…

[click titles to read]

…

1. Kissing
2. How Mavis Staples Healed My Heart
3. For Michael Jackson
4. Sad Girl Poems
5. For Peggy Oki, the Only Girl on the Zephyr Skate Team
6. Williamsburg on the First Day Mimicking Summer
7. A Letter to Roger Mitchell

–

–
Kissing

when I say you remind me of a book’s broken back,
pages half-sewn and a coffee ring on it’s face or
that moment in half-morning where the sun is hesitant
or after the ground’s been cried upon and everything
is soft and open or holding the earth’s guts in palm
just to feel alive amidst all this concrete, my god, what
I mean to say is this song is an off strum and I like the way
it hits my ears sideways and how I might be cold and you’ll
put your coat around my shoulders like the movies and
I’ll show my teeth and say, who spilled molasses over the window,
making the day golden? You’ll say, beautiful is a dead word
and I’ll say, so let’s invent, they tell us that star up there blew out
ages ago and you’ll say, but it still holds 10,000 wishes
tonight alone and we’ll want to sing with our voices turned
on backwards, we’ll want to laugh so hard we forget to
ask why and then lose any use for that word, too.

[back to poems]

–

How Mavis Staples Healed My Heart

…
I try to think about it so it will be real.
You will be touching down on my soil tonight to her arms.
I am, too, in transit, riding a train that smells of people’s waste-
bowels, minds, it all hangs out in the air, unkempt.
The air is charcoal blue.
Spots of porch lights peek through tree’s willowy arms,
ragged reaching, as if Pollock relieved his brush,
weighted with black paint, in a single flick of it’s heavy back
against sky, it is still summer after all, the silhouette of leaves.
Under headphones, Mavis Staples crawls into the hurting parts.
She is awkward, but persistent, squeezing her round maternal body
into the tiny cracks. Shimmy’s up the pipe of my heart.
Stomps her feet against the wound. Rolls her eyes.
Says, toughen up, mama, this ain’t the end of the story, yet.
She holds a kettle beneath my tear ducts.
She shakes her head and throws it on the stove.
Beans and rice, again.
She pulls out a chair from the table and wipes her hands
on her apron, how you feel, child, she asks.
I tell her I am coming home to a home we did not share.
It’s a new home and it fits me.
There is a tea shrine in the kitchen, a yellow pot
on the burners that I light with a match over gas.
There are the things that belong to me,
there are things I love, like books, many books.
There is a backyard with one crooked tree
to carve my secrets in. There are angels in the mantel.
Mavis pauses to wipe the sweat from her brow,
puts her hand to hip and juts it out, shoulder thrown back,
are there lovers?
Oh, there are always lovers, I tell her.
Mmmmmmmm. Hmmmmm.
Her lips are a crescent moon.
And then she opens her mouth so wide
I think she might swallow the house,
the neighborhood, the Caribbean accents
and the young people who look like me spoiling it all,
swallow the trains and the booming radios, swallow me.
Mavis could turn it all into a hair-raising church song
and I have my soul clap ready.
But she doesn’t.
She inhales so deep half the kitchen gathers
in the back of her throat, rattling together.
It vibrates for a moment, deafening.
And then she exhales.
The kitchen falls back to place,
each spoon returned to it’s cradle,
the wine opener back in it’s nook.
She grins. Takes my hand in hers,
and sings my favorite song.
“I know a place, ain’t nobody cryin’….”

[back to poems]

–

For Michael Jackson

…
Its a humid Saturday night in New York City.
Wet and wanting, even the sidewalk wipes
sweat from it’s forehead.
Cars blast anthems we grew large on,
asking our hips questions without answer,
turns the streets to sacred party: shift, sway, break
clubs across each borough, the DJ plays tribute every third song.
In our bar, an altar of album covers stands in silent triptych.
The candle bringing our shadows giant across the wall,
showing us the monsters we are under the thin slip of moon.
It’s Sarah’s birthday.
She is twenty eight and wears a black tutu,
a tee shirt, tucked in, with your bright smile across
wearing the signature red leather jacket I lusted after for years–
I catch her, in the dim light, hands clasped in front of chest,
taking in your three faces, as if trying to remember softer times,
sadness cast around her eyes in dark spell.
And then we give ourselves to dance.

Michael, you were show and stage, worshipped.
Greedy, we drank you in, restless in our own plain normalcy,
wanted to swallow you whole until we ate you away:
a face of plastic and candle wax, we danced, your songs
helped us reconstruct you, the sweet faced boy our collective
memories allow, so handsome, we took you in like feast.
Laughed until our bellies turned, afraid of how a soul could
seem to sour, to spoil, unsure of how to love you, anymore
as your delicate bones laced a flickering shimmer across the floor.

Did anyone really love you, Michael?
I, too, have had people cast their gaze upon my strange:
pink hair, nose rings, searching for who I was publicly,
turning toward an unnatural grasping for identity in
adolescent isolation, I, too, know how hard it can be to
accept this mortal body, to see what other’s deem worthy
to allow the mirror it’s reflective comfort, to feel free.
I, too, know how one can become addicted to this sweet sap,
this temple they have built for us to live in, how lonely it’s
cavernous halls, how they beg for paint and words to grace
the walls, but they are not ours, anymore.
We have given them to wind and let the air pass through
what has become ghost, rise like smoke and fall to ash.

And I know this is why you danced atop the car after the trial,
grotesque idol, waiting for the praise to spill into
the wide empty space, the vast cave of your heart
accidental martyr, you crowned yourself King
and we followed, blindfolded and dumb tongued,
did not allow you to grow outside of fainting fans
tabloids, demands, accusations, true or not,
be on, be better, show us the light, lift us, levitate
deep lean into thin air, magician.
We watched you walk the moon,
do things no human can do
you were god, but you were not.
You were child, but you were not.
There is a little magic that lives in all of us
true, but I am sorry this world failed you.

The candle’s flame limps under our panting breath
and ripe bodies, as well recall our own underdog.
Clouds ask for patience as we turn our judgment
back on our own past hurt.
We are alone with our memory, now.
Michael, I have sang my lungs out to you before I knew
what the words meant, I have oiled my joints
to put my feeling onto a dance floor in
mimic, I have fantasized about flowers at my feet
and the seas turning over for me, I have felt sad.
When I was eight years old, I asked my mother,
writhing with salt and sting, if you did it.
If you touched that boy who’s name I shared in years
on this tilting, frightening planet.
She said no, wrapping her arms around me
the way a good mother should.
What else do you tell your child?
What else could I have chosen to believe?

Michael, I don’t know who you are, either.
I am just a fan.
I take your story as warning.
There are things I am not proud of that I have done to
others, done to myself. I seek forgiveness.
I accept your gifts with prayer and ask for nothing more.
I watch as the world grieves for the boy who lived in you,
pure and wishing for this earth to put salve onto it’s aching parts
and stop pursuing everything that is broken.
We chase everything that is broken.
We are looking for God in dark alleys and sleeping
in the devil’s bed, a savior in a pop song, my God,
what is wrong with us? The radio cannot heal us, anymore.
This black void calls in siren, it hurts to look into it for too long,
in this way, you have helped us to feel.
You are gone and one day we will all be gone.
Tonight I ask the sky to write a ballad that turns
our faces toward a new light, to give our spirits
finally to what is right and move in time.

[back to poems]

–

Sad Girl Poems

…
Where in the world do we fit?
Two girls shaped like open-ended questions.
You are a tiny box tied in an exquisite bow.
Short limbs full of black lack of sleep
little wounds, unconnected constellations,
face of a China doll, delicate, hair brushed
over your eyes with finger comb.
In photographs, only your slight button nose
and pouting lips begging the viewer, mysterious
a still life from a movie, and you prefer it that way.

I am tall and all limbs, long as the Great Lakes
a full person more, which gives the appearance
of a mother and child from behind on the short
walk to the Bodega for toilet paper.
You tell me when I wear too much jewelry
and notice, again, how earrings don’t suit you
but I prefer things from parts of the world I have
and have not visited to hang from my body
a multi-cultural non-specific holiday tree
from a New Age catalog we’d pour through
and laugh about ’till our bellies rot.
In photos, I address the camera like a dare.
I do not apologize.
Neither do you, in your own quiet way.

You watch me expend energy on boring men
because there is no one else around
and roll your eyes, shaking hair over
your shoulders like a shawl of stars.
I watch you fall in love, enviously.
we write poems about these things
and read them aloud to each other
in the darkest part of night.
When we hate ourselves, we listen to sad songs,
the only sounds we trust in this tired land.
Each evening, I return home with a bundle of kindling.
Pile it on the floor and throw it to match.
We watch wide-eyed as the room goes up in smoke.
Until sleep comes like a prayer of forgiveness.

[back to poems]

–

For Peggy Oki,
the only girl on the Zephyr Skate Team,

…
carving the pool
sucked dry of water
hands grazing
burning asphalt
venice beach
spray painted
stained jeans
I wonder
did you ever find
your tongue
between the
mad dog’s lips
did you pretend
to forget it
the next day
breasts carefully
tucked away
under boyish flannel
from the back
you all looked
the same anyway
adolescence hanging
bright and obvious
from your skinny bones
Peggy, it doesn’t matter
forget I asked
I know in those
fast moments
there was nothing
but wind begging
out the box
of your chest
you didn’t play
their game
they played
yours
bringing the sun
over morning
on a flat board
falling into the sea
and palm trees
again and again
and again

[back to poems]

–

Williamsburg on the First Day Mimicking Summer

…
the park is one long laugh track
under the newness of Brooklyn sun
girls in poodle skirts and lockets tattooed
up their spines, boys who’s skin is hardly
seen at all, tight pants and bare chests,
three lone hairs or a whole wooly rug
panting put your shirt on, please, but
they want the world to see they got no
secrets left

ball playing and biking, ironically, of course
it seems people still think smoking is cool,
vinyl and books spread out on picnic blankets
everyone is yawning in feigned boredom, too
interesting to care, in fact, there are even
a few James Dean hairstyles and really, we all
look the same anyway, our bodies sprawled in
damp grass, barely talking, minds jumping
across the Atlantic and back, always
traveling somewhere unannounced
without it’s suitcase

these girls are like me, I can tell
wearing their bull-dog hearts baring teeth
wanting for their next love story to move
them into summer swift and taking every
inch, wearing their shoulders naked but
cover their eyes, drinking in warmth like
the only touch that felt safe in years
welcomed in for raspberry lemonade
and smoke, speaking openly on regret
petting their blunt cut manes with bejeweled
fingers, crowned spring queens, forgetting the
strange past when it is convenient
we are blossoming girls, punching the air
in wide laughter, noses buried in paperbacks
fancy ourselves muses, open and willing for
the possibility of hurt all over again

[back to poems]

–

A Letter to Roger Mitchell
*My new favorite poet, and a dear friend of my father’s

…
Dear Roger,

Please forgive your book’s curved edges
dog-eared and bits of soot that have lodged,
inexplicably, between page 42 and 43
it has come everywhere with me
I have a gift of dirtying everything I touch
a euphemism for love, perhaps
sometimes I read a poem and close the book shut
rub fingers over it’s shiny cover and
whisper a soft yes.
Strangers on the subway have taken to
staring, thinking I might be one of the mad
and in some ways, I am

Did my father ever tell you
I hated mountains as a child?
The steep incline aching little tendons,
hiking boots clinging captive toes,
the third blister arriving on the pinky to
draw complaint from my throat
I was a tantrum thrower,
already full of vices and unable to lose
my thinking mind, despite the view
My eyes were small then.
I had not yet learned to be a bird.

Yesterday I climbed the rickety ladder
to my Brooklyn roof
noticed how the street below looked
the morning after a shooting
ambulences had returned to their beds
one strip of police tape unhinged,
waving in the wind
across the way, the building’s five mouths
still boarded up in silent witness
the super is laughing with his daughter
in a language foreign to my ear,
punctuating the gray sky in audible color
garbage and broken glass leave a trail
for the stray cats to bleed on
nothing much is out of ordinary,
the city lays sprawling in it’s
hurried, noisy habits
but if I squint, I can see the Valley
and hold it’s magic, twenty years later
next to my ragged heart
I read your poems and remember a feeling
called peace I have only come to know
in my young adult face
and whisper, softly, yes.

[back to poems]