Poetry

Pink millions of passenger pigeons slammed the sun shut again and again for fifty thousand years. Above the Ohio River, a solar eclipse for three days straight as one flock passed over. 

of the dead a million years of age-related faults / danger war hunger lust the extinct fallen stars / everything living falters is always on the verge

Will Smith plays a cop in this movie. We watch him on the couch, your baby sister and I. She, who was not yet born when I knew you best. The speakers make such deafening sound. Subwoofer. A thought couldn’t be had if you begged it.

Stars curl in the shape / of a scorpion’s tail and sparrows / float like gold flecks over the fields. If it's true / death is just a portal through which to pass letters.

& this is what we mean when we say body count. first, a swaddling. then, betwixt damp & ordinary gums hangs a mess hall. we offer a martyr to the blowtorch’s bright kelvin spit and call it supper. an autopsy worth its salt.

Fog flowed in a continuous river through the trees. / Inside the river, a little light. / Light trapped in gray smoke, beckoning.

how many of you sitting
here
think some woman of color
Black Brown Yellow White
woke up this morning thinking
“Goooolly … I can go to the airport
and clean toilets?”

In half-light of morning the red car appears / over the bridge, suspension wires like streaks of rain. 

Cheap child’s toy/ incompetent user/ pilot error—tangled and hanging / Sway, spin, climb, and fall on its ladder its helix of string / Pleuston (meaning dwelling on the surface) / (meaning sail meaning float)

When I sleep, you dream, turning and turning
on a soft earth.

Light drools down, blinds me. I can’t see your cheek
curve. Words rise