Poetry

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.

have mercy nothing
prepared my body to lose its
brother nothing prepares a grown man to fall

The tops of the buildings were shorn. So I walked
down Market Street to see if I could find them. 

The fog tried to take my head off. I was so scared on
some parts of Market that I stayed a few feet behind 

In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness
he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather
thrashing in a gravel bed.

If you like me will you make me better
look at your sandbox of a screen how my
bones have ground fine like my mother’s if
I promise

Where you are going
you cannot take
your things leave
in this locker the rivets
at the corners of your blue
jeans

There are so many things a body
can collect into itself
milk of a mother in a cup of coffee