Poetry

I’m without body but forming in the latticework 

of blood cell and fret. Each threat pulls me upward

tempting and building me until my spine lifts into a column,

I put a poem

in your backup jewelry box,

the one you keep

at the bottom of the taxes from 2003

in order to foil the inevitable burglars,

Up ahead it’s white. Snow animal,
I’m running at your back. I’ve failed to tell you
I’ve been hungry all this time, to tell you 

Everywhere I look I see him,
I have a right to fear for him, 

though I have no right to claim his color.
His blackness is his to own and what will

my mouth say of that sweetness.

1. Dad, Don’t Be That Guy

2. Dad, Quoting the Wikipedia Isn’t Gospel

3. Dad, I’m Going to Take Those Away

4. Dad, I Warned You

Who’d have thought this wine made from the flowers of wild gorse
would turn out so well? How were the flowers ever convinced to give up so much

If time is money then how much might the bookie’s runner’s leather shoes have cost? To start: Tommy takes a watering can and tends the window boxes on his window sill.

               I wanted to make a gothic of it all:
the trees on the slope where the island dipped
               into the sea, their weird kinks & angles;

She has drawn them disembarking a sky-blue bus,
fresh from the bombing of Al Hajar. Some stumble
in the red-blobbed orchard, their hair shedding dust.