Poetry

Steve, though he’d cut you
if you crossed him, drop you like a sack
of potatoes if you came at him drunk
like Randy Parr in the backyard,

Pink Floyd’s Animals
drones through a thin
dreamless sleep I keep

each day you wake wishing that what is, is not, and that’s no way to live.

the owl refuses to dispense any wisdom
but has a few questions of its own:

I’m lonely and the only Black person inside the paid Cézanne 

exhibit today.

It isn’t the trees but the space

between the trees,

This is the year strangers
will say terrible things

about you 

There would have been chaos,
confetti mined from the cliffs
of Michoacán.