Poetry

Something quick and wet on my neck.
I whipped around, and right behind me
in the lunch line: Mary-Arkansas Greene,

No tide pools, no couples on the beach
where my parents met,

only whitecaps bowing and lifting,
until each blurs into itself.

[…]

Within the hush of birch medallions, 
fir fingers, wild scallions—
that company of dancers held 

Channel, brook, stream—call it a river
that flows past the hospital
in different shades and seasons of blue,

Time to pick berries. This strain (pink when ripe
instead of black) surprises me each August,
although I should be used to it by now.

John, you asked me what it was like to be black,
to come from a place where being black mattered.

In the halls of Pigalle, juxtaposition is not intimacy. 
Moulin Rouge Moulin Rouge Moulin
Red—Louise the Glutton spread high in her kick, 

I once believed in heavenly clarity—
do you know how good it feels to sing
of certainty, the wild apricot

At first among certain shadows 
you felt forbidden to ask whose they were.

Metrophobia
I, too dislike it, or at least I find
too much of it bromidic and unrhymed,