Nashville, Tennessee
you have to forgive
the snow for its
waking. ideally, you
occupy a land. you
are accommodated. you
are private school
broad, shouldering
the quiver of a pollen
weighty spring. instead, you
occupy an apartment. you
are a tenant. you
are watching hived frost
slip through unsealed
window slits and sting
your sore thumbs blue. you
are fused to the mud, you
are dodging silverfish.
you are too broke
to buy space heater.
this is not the south you were promised:
marigolds, big and batwinged
off of yam-sun, blushing your neighbors’
lawns, taro ichor leaking from your nostrils.
it is january seventh, radnor lake grey
and heronless. snow webs white the orchid
lounge awnings. wind delivers a cold
that coagulates your blood to tubers.
the city, saltless, shuts down.
at the start of the week you bronzed
your wrists on bike handles,
thanked for shade the copses of trees
that keep the barred owls company.
you unnotched yourself from the palm
long icicles, the rockies’ paleozoic udders
that nourished you, in the name of sun
gorged skies. but the weather erupts,
unravels, unfurls the cartilage keeping
magnolia bloom bonded
to otherwise unimpressive bark.
This will be the most docile winter
of the rest of your life.
Soon, your grease sweet scalp
will gulp a warm hibernal rain.
root deeply
i restart my tomato garden
in a halved oatmilk carton,
stuffed between teakwood
kingfisher and propagated
peperomia on east most
window. i spend hours and
forty-six dollars on a red
covered book that promised
thriving indoor heirlooms.
paige told me to celebrate
the little wins. this morning
i am alive and so i sit cross
legged beneath the window
to sniff the mycelial yellow
blooms that indicate a future
harvest. a reason for bees.
the last tomato garden i had
was shoved behind wasp
bloated grill and stunted by
dirt unturned since the sixties.
the last tomato garden i had
is six years gone, six years
without the smell of trichome
stippled stems to keep the shit
from clinging to vibrissae.
a year of wrestling the ooze
leaking from mother and
grandmother’s thinned skin.
a year of eiffeling piss pad
and diaper boxes.
a year of moping chowder
dribble from arid lips.
a year fracking contentment
from the sprain of iowa city’s
sparrow population.
a year of licking the sales
floor salty taint of the man
who paid my rent.
a year of tattooing nightshade’s
daughters on my forearm.
i name the first star-splayed
flower tabitha, the next denzel.
when i catch the sun squirreling
away from the sisters’ fragile
sprout, i move them across
the country of my apartment.
the more light, the more fruit.
anything that is fourteen lines
is about you :: the bald spot on a widowed
man’s peak, sunned a sapsucker red :: you are
bruise red centered in silt grey tonsure :: an opened
mouth :: an opened chest :: an adolescent hare braced
against sidewalk :: all the bottle flies suckling
the final pink of its small intestine :: you
the collective :: you trillion eyes :: prismatic
former maggots pulling meat from rabbit’s bone braid
—beloved, today i spoke to the river about you.
told her you are her milky equivalent :: a gosling
white flood receded. the river wants to meet you.
the river wants to check beneath your skin for sunfish.
the river wants to know if the cornsilk :: cornsick yellow
:: hurricane in me is stilled by the pink brash of you—
anything that is fourteen lines
is secretly about my mother. don’t let the cardinals
or the murky bodies of water fool you. when i sent
you work about the songbirds, i was telling you about
how thick the stitches on her stomach were. how
serum and blood would bloat them, and ooze through
four sets of sheets. if you ever received that packet
of ocean poems in the mail, they were all about the
summer i was freshly sixteen—or was i fourteen—
potentially i was twenty—and her retina detached.
the summer she wore the svelte purple eyepatch
to match the ocular bruising and when my uncle or
one of her boyfriends offered more than soup or brief
visit, said “no, only Sydney” or did she say “i only trust
Sydney”—“only she will” or “only she will do it right.”
Note: “anything that is fourteen lines (is about you)” and “anything that is fourteen lines (is secretly about my mother)” were originally published in Booth.
Golden Glosa with Squeegee & Saxophone
“And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes—"
—Toni Morrison Song of Soloman
You make your living pickpocketing raven feathers from skyscraper window seals and
husking pistachios with saxophonist’s tongue—talking
about you’re on god’s timing, going on about
how you’ve got plans to spit a shell so far into the dark
it’ll come back scorched and dictating the standards of a new jazz. You
tell me that you’ve been composing under bosun’s chair, that you think
you’ve got a classic, that you just need to hold something. Shit’s dark
baby sis. This has always been the gully between us: the ‘is’
of you, your perpetual being, your conscious eyes declaring what is just
and talking about dark. You think dark is just one
shade of living. To you dark’s not the color
of oxtails rationed, not the collapsed flare of our nostrils, but
the fact that the two nickels you got laughing it
up in jean pocket, rubbing together when you strut squeegee down main street ain’t
coming from the Kentucky brined palms of the manager down at the jazz club. There're
only a few hands that’ll slide you a check: our mother’s, or a nine to five,
Sheila’s from the sperm bank with the rubies in her incisors or
mine. You, the oldest, bucktoothed and six
years ahead believing a regular set to be a pigmented life—tones, kinds,
color—but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of
living color worth coveting and they’re all black—black
as our necks come August, black as your first saxophone case. Some-
times I wish you remembered when we lived with Silky.
Her window garden of sweet basil and rosemary sprigs, the way she said sun like some.
The afternoons you would traverse basement crowded with woolly
haired Black Santas, her camo wrapped treadmill and the tire-some
maze of our grandmother’s woodwinds. I wish you remembered just
cruising on Silky’s corduroy-legged lap and blowing into sax till you were empty.
We were among the things Silky had left of Grandmother: some brass, some
black, some silky, some woolly, some just empty, some like
kin. Now look at you, with soap, raven’s shit and living caulking your fingers.
Begging with savant’s brow and held out hand, callus and
lifelines knotted above your wrists. You don’t remember what it
means to be small and wrinkled as plum pit, don’t
remember what it is to busy your mouth with ligature, to trust sound as sound as sound, to stay
unified with the reeds. Brother, you got all your goodwill vaulted in the parts of your face still
dark as sixth grade. Got on thinking your mouth’ll keep me giving, it
will keep blackbirds going north, old brass rusting. But you know well as I do that what moves
you to genius ain’t in the talk—it’s in the ulna, the carpals and
fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes.
W. Coleman in L.A.
after “American Sonnet 51”
while living in
Watts, i wiped my
eyes last
first the girl, boy, boy—re-incarnation
just a rotary ringing, i
heard sob, ring, weep, ring; i inoculated
Coltrane into the boom box so i could hear myself
think. in those days i worshipped
the big tipper, the 323, the copper breasts in
the magazines, the
scraps on which to erect a temple
first, then a sonnet, i
waited, and the old phone rang, and as always
the children cried, and i wrote ‘till the pencil wore
down past the ferrule. ‘till my
fingers burgeoned calluses mink,
‘till the lining of my good coat
was all scribble, clementine ink. and to
think i spent the long lines at the
grocer, the liquor store, the laundromat
running from the noise and
the orange juice the kids drank,
the snot pale
as a good champagne
that’d drip from their flared nostrils—with
two napkins: one with my
poems, the other a quick recipe for soft-boiled
paprika sprinkled eggs.
Him
he wakes in the middle of the night to ask me if he could be better than god.
According to legend, god created all things: the matcha that congeals in our
unwashed glasses :: the waterbugs that crawl from tub drain :: the junegrass
we choke with rubbersoles :: the pigs that died for our dinner, the drugs that
swell them. god made the lymph nodes :: made the magnolias that eyelash
the yards on the rich folk’s lawns :: the atlas moth :: the robin’s tweet battered
throat :: the plastic fusing with rock on Brazilian coast, the waters that lap there
and the turtles that migrate their eggs through turquoise sand. The silkworms
that siphoned from themselves my bonnet, god made them. god made him—
made his hair black as the smell of brand-new tires :: made him a voice always
crackling like a Christmas candle :: made his eyes canyon, made them brown.
Better at what? Into the dayblack cavern of my ear, he says making.
Ode to The Last Hour
“quickly, then, the worst was over, i could comfort him.”
—Sharon Olds
when you came, with him riding the ceramic
steeled toe of your mid-summer boots,
i was grateful, the way the body is grateful
for the pyrite of heat when dying of cold.
i want to say that you shocked me, dear friend
that you were conceived, gestated,
c-sectioned between good morning kiss
and abrupt disillusion but there were hints
of you—a sex life reduced to closet floor
handjobs, a newfound love of square jawlines,
and season fourteen of drag race,
a script of figuring things out,
coupled with automated reassurances.
that even when he leaned over banquet table
of moving boxes, and asked if i still wanted
an emerald instead of a diamond ring,
you were there, stirring within him, a rot
deflated fig, a split condom, a single blueberry.
beloved ally, once you were born, i
removed placental film from earthenware
cheeks. it was my turn to do the laboring,
the reassuring, the reminding of what
good friends all three of us could be.
and ever since, you have been
deliverance’s hand running ice
across my thyroid. you, granter of wishes:
to be held by him one last time,
to forget for a few minutes,
the name of the man who
emptied him of his needs,
so that he could provide
one final kindness for me.
