I’m waiting for the words    to catch up to my heart     which is
elliptical at the moment      there’s an apology

even I am expecting to bore out of my throat

                   but what for      what for

I am continuing to write in a font      that displeasures me        everything shifts so rapidly

my body       the environment       my body     the environment

It was said that in the beginning there was only the sea and the sky; not a spot of land and only the flying animals living between. And the waters were quiet. And the skies were always still. And, yet, everything moves around them, and there must be something that moves them, too. When we become aware of our wants, isn’t it then that we understand we are helpless to time? As all things must be.

rustle plastic bags of outside food in
movie theaters/talk out of turn
in the swallow-dark light/believe
trash should be/as confetti/everywhere
in the viaducts’ shadow/souring in gutters’
craw/jaywalk with the urgency of sloth /split
verbs meaningfully

Everybody is doing trigger warnings now, so
To Whom It May Concern, I hated God
when my sister died. I didn’t know it was
coming, but we were at the hospital in a private
room for family, and our pastor
was there, the one who baptized me, and
he said Let us pray, and I kept my eyes
open to watch everybody, but
listened, and when he said Sometimes
God has to take back his angels,
I was smart enough to know, I was 14, that
he was saying she was gone or going

Growing up, I used to be fascinated with creating my own “out of the box home.”

I’d find boxes, tape them together and stack them on top of each other.

I’d go outside and create fortresses out of trees and branches. I’d sit in it’s darkness and imagine myself shaping images.

I’d go in my closet, in the crease between a tub of clothes and the wall, close my eyes and imagine myself with super powers,
flying and bending fire with my hands.

Dear White Couple Who Have The Black Pre School Aged Child,

We don’t know each other, but I see you in the neighborhood, usually at the bus stop in the mornings.

It’s hard not to notice a white woman and man walking with or pushing a Black pre-school girl in a stroller, up and down a Chicago South Side street. It’s an off-putting precursor to what will inevitably be the same wave of gentrification that crashed over neighboring Hyde Park.

Sunlight shines through the window on her plastic Aldi bag
…facing front…moving forward…traveling backwards into canned quicksand.

Behind her stands a man at the door

…his plastic Save-a-Lot bags on the floor, parked between black-laced Nike’s.

To hold the bird and not to crush her, that is the secret. Sand turned too quickly to cement and who cares if the builders lose their arms? The musk of smoldered rats on sticks that trailed their tails through tunnels underground. Trickster of light, I walk your cobbled alleys all night long and drink your salt.

What else to call the way the bare branches
I’d bought at the neighborhood bodega
came back to life that winter.
I’d carried them home—dry, wrapped
in paper—stuck them in the square vase,
and, as an afterthought, filled it with water.