This is where I sat
in the avalanche.
In winter,
where I was born,
you pulled a cord of silk in your beautiful hand.

We girls saved our cigarette ashes to fade our Levis with.
We crisped our hair with curling wands.
We always smelled like smoke, playing
as we did with fire 

because I look like them—
because I am ashamed
of their bodies that reek so
unabashedly of body—
because I can—because I am
an American, a star
of blood on the surface of muscle. 

I play
and replay the voices of these
hurt women flowering
like marigolds or thistles.

It bewilders me to have looked
at this piece of fruit without
seeing it grow its own blue
shroud. Now you, too, are
gone.  

Crying love, in tongues
of false thunder. If my body is a nation—and by body I mean
my black queer pussy, it’s phantom and light—is a paperweight
pressing a constitution like a new shirt.

I take my father’s nose and shove it in a box.
My mother’s mouth lays claim to the vowels
Of my making. I learned to tend and till and dig
and there is something like a hole where a good
family should be but instead I have the good people
who do the best they can with what they have.

There is no homonym for disappearing, only
synonyms. Vanish into the ivory tower language.
Perish beneath split selves. End her. Die her. Fade.
Dissolve one blue bupropion until numb. Melt away
thick kink with bleach, die one patch pink.

is the sound of my loud carrying life a knell
far across your small ocean? Do you share
the secret that the months keep hidden there?

Ours are the only mouths
to taste with this smothering slow
touch, and the only steps
to sink like bellsounds and cave
deep into the marble snow.

When I was thirteen she found me,
spiralled into my blood like a hive.
I stood on a porch where she wound me
for the first time, tight and alive,

I captured my daughter running
between water and violet
fire and viridian
emeralds and ancestors their green
day bed of reveries
a mythology of first days

Her body is hillocks, pond and spring, long
planted and greener before. Her spine is
the trysting tree from the time of the
grandparents. It is where they meet
and court. Birds turn and return. Her girls
come back. The wind sails their hair
in three directions: light, silk, conifer.

It is the law:
seasons, best selling books and empires
come and go.
Babies are born to die,
bridges are built to one day fall
and shoes wear out.

Bring with you your anger on Saturday Nights
And your beautiful children,
their great eyes full of wonder
that hunger for your learning
I understand, young man, with your outraged confusion
that smolders upon corners.

…Aw, baby, look!
This life is not no legend, David.
Underdogs is buried everyday.
Only fairy tales are filled with giant killers.
Man, let Goliath sleep. Or there’ll be hell to pay.