Women. That’s what he wants. Women of all
shapes and sizes. Mexican and American. Maybe
even Polish, like the blond upstairs.
He wants them at his funeral, crying their eyes
out, so he can look down on them and smile and laugh
and remember and feel proud that he’s kept them
coming back for more. Coming back, for the parts
of his body they say they like the most. His eyes for
Maria la Amarillo. His chest, La Metiche Americana
de la vecindad. His hair, Sherry la Americana
de Michigan con the black Trans Am. Pilar la vieja,
para todo, for all his body.

After Zoe Saldana defends playing Nina Simone in her biopic by saying “For so many years, nobody knew who the [fuck] she was. She is essential to our American history. As a woman first, and only then as everything else.”

I looked at my Aunt Sarah skin;
my stay out the sun-
You already an eclipse- face.
Body an automatic rejection letter
erasure waiting to happen.

I birth a child, and the wet wound never closes.
My mother diagnoses postpartum casually
as if saying – mail is here, and your name is on it.
Explains the drilling is nothing I asked for, overripe nerves happen sometimes.

The children of fugitives perhaps lust for nothing
so much as a country where we are faster
than everything else. Here I graceless bouquet
of dark whipping hard through a need
for electric.

my body is an architecture of gazes/I wanted your eyes/not for the color/but the water/I was born/into thirst/and questions/what are you/where did you come from/what do they speak there/are you Black/are you the border/and my throat crack down to scarlet with the answer/I bleed/therefore I am

We fear from afar
The brutal waste of war
The extravagant arrogance of power.
We rage at the rage of men
Who refuse to see you, or rather,
Choose to see through you and thereby
Refuse to see themselves.

When I heard the explosions I was watching TV
after putting the kids to bed. There was nothing on
and I didn’t feel like checking the news,
dear God, because how could I want
to hear, over and over again,
the same story. While falling asleep
my son said, “I have so many stories
in my pocket to tell you.” Someone’s son,
another one, is dead. All his stories
folded up inside the quiet earth.