This is the year strangerswill say terrible things
about you
There would have been chaos,confetti mined from the cliffsof Michoacán.
The “Lyric I” tied its sheets together and flew the coop, confessed itself off the balcony.
All the rain in the world
is falling, makinga door you can’t open.
I’m lonely and the only Black person inside the paid Cézanne
exhibit today.
It isn’t the trees but the space
between the trees,
We made a dance of all the ways
we’d hurt our bodies.
I don’t lie, but I try to make myself sound worse off than I am.