Poetry

If you were to shoulder a heavy bat
& beat one today, many decades after—

Barry was six-foot-six, fifteen like me, floating layups and hook shots
over our heads through the hoop in my driveway. We called him Big Bird
for dwarfing us, for his slappy feet, for the mouth that hung in a grin at all

Crucial early bark
   to learn, like dat?
Or no! The wooden ball

My father spoke: Look at this, he said to me. We were walking through
an alley from somewhere to somewhere else in Brooklyn. In front of us,
a man with white hair and a white beard reached into a dumpster,
plucked out a bag of potato chips...

Sometimes when I get
My period,
I wake up & my bed 
Is a massacre.

1. sharpening the white epidermis to machete on 
gum-grown whetstones belonging to inheritors 
of mitochondrial Eve’s Earth-blown nakedness

True domination means 
That all of the desires & impulses 
Come from the submissive;

Thirty miles south of Dallas the air smells of ozone and water. Thunderheads on the horizon in shades of indigo.

A finger so tender 
the diminishing coneflower’s center shocks        
a needle

up through reaching skin

I pull down my black dress 
& feed my child.