This is a free write I did along with some students of mine last semester when they were writing their Derrion Albert tributes.

This is how a face changes
How smiles are stomped
This is how corn rows
become the fault lines of a skull
how a skull becomes a puzzle
tectonic plates shifting over
swollen brain
This is how an eye bursts
How a retina bends to accept
the force of a Nike swoosh
This is how fingers break
how blood bubbles over knuckles
of children, how hands become
skeletons never to flip the page
of American History again
This is death recorded
This is humanity’s close up
Bleed for the camera
This is the last Timberland
his body was awake to feel
This is his nerves firing
in a furious trill as his soul shakes
free of the carnage
This is a graduation cap
waterlogged in the Styx
A song clotted to a child’s
splintered ribs

My freewrite from a workshop I taught to some high school students on the Westside

Holiness is finally drowning
the last prayer to a starfish
before joining the bones of brothers
I am a barnacled reef thatched
across the floor of the ocean’s palace,
a chalice of blood and damage
I am Atlas, this grave is just a pressure
point on my third vertebra, I am the velocity
of a mother’s prayer, the sun tangled
in viscous cables of horizon, lightning
that veins the fog, I am the amputated
ankle, the raised blister of a brand,
I am sand and salvation, I am
piranhas pressing against a colonial thigh,
I am why horses humble themselves,
I am an archer whose quiver
is ringing empty, I sing the silence
after lost battles, I am mausolea and
memory, I am hyacinth and curry powder
I am not synthetic – I am indigo dye
and indigenous death, I am the native
heiress standing when no one is left

I

In my perfection, I am unafraid. In my perfection, I flow through the world like Light and it flows through Me. I hum yellow and yellow appears. The sky turns violet and so do I. My muscles are relaxed but strong and I am a physical manifestation of Love. My teeth are Love. I breathe Abundance and my bones are filled with it. Every day I make my Legacy and it is Creation. I collaborate with the Divine Energy of the planet and make my divinity manifest. I am the idea of Manifest. I am grateful. I use each moment on this planet, in this skin, on these ankles, to become my Highest Self. Each moment I am closer to Her and I thank the trees and my mother and my elders and my shoulders and the sun and my father and the bricks and the signs and the shells and the ink and the gates and the blades of grass and the grain that grows downstate. I thank the souls of birds. I bring my mind to its limits of comprehension and seek remembrance. I believe in my own Perfection. I nurture this temporary vessel. I say Thank You to the people that love me. And the cars and the artichokes and the leaves of deep green spinach and the planets and the kittens and the spiders in my bathroom. I thank them all for Loving me. I become and unbecome them. Each day I find a new way to Remember. I sing the limitless heights of my being. I believe in my safety and passage and growth. I claim my own perfection and become it.

II
It is easiest, and therefore tempting, when misfortunes accumulate, to ask why bad things are happening to you, why the Universe is doing this to you, what have you done to deserve such difficulty. I strive on this day to ask instead “Why have I created these circumstances for Myself?” “What do I wish to teach Myself? How much stronger will I emerge? Faster, wiser, sharper?” Of all of the things to stress about, money should not ever be one of them. Money itself is a tool to uphold an illusion of Universal lack. It symbolizes a limitation of resources in a Universe defined by Abundance. If there is a Hell, it is only an ascription to the illusion of lack. And if there is a paradise, it is perfect acceptance of Universal abundance.

Therefore, in this moment, I need only breathe. Everything I need, I already have or have the ability to create. There is nothing that I can imagine that I cannot claim as my own. In this perfect belief, there is Peace. And in Peace, there is a vast plain awaiting my acts of Creation.

If I can find a way to teach these things, then my work as a teacher will be more meaningful to me. But how do you teach a sidewalk that it is air? I trust that as I continue to seek, Knowledge and Understanding will be revealed to me. I am grateful for my face and my eyes and my hands this day. I’m grateful for growth. For my ability to love.

On Wednesday she sweated
in his city flat, wrenching
away from ugly lust. She can’t
keep her promises. Oshun’s teeth
have gone brackish as this burrough’s
gutters and she sends no charms for rescue.
She clogs his toilet so a stubborn tampon
floats and floats, celebrating porcelain,
recording deceit, threatening to display
the stuff behind the puckered nipple,
the pimpled thigh, the gristle
that ripples over skeletons of sirens.
She appraises herself in jagged glass,
an apparition perched in the angles
of his humid square. Picks dung
from under her nails and flicks it
at their twisting bodies, knotting
sheets at ankles, desperate to forget
all outside this room, desperate
to remember its clumsy streetlight shadows.
She is ashamed of us. Regrets
our fumbling, our elbows stapled
to feathertops, haphazard knees grazing
a scrotum, kisses that inch away
from themselves. Oshun fingers her moles
and crow’s feet. Drags ragged nails
across the radiator’s flaked beige paint,
music for our stupid barren hump.

I think I smothered your child
in the quiet churn, muzzled
her tiny African mandible in the mucous
of my undone motherhood. I braided

the black cables of her hair into bone
marrow, burned her fingernails to crust,
crushed the song of ashen atoms twisting
in the thimble of her throat. I wanted

you to save her, to hear her when
you mined me. I was only silence
for you to plumb, air too thin
to womb for your songs. When you stab

a brittle matchbox with a staff
of dynamite, something is sure to burn.