The sloppy slap of thigh
to belly, the slurp of sweat
slick breasts pulling away and
away and away from the center
where we stick. This is sin.
The hungry din of gnats swarming
over a picnic.

The pawing carves me out.
I’m nothing. Confetti of voice
and fat, canvas to be bled and
scraped and bled again. Browning silver.

Watch my fingers become thread
with the linen, my face a pillow
case, my brains down, I won’t
even swat the fly on my cheek
because my cheek is a crown
of batting, seams unraveling
on the fault lines of the quilt.

While I’ve been poking around on the theater scene for some time now, this will be the first professional production of a play that I’ve written. It’s going to come hot and quick, so make sure you don’t miss it.

::: after reggie eldridge

Imagine a cathedral of bones,
her hesitation a chorus of brass, imagine

light bending through the mosaic
of her smile, imagine mornings

kneeling in her knotted curls, rocking
religious on the pews of her thighs.

Imagine salvation, a single finger
forgiving your eyebrow for every

dishonest twitch or frivolous furrow,
sing the cobwebbed hymn of her

beauty, silly scattered marbles
in the water at the altar, call

her cosmos, call her christmas
loose teeth and fractured breath

Let her be sand through your knuckles,
grit under nails, the pollen your shirt wears

home. She is the perfect language,
with no poem to call

her own.

I’m chasing chariots.
Spitting out the cherry stems
and tracking postcards with my heartbeat.
When I was seven I wrote
something ugly in crayon
letters green and hunching and angry
and I meant it but I’m still alive and
somehow I’m always still alive even
when trees collapse and Fords bend themselves
into concrete and fingernails dig through bone
to open an aorta, somehow I twinkle and
hum into another morning, another morning
dusted from the heels of gold leather pumps.
Why do I bruise so easy? Car doors and granite.
This morning I am hungry and honest
I don’t know how else to say I miss you

The lizards unravel their tails poolside
to listen to poets’ tales, thirty years ago
these stories did not exist, a black girl
ate a pickle somewhere and our fathers
cooled our mothers’ breasts with ice.
We write suras on the dried femurs
of griffins, tangle in each other’s
poolfrizzed hair, and sing covers
of ballads that once crackled on car radios, this
is where mermaids come to swim, where
warlocks sharpen scimitars, and orpheus
hatches in the throats of black boys
who maybe keep a guitar in a soft case
back home, home wherever home is, this
is the only home many will ever know, no
rain eroding ceiling paint or memo pads
just iambs and assonance and love affairs
that pull apart like thick smiles of grapefruit.
We love the sting of citrus in our nail beds,
we tolerate tobasco in our eyes. We regal
fools. Our tongues beat sore on polished words,
truths we only wish that we rehearsed.