It may be time for some of us to rethink where we shop.
I don’t want to read another book
or listen to another podcast promising
a better life, the road to happiness.
I just want to love my life as it is
Congress has spent decades nullifying even a whiff of comprehensive immigration reform while simultaneously encouraging American businesses to both hire and demonize the cheap labor.
Coins begin to rain into his cigar box,
a few folded bills. Small children seek the deep source
of the sound. An old man with waist-length dreadlocks
puts down his heavy pack and sighs.
Americans can learn from the anti-Nazi leaflet “10 Commandments for Danes” by denying ICE everything it needs to function.
Economy and naturalness,
as in ballet, or basketball’s dunk,
or skater’s twirl, leap and glide.
Body’s flow seems effortless.
There were no legal protections against the rape of enslaved Black women or enslaved Black men.
That was Sunday. The village. I was a baby sugared
with indulgence. Fat and black-haired. Those years
of his unfolding wallet and the ongoing thorn
of origin.
I see how my whole life has been a dream,
one she built for me from the ground up,
her daughter, my mother the axe, beautiful
tool with which she shaped me, a house
much like the one she lived in, but smaller
A punishment for the arrogance of thinking my mission in life was to explain things to people.
Watched the movie Hidden Figures (when the first black women worked in the Nasa space program) and almost cried. My father was a rocket scientist, something I didn’t realize until his brain was already gone to Alzheimer’s.
You stood before me, brushing your long hair,
stroke after stroke in the astonished air
while you talked of nothing, and I sipped my drink.
The task now is not to burn brighter or faster, but to build the collective capacity to withstand what’s coming.
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease the child in her
Because she is alone