If you want to know what I think, I think Santa Claus is a Black woman.
She takes on extra shifts before the holiday, puts her tips
away in a jar in her sock drawer, and ends up buying everything
on her kids’ list with a credit card.
All in Poetry
If you want to know what I think, I think Santa Claus is a Black woman.
She takes on extra shifts before the holiday, puts her tips
away in a jar in her sock drawer, and ends up buying everything
on her kids’ list with a credit card.
some of us, had the good sense to call out to the warmth & beg
it to return to us in our sleep—when it was ready to sing the joy
back into our bones—humming the rhythms of our grandmothers’
deepest laughs.
Her azure skin waning under a lunar gloom.
Just the bare hull of her, spread out like a water deer,
weighing her head down against a familiar cloud,
surrendering to shadow.
Sorry I didn’t respond.
I was going to, but your laugh sounded
too much like an insult.
I am not your parachute
I’m a trampoline left oscillating from your stay,
of the class of 1914
dismantled, stiff and agape
in cold French mud
punched by painful numbness.
I am bad for you? So is smog and second hand
smoke and a good rare steak and what am I
to them if I am anything at all.
See him as he watches you from the top
but does not bring you a ladder. You
ask him why every night for 6 weeks
in a row and he says nothing.
The father would like to explain: the cycle, the impermanence,
the giving and the taking away—
but she is just a seedling and he is full of termites:
old wood, a petrified Cypress.
he met me at a clam bake, barefoot and howling at the moon on the gulf coast
in the summer of ‘82 and has never forgotten my hand on the bottle of raspberry
wine or the way I disguised my lust with tragedy, my tears sparkling like beacons
every time I walked into the bay, and I told him that his ice was melting
I shot the poet. But don’t bother crying.
You yourself have died a thousand deaths --
anesthetized, stupefied – in case you haven’t noticed.
Poetry is dead. I read it in The New Yorker.
The woman I become shaves her head
again & again because nothing ever feels clean.
the person at the epicenter of the experience doesn’t necessarily
get to decide / i was completely at his mercy in that way / it was
just like a whole other layer of being burned /
growing up, you always thought you’d be as tall as lightning in a bottle, so damn electrical
you’d shatter any prison with your brightness & shoot through the clouds in a blaze of glory
it hasn’t worked out the way you had hoped, wasting your wilderness on the American Dream
partying in the gooey lowlands & cutting up napkin monsters, all that talk about howling
where were you when all the broken people in your life built boats out of used razor blades?
i tap into the spot in my chest you live to not respond to his text
i trust that everything will work out in time for the credits
queen of choosing loyalty and herself first
queen of platonic girlfriends
teach the bend and snap to everyone
He was older and tall
and married though I didn’t know
that last part till I was in too deep
in so deep with his dick
that I gave him a yeast infection and went to therapy
no token-booths,
no gates,
passengers stripping the body
in preparation.
Amenorrhea means no children, or children if you’re lucky. The Latin translates to no moon. I am a moonless woman. The Pollock painting does not depict me.
In this white bed. In this white gown. I am no one’s woman.
Should my heart stop
before prayer can save me,
who will claim this body? Maybe, I will be buried
at sea.
He falls out of a plane and proclaims, “Anything is possible.” John Travolta dies hospital slow, in a government made bed that's known many guests. John Travolta dies on set, in his flm trailer, choking on a bagel.
I was raped and the story reads like a rejected script; someone else’s gritty noir.
There are no cicadas in this poem—
no praise for the passing of seasons. No lover with a velvet touch.
There is nothing left to romanticize