Maybe it was just the light,
cracked somewhere, leaked out,

lucky—I thought you shifted away
in voice, my mouth to hear,

Be honest now—
just for a minute;     I cried.

I had him locked out—
a perfectly good       wish.

Privately,       for over a year now    you drove off and left me.
The place cooled down        beaming and bright—       
put my name on        a silencer      (it’s not the end of the world).

Only a true spell
of fittingly glamorous phenomena
repaired sunstruck imagination—

2016, it's not funny anymore.

The things I never said, I said them like a man.
Like a man I insist I never said those things.
And afterwards I will assert I never said the second thing,
layer on layer of vow, disavowal. And what I believe,
you shall believe; there is only one thought and it is me.

My smell wipes across the thought of him. Crying in a pin stripe business suit. There was an accident. Perfect bodies lose perfection like melting ice. Crowns of thorns are passed out, metal trinkets to place in private. Kiss the blood rolling down.

I keep having this dream where
the white man isn’t angry
the black man entered
the white house.

There is a cabin by the bouldered beaches
of Northern California, 
where the pines practically toe the foam. 
This is where he’ll go, and off will come
his tailored suits, 
his lacquered shoes, 
his streak of blood-red tie.

She’s been sitting in the passenger seat of my car for a week.
 
She won’t wear her seatbelt and she won’t come in at night.

We are the easy targets
to the men who hide behind
the thin veil of life
the men in Washington
who pretend that they care.

It’s nice to scream
“This is what democracy looks like” 
With a hundred people you’ve never met before. 

Of course we knew what was at stake.
We all had that pill between our teeth
the gelatin cap
would not burst
no matter how hard we bit down