We learned to open our throats,
your lung’s breath whispering:

Feel me here. Your head moved to my touch
until a knock on the door made us stop.

After six years of each snow-covered morning and
your grumpy greeting,
there are only two things you must have become.
And so I search, waiting for your legs to emerge

I am a planet, after all, with its
own moon, gathering sands,
wondering when I discovered
that I want nothing from him.

He lives on in black and white
In a houndstooth jacket
Is certainly someone’s uncle
though he never had children himself

Is it better to have seen it?

The moment the plate fell and the toast burned.

Shattered and cracked. Severed and dismembered.

Go back. Go back to eating in bed.

My legs are all marigold sun winking with my pink shoed-stride. People wave, and like our hands were drawn up by invisible strings, by magnets pulling us together, I wave too. I like your stockings, baby, they say—the old woman and the man on the stoop, have I ever said stockings?

I wasn’t in Colorado, but on a windy beach in California
under the same blues and grays, the day you asked me
if I thought you were affectionate enough with her.
Only a child, I could think of no answer for you then

The woman’s split lips seals like a tire
plugged by a roadside Samaritan.
The linen closet door opens, pushes the woman’s
head away, propels her body up the stairs.

and I find myself in a multi-season show
with many incomplete arcs for many forgotten guest stars.
And 36 is not old but it’s old enough
to see life being done to me

I’m recalling my professor, Horace Coleman, a poet
who once christened Black America the engine under
the hood of Thomas Jefferson’s America. I know my
father. However, I’m learning what it takes to get him
to lose the Confederate flag. It’s quiet. Then he laughs.

My grandfather touched his children with
a staff of wisdom. My father would sing and sing
of the banana tree’s grief.

I sat tongue in cheek with a preschool nod
singing Yes, Pastor! imposter smile with the same canine teeth

I’d use to rip myself anew.

I’m five and it’s past time
to feed my tamagotchi.
I make a point to sob with enough fervor to properly indicate I’m not in fact a smoker.

This might be the day to winnow charcoal,
navy, or grey wool pinstripes, starched white
shirts, striped silk ties, rich brown wingtips.
Today, five years past retirement.

No, you didn’t walk
among the uplifting. No, you didn’t
know all that you were
or could have been

Instead i break
like sunset

the moment it decides

2 stop speaking
for God

While my husband slept, I ran through the nearby neighborhoods in the early morning chill, eager to see the black cat, my old friend!, in the window where he perched, underneath Halloween decorations and Christmas lights, until I saw him on top of a trashcan

what made you
strip naked & run screaming
into the abandoned building
licking flakes of old paint from walls bleeding cold
skin

Where now only weeds seemed to thrive, the walls had to be reimagined, the slope & pitch of the frosted roof

hidden, in the small corner of the heart
a seed won’t grow
rimmed in shadowed soil, won’t
stretch its rooted fingers