A diorama of function, all clockwork and organ.
……………Transparency means the light is bending.
Damn this gravity. Suspension is spirit’s legless shadow,
……………At least here in this hall. A woman, remembering
Something she cannot name, wanders as of seeking
……………Light. This is how shadow destroys itself.
Through an open window. As she falls, a silver spoon
……………Spins a web of light from her pocket. The trees
Do not understand this broken kite. This bitter copper
……………Water. Since the first time she fell, I have taken
The dead inside of me nightly. Spoken the transposed
……………Tongue of mirrors. She is not the first
Of the living to disappear. The first of my children, now
……………A blur of movement under water
Where there is no water.…
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The Wanted, always, envies the Needed,
regarding it bitterly
as the senior party between them.
It makes no secret of this fact:
How sweet a day must be,
it muses,
to bask in affections
without ever glancing over shoulder,
having no cause to dread
the turn of the wheel;
how sweet to shed the shame
of being marked a luxury.
Now, the Needed is more coy:
It fears not the ebbing of tides,
having settled well into a rhythmic life.
But, privately, the Needed longs, longs
for the thrill
of being a thing of covet.
There must be a certain grit
forged in the disquietude, it imagines,
a hard-won self-respect that banishes
any doubts as to one’s caliber;
for the Wanted thing must fight
to hold its keep,
always jockeying to charm a fickle appetite. …
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The faces behind the trees wither
……………With the radiance of will-o-the-wisps.
To the uninitiated eye this blood
……………As thin as moonlight ribbons loss.
For those who have lost more than life
……………There are rivers deeper than oceans
Ascending these hills and hollows.
……………Bone is a dull bell the winter rings
Into shapes of haunting, melodies
……………That compose your specific gravity.
Returning limb for limb the weight
……………Of absent children. The pregnant womb
Emptied by the callous moon. Eyes
……………Of bloodshot destiny, hands made cradle.
The flower of youth that will never bloom.
……………The earth turns away from such use.
Tell me, am I wrong to pull
……………The dead into conversation, seeking the name
She would have carried among
……………Their number?…
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She has one knee pulled to her chest,
Her face downcast.
My biological host stole the sun.
I can’t bring myself to call her mother,
But I’ve always had a good imagination and will try.
I understand now, I told her.
Hardened eyes kissed by time,
She’d seen it all.
My human mother raised a mirror.
Do you see me?
I asked the statue, but ivy armor muted her.
My mother’s heels stabbed into the dirt for the family Christmas photo.
It was winter; the stone was cold.
Come spring, chlorophyllic stains wept down her chest.
I’d feel her breasts and pretend
The blood pulsing in my palm was a real-life heartbeat.
Do you love me?…
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I dreamt that I had a baby girl.
In the dream, I cried cinnamon
and birthed a fairy from my belly button.
I held her in my hand,
struck by her smallness
and the intrusive desire
to crush her in my fist.
Instead, I circled my thumb over her tiny cherub belly.
Yellowed wings like an old book
slicked to her back, and
bloody ringlets dampened her head.
She had my grandpa’s nose in miniature,
a grumpy little mountain.
She was funny looking,
fat and small like a bee.
The way boys look
like old men shrunk down—
she looked like everyone I’ve loved
got in a mirror and shattered
and we glued it back together wrong.…
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lightning strikes splits me open ozone sharp and
pungent filling the skies before thunder can do its
tepid heralding my favorite view out a window is
a grey expanse ripped open by electric lavender
knives but i had never imagined the atoms
their trembling after vibrating with exothermic
pangs begging to turn back but this is all there is
the mean bifurcation of a trunk and janus with head
turned not looking into the past but gaze palsied
rooted to the present burning foliage or to future
growth yes even from the charred remains tiny
rootlets spring upwards feeding and reveling
with no sense of decorum at all this is what
happens when the tree falls in the wood
with no one there to bear witness no one to
weep just mundanity crawling along like an infant
– a a khaliq
Author’s Note: A morning lightning storm is one of my favorite kinds of weather, as destructive as it is by its very nature.…
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In Texas,
They declared a heartbeat alone
enough life to preserve.
I watch my baby girl
Suspended in darkness,
her heart barely blipping at 120 bpm.
She has a tail, paddles for hands and stumps for feet,
two dark spots where eyes will be
and a spinal column.
No head, no brain, nowhere near human,
but a heartbeat pulsing through the womb
I waited my whole life to hear.
In Elizabeth City,
They declared a grown man,
not worth saving.
He had a heartbeat,
and 10 kids, and a spouse, and
four decades of HIStory.
And two hands on the wheel.
The thunder in his chest
pounding in the darkness
until
he was aborted
by people who promised to protect
and serve him.
No more waiting.…
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