Category: #NPM17

I read the papers, I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight. The way the red mortars, in photographs, arc down into the neighborhoods like stars, the way death combs everything into a gray rubble before the camera moves on. What dark part of my soul shivers: you don’t want to know more about…

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and…

I thought of happiness, how it is woven Out of the silence in the empty house each day And how it is not sudden and it is not given But is creation itself like the growth of a tree. No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark Another circle is growing in the…

Some maps have blue borders like the blue of your name or the tributary lacing of veins running through your father’s hands. & how the last time I saw you, you held me for so long I saw whole lifetimes flooding by me small tentacles reaching for both our faces. I wish maps would be…

The punch-press operator from Flint met the assembler from West Virginia in a bar near the stadium. Neither had anything in mind, so they conversed about the upcoming baseball season about which neither cared. We could be a couple, he thought, but she was all wrong, way too skinny. For years he’d had an image…

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am…

To crease a sheet of paper is to change its memory, says the origami master: what was a field of snow folded into flake. A crane, erect, structured from surface. A tree emerges from a leaf—each form undone reveals the seams, pressed with ruler’s edge. Some figures take hundreds to be shaped, crossed & doubled…

I wish I was a photograph tucked into the corners of your wallet I wish I was a photograph you carried like a future in your back pocket I wish I was that face you show to strangers when they ask you where you come from I wish I was that someone that you come…

But sometimes I forget where I am, Imagine myself inside that life again. Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps, Or more likely colorless light Filtering its way through shapeless cloud. And when I begin to believe I haven’t left, The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke Climbing the walls while the hours fall. Straining against the…

My ancestors are made with water— blue on the sides, and green down the spine; when we travel, we lose brothers at sea and do not stop to grieve. Our mothers burn with a fire that does not let them be; they whisper our names nomenclatures of invisibility honey-dewed faces, eyes sewn shut, how to…