Status Updates From 250 Poems: A Portable Antho...

Now I realize there is nothing
more personal than speech,
that I don’t have to defend
how I speak, how any person,
black, white, chooses to speak.
Let us speak. Let us talk
with the sounds of our mothers
and fathers still reverberating
in our minds, wherever our mothers or fathers come from:
Arkansas, release, Alabama,
Brazil, Aruba, Arizona.
👨🏿👲🏿🧕🏼

My father calls a day
too late, merely to remind
me that once again
I've forgotten my mother's

birthday, never mind his,
which is a month earlier,
and which I have also
forgotten. He lowers

his voice so that he can
tell me that he will call
my mother and....

The counter girls laugh.
I concentrate.
It is the crucial point-
they are ready for the cheese:
my fingers shake as I tear off slices
toss them on the burgers/fries done/dump/
refill buckets/burgers ready/flip into buns/
beat that melting cheese/wrap burgers in plastic/
...

I was born blind she said, an act of nature.
Sure, I thought, like birds born
without wings, trees without roots.
I didn't understand. The day she moved
I saw the world clearly; the sky
backed away from me like a departing father.
I sat under the jacaranda, catching

This is the story
of a beautiful
lie, what slips
through my fingers,
your fingers. It's winter,
It's far

in the lifespan
of man.
Bareheaded, in a soiled
shirt,
speechless, my friend
is making

A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it's not the wind
or the noise of the water:
I'll tell you, he said:
It's the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
Flying into town like projectiles.

The only legend I have ever loved is
The story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
A city of frogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
An exiled child in the crackling dust of
The underworld....

Every day our bodies separate,
explode torn and dazed.
not understanding how we celebrate

This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.

She was advised to play coy....

If I stand on my head will the sleep in my eye roll up into my head?
Does the dream know its own father?
Can bread go back to the field of its birth?

There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes
into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a word
colored
by who pays what for speaking

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
It's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate the most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,

We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning with shovel
and rake, drawing the risen brown buns
toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were,

or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled
in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does,
so as to lift out entire from the stall.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
⚰️

At whose quick touch all glasses chip...,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering in his undulant floor.

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against hate.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of....

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent on the undergrowth;
👨🏾

Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand
The Second Coming!

POETRY.