Corinne Herlihy’s Reviews > The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop > Status Update

“We did not build your boats (though we did leave a trial of kin to guide us home).”

the Colt .45–silent & heavy as an amputated hand

if an entry wound in the night would make a hole bright as morning. That if I looked through it, I might see the end of this sentence.

cripple the air like a name

furnished only with laughter

There’s a question corroding his tongue.

what becomes of the shepard
when the sheep are cannibals?

Fingers blurred like a photograph.

“Your very name —
glass splinter planted
deep in the fat of our vernacular.”

Sound we carried on foot

my grandmother cooking up words

the night is a varnished peeling wall against which I always want to be roughly pressed.

you wear the missing
like a golden chain.

trying to make a statement through their offspring
wanted us to have names with throat and vowels

See sound is infinite
so the break will forever echo/

bleeding all the stories he has never told and a halo of bullet casing around his head.
Time will gnaw his bones