Explore Poems: Ekphrasis

[as jumping from a plane. easier—a bridge. as tripping on a shoelace. as blinking your eyes. as breathing…

[all my exes agree i’m too sensitive. inside i’m keeping track of slights on one long receipt, a diaristic…

[if you marry your confession, you can live alone inside it. no priest behind the window. no wife or…

Why yu always ask stupid question, ee?
The man call mango head because him head
shape like mango. What…

What if, Betye, instead of a rifle or hand
grenade—I mean, what if after
the loaded gun that takes two hands
to fire, I lay down the splintered broom
and the steel so cold it wets
my cheek? What if I unclench the valleys
of my...

The effect—for those three hundred years, while the cupid remained hidden—was a kind of silence.

Like…

The handwriting is on the wall
a white smear across the face of the sky
a smear of white
  a white chalk smear on a blackboard sky
an inky bleed that eats everything.
Come clean. In the dark
we all look alike,
    right? Wing of a bald...

Indigo pool, color of the wings
of the biggest specimen captured
in glass in my second room, that one
iridescent, incandescent, a word
I wish every nigga knew. Not too far
back, my shadow embraced me so long
I thought I was Narcissus, pulled
deep into my...

Everyday some brown
woman pools into inky blue,
a madness that crawls up
from the floor of her and flows
out all around. I should
know, for months swallowed
in the bruise of myself
reaching to hold my hand.
The sun continues to brush
orange light intermittently
everywhere despite the...

All things begin from the spindle,
we say—life spun from graces.
I grew like rain from rumbles of my parents’
cloud, a dark dawn, admitting growth.
In the beginning, I squeeze into existence with a head,
white, silhouette-like—formed from
the stomach of the hard earth on...

SIR, the 28 spheres of Kamen’s harmony

Susceptible, inferred, immense, actual - the electron microscopy provides images of the virus long in memories.

It shows grey spinning, transforming this (I point to the past fifteen months) into orbs.

Here they are, grown enormous, before you in place, not within you in space. For what else can it become but the potential for indifferent attractiveness.

A memory, this spread; a novel micrography.

The SIR diagram is a mirror that creates a migratory pattern in the mind, as one would imagine birds flying, out of sight.
Of birds then. The diagram is a symbol that brings nets down, and what gets trapped in nets, as it is expelled from our hands, and rid by water, is a thing, that reflects, traces, and symbolizes.

Both the virus, and us.

The universe participates in making the artist well, and an instigator.

The participation of the invisible moves the virus into view.

A speck, a spread, a tiny writing in the air, a diagram, an avian metaphor, an object installed to illuminate. All of this, completely noiseless.

And this is why I write to you, in order to not speak the word, and have it just be seen.

You once sat on straw mats but clearly
it wasn’t enough.
It must not have been

since you lifted the mat a few inches
and added pegs at the corners.
You knew how legs worked,

you used them to look for your food.
Was the elevation meant...

I was living a life that was more
or less filled with misfiring synapses
inside a braincase. They said and said

and never stopped saying, “You are
that problem that can’t be undone,
a daughter that keeps becoming

what keeps her mother awake.” I was
in that...

That the walls have no texture suggests that we,
the angels and I, are perfect. And we are,

the way children are until they are no longer.
I remember seeing ground and wondering

where walking might take me. Up or down?
In a landscape of...

Jan.4.2022
A call is just a call. I pick it up.

Jan.6.2022
I lift blankets looking for my father.

Jan.7.2022
When I take off the patch, your eye is gone.
I spend the day in other people’s tears.

Jan.9.2022
Someone says your eyelid almost came off,
the doctors tried...

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.   
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all...

But all dark notes are dismantled

there from the middle ear

downward. Voyaged mind, cauldron skin.

Can you claim anything is yours?

The burning salt hour

throws its black broken-glass frame skyward.

Left behind

the mum orchestra, body parts in peril

and animals dizzy for

lust past all lost

astronomy...

The aftermath always happening like an airplane falling, or a man
midair falling from a horse, and an arrow, a gun, many guns
pointing away, at us, our all bull’s-eye-on-the-mark. This is what he
sees when he sees. Maybe Wrong or not, the...

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
       A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:...

The woman sits clutching her knees
inside a short-necked bottle on a beach,
looks up smiling at a mouth above
all imagined itineraries.
We like to think she volunteered
to be lowered into the bottle.
On her own idea, even
her own craftiness, lured into being
enrobed with...