When winter set in, they came
to see us with their baby,
a beautiful child about a year old
who was learning to walk
and stepped proudly
across our living room,
waved her fists and hands
and shook her straw colored hair.
It may be cliché to say this now, but how people treat themselves can show you how they treat those closest to them, then other strangers. I often forget to water my flailing herb garden. I often force my body—muscles hard from the lactic acid produced in my anxious panics—to be pleasant to my lovers, who expect pleasantries.
& no one believes the future is horses falling
beneath ten thousand satellites & ten thousand
tombs & who in the new
cities will say through
horses of fire & phosphorous drain
that we could make the journey alone
a temple?
A father is only as good the tree house he never builds
Which he’s promised to his children before
they were script on checkbook, a practiced inheritance
from his father, and his father’s
father.
There’s so many of us here: hood boys taught
discipline through bowing and bare feet, through
knowing the leg is just as much of the punch as
the knuckle.
By ERICA DAWSON
Kool G. Rap said, Cover your head
’cause it’s a dead zone in the red
zone. Rap said, God, now this is ire.
When I was with the bartender,
I didn’t see a field of yellow flowers
when I closed my eyes.
There was no superbloom
the way there’d been with you,
and my heart didn’t burst open
when he put his mouth to my mouth.
Darkness, my sibling,
I have a story to tell you
Last shabbes I was chased by the law into Bed
Stuy streets for passing out pamphlets
decrying America’s uncles.
I’ll never know the rupture and the gush,
the crown, or the crowning, the gummy grin
of the vulva, hair for teeth, the soft orb
forced forth without volition, the pungent room,
king mushroom wrenched from its mycelium.
This is the body, the eight year old body, cream skinned, cat boned, silent.
Call the body Johnny.
Bend the body—it will not break.
Bend forward, Johnny.
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