A nightly spell of sleep falls  
heavy on the sea.  
Blue whales undulate their slow song,  
while soft-bellied mollusks are carried  
down, sand-ways like a wound. 

These swaying underwater breezes, 
this gentle flotsam of an oceanic dream 
are all for me, querida – a keepsake 
of my savage grief. 
Artifacts of deaths that no one died, 
ashes brimming with unnamed souls. 
I hate this disconnected dream,  
this crystalline suburbia,  
this history without light.  
You are the machine, I make and 
remake in my sleep. 

                        We could not save  
each other or ourselves in this forgetfulness. 
Yet, in the making, we disappeared 
into sound dressed in gray,  
where they said our hearts lived.  
Where the sword decides and  
Foucault lectures to the ghosts of crows 
about sex and the biopolitic. 
And what of colonialism? they squawk,  
Y que del negro atado?  
The sea distanced itself and sang 
of its guilty blood, of the bodies  
consumed in its salty lather. 
Forgive these ravenous waves  
for demanding sacrifice, a buffet of 
flesh and fat spread thick and fragrant.  
Pain is a difficult animal to domesticate.

^{—after Frank O’Hara}

like I dreamt of the lamb—slaughtered,
           forgotten,
lying on porcelain tile, on crimson-filled grout—
           and woke up thinking of my grandmother,
of her Betty Boop hands that held 
marbled stone, held dough-balled flour, 
held the first strands of my hair floating atop the river—

like winter apples, the ones that hang outside
my living room window and survive first snowfall 
to feed the neighborhood crows,
           how they fall
beneath my boots, staining my rubber 
soles with epigraphs of rot, epigraphs 
           of fors, of dears, of holding on till frost’s end.

Someday I will see long-forgotten fingerprints 
on the inside of my eyelids as I go to sleep,
as I close my eyes for silence on a Wednesday,
mourning—seeking—creases and smile lines, 
           porch lights and swing sets, 
summer nights of lightning bugs and Johnny Cash.

I think it will be a Tuesday, or maybe someday 
is yesterday, is two months from now, is going 
to be a day when I forget what I’m supposed 
           to be remembering.

For now, I will paint my nails cradle, adorn 
my skin in cloth that doesn’t choke,
tell my bones that they are each 
            a lamb             
                       remembered.

The worst part of it is that I’ve forgotten your face. Or the idea that each tide was a slender finger pulling at these knots, loose end then left to work on another day. Lost at sea, love is a logogram: less than, fewer still, a word made nothing more than cauter-mark on starboard hard, port I left all those years ago. Sometimes, I dream of my own (sorry, our own) great-rooted bed, shaped from something still alive. Eurycleia means “broad fame” and that’s a sandy-pit, if you ask me. It’s an island beautiful as a scarred oxen’s back, sowed with lash and eyes. I saw something of you the other day in this glass of magic, vase filled with smoke’s children. There’s that dress you wore, I said to no one in particular. There’s that blue that never bled to red wine, dark in its never-nocked-arrow waves. And suddenly you’re the moon, again, lost in reflection’s sea. I follow the light to nowhere as I wander through the sipped sleeve. Because. Because you walked the stairs that night before I left, after we heard the rain spill like grain from a split sack. You walked in front of me, just above the cochineal stars, bright bald ember, fashioned still spear. I think of nothing else but you. It’s true. It’s the worst part of forgetting, all this remembering.

^{a Markov Sonnet, with thanks to Fargo Tbakhi}

Baba, I held your hand as you were dying
Half-asleep, floating between Unknowing
And here: your gazed fixed into the greying wall.

                        *

Half-asleep, floating away from an unknowable
Here, your gaze was fixed past the wall greying
from hospital to hospice to bedroom to heaven.

                        *

Here, your gaze was fixed. Past the wall, greying
from hospital to hospice to bedroom, the heaven
of your unforgotten youth played out before us.

                        *

From hospital to hospice, from bedroom to heaven,
Your unforgettable youth played out before us: 1967,
Summer whispering in the ferns, gator dead on the mantle.

                        *

You un-forgot your youth and let it play out before
Summer whispered the ferns dead. A gator on the mantel
Meant hunting season was beginning, its heat coming still.

                        *

Summer was a whisper. Ferns, dead on the mantle. A gator
Meant hunting season was a heat you named beginning:
This is how you convinced yourself you were American. 

                        *

I wrote heat, and beginning, but meant hunting season.
This is how I know I am american: I can convince
Other men I am worthy of their roughest entries.

                        *

This is the shape of my knowing: I’m a convincing american
To other men who see, in me, a rough entry. A worthy
Hole would know when to submit, how to say daddy. 

                        *

To other men, I am a rough entry, a worthy
Hole. I know how to submit, call daddy
Undeserving men: all spittle, teeth, and thrashing.

                        *

Hole I once submitted to, Daddy where once
Was undeserving man: in all the spittle and thrashing,
He was my first love, my earliest childhood friend.

                        *

When I was spittle & thrash, I thought myself undeserving
Of him. Being in love with my earliest childhood friend
Was how my body first taught itself to swallow.

                        *

I once was in love with my earliest childhood friend.
This is how my body first learned to swallow
the impossible wound of itself: summer quieted to whisper.

                        *

I first taught my body to swallow itself
As a wound scraped quiet on an impossible summer.
Baba, it was you who held my hand as I was dying.

                        *

I quieted the impossible wound of my body,
Baba. I held your hand while you were dying,
Half-asleep. I let you float off, Unknowing.

To Keep
the memories nimble, place your fingers inside the mouth of her hair.
The history there is one motion, told and retold by millions of bodies 
over hundreds of years. Sister, mother, grandmother, aunt, cousin, 
lover, friend, partner, braid me. Keep the tales of what we cannot forget here.

To Float
think of silted braided rivers. Now extricate the rivulets. Use your tongue.
Can you discern salt from iron or shell from shale? This is what it is like
to make a world with words. 

To Re-grow
a tongue, pull it from beneath silt at the bottom of the sea. 
If it is knotted, frayed, tangled, you can take up my voice. Look for my
feathers in dust, find my matted feathers in the surf. There, make
a nest for me. Gather shells and driftwood. Dig a small bowl
in the sand. Let the patterns arrange themselves into a beautiful thing.
Ask me to come, and you will find me on the horizon, glittering.

To Claim
you we claimed ourselves. We touched the surfaces of mirrors
with no reflections. Hic sunt leones. Here there are lions. Here are waves.
Imagine us a tide of lions crashing on sandy shores, returning for what is ours.

To Unfold
into a receptacle for holding joy, entrust your tender heart to another.
Look. We are more than our scars. We hold the memory of trauma
in our roots. And still, here is a moment of pure joy. See how our chests
shake the air with a trust manifested from generations of resilience? 
Reach for each other. Embrace. Grow flowers with your lungs.

i have diver’s lungs from holding my
breath for so long. i promise you
i am not trying to break a record
sometimes i just forget to
exhale. my shoulders held tightly
near my neck, i am a ball of tense
living, a tumbleweed with steel-toed
boots. i can’t remember the last time
i felt light as dandelion. i can’t remember
the last time i took the sweetness in
& my diaphragm expanded into song.
they tell me breathing is everything,
meaning if i breathe right i can live to be
ancient. i’ll grow a soft furry tail or be
telekinetic something powerful enough
to heal the world. i swear i thought
the last time i’d think of death with breath
was that balmy day in july when the cops
became a raging fire & sucked the breath
out of Garner; but yesterday i walked
38 blocks to my father’s house with a mask
over my nose & mouth, the sweat dripping
off my chin only to get caught in fabric & pool up
like rain. & i inhaled small spurts of me, little
particles of my dna. i took into body my own self
& thought i’d die from so much exposure
to my own bereavement—they’re saying
this virus takes your breath away, not
like a mother’s love or like a good kiss
from your lover’s soft mouth but like the police
it can kill you fast or slow; dealer’s choice.
a pallbearer carrying your body without a casket.
they say it’s so contagious it could be quite
breathtaking. so persistent it might as well
be breathing                        down your neck—

^{Motivated forgetting is a psychological defense mechanism whereby people cope with threatening and unwanted memories by suppressing them from consciousness.
            —Amy N. Dalton and Li Huang}

              in Badagry there is a hung-
              ry well of water and memory

                                                         loss. in Badagry there was a well 
                                                         of people lost across a haven 

of water. in Badagry there was
a port overwhelmed in un-return. 

                                    to omit within the mind is to ebb
                                    heavenward. memory is a wealth 

                                                      choking the brain in un-respons-
                                                      ibility. violence in the mind and 

                                    the mind forgets in order to remember
                                    the self before the violence begot. 

in Badagry trauma washes ungod-
ly memory heavenward. in Bad-

                                       agry there is an attenuation well 
                                       meant to wish away a passage, 

                                                                      meant to unhaven a people.
                                                                      violence is underwhelming

                                         in return. what the body eats, 
                                         the mind waters. responsible 

is the memory for un-remittal. 
royal is the body for return. god is

                                     the mind for wafting. forgetting 
                                     is a port homeward. in Bad- 

                                                   agry hungry memory grows angry.
                                                   in Badagry the memories un- 

                 choke. trauma un-eats the royal. 
                 in Badagry there is a heaven 

                                               of people responsible for the birth- 
                                               right of remembering, for the well 

                                      of us across a haven of water
                                      overwhelmed in un-return.

We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We

Were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to Strike.

It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were Straight.

Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We

Made plans to be professional—and did. And some of us could Sing

When we drove to the edge of the mountains, with a drum. We

Made sense of our beautiful crazed lives under the starry stars. Sin

Was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We

Were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them: Thin

Chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little Gin

Will clarify the dark, and make us all feel like dancing. We

Had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz

I argued with the music as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June,

Forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We.

1.

It's not water to wine to swallow harm,
though many of us have,

and changing the name
of Ozark Street to Willie Jones Street,
won't resuscitate,

won't expose how the sun roars across rows of faces
at the funeral for a seventeen-year-old-boy,

won't stop the double slapping
of the screen door against a frame,
causing a grandmother, by habit, to yell out, Willie.

It can't deafen the trophies in a dead teenager's room.
That day in '94 I felt strong.

I walked down the street with nickel bags of weed
in the belt loops of my Dickies,

and a bandana strung from my pocket.

That's when I thought trouble could be run from,
could be avoided by never sitting
with your back to the door
or near a window.

I swore by long days and strutted along a rusted past,
shook dice and smoked with the boys

that posted on the corners:
and men cruising in coupes, men built so big
they took up both seats,
I rode with them that summer.

That was the season death walked alongside us all,
wagging its haunches and twisting its collared neck
at a bird glittering along a branch.

Willie was shot in that heat,
with a stolen pistol,
in the front yard of a party.

It poked a hole
no bigger than a pebble
in his body.

The shooters came from my high school:
we sometimes smoked in the bungalow
bathrooms during lunch.

A few weeks before Willie got shot,
Maurice had been killed—

An awning after rain,
Maurice and Willie
sagged from the weight.

Some say it is better
to be carried by six
than judged by twelve.

Some say the summer of '94
in Southeast San Diego
was just another summer.

Where do you keep all these people?
The shoemaker with his rumpled cough.
The man who twisted straws into brooms.
My teacher, oh my teacher. I will always cry
when I think of my teacher.
The olive farmer who lost every inch of ground,
every tree,
who sat with head in his hands
in his son's living room for years after.
I tucked them into my drawer with cuff links and bow ties.
Touched them each evening before I slept.
Wished them happiness and peace.
Peace in the heart. No wonder we all got heart trouble.
But justice never smiled on us. Why didn't it?
I tried to get Americans to think of them.
But they were too involved with their own affairs
to imagine ours. And you can't blame them, really.
How much do I think of Africa? I always did feel sad
in the back of my mind for places I didn't
have enough energy to worry about.