What he thought belly down, face down on the beige speckled tile floor, new wax, drill holes where desks had been anchored. Of the shield-thick hovering air. He could be a ribbon of wax, a thin trail of caulk. Something left over above his breath and heart sounds he could hear waiting like a hymn and pipe organs’ stop just before release.

What he thought belly down, face down on the ice sliding between cars toward the gutter. Of the rifle smug and steady at his forehead and jittery sawed-off rushing his wife for her wedding rings. Of the streetlight shadow. The hydrant hunched in the snow-crusted grass. The salted walk. His little girl mid-step on the porch and the wrought iron storm door and front door ajar.

When I was 8 years old I thought my father was a monster.
When I was 8 years old I thought my father could fly.
When I was 8 years old I thought my father was a dark room
In a dark house with walls of eyes and teeth and banisters of thick rough skin.
The rooms around him were also monsters and they were tall
As telephone poles with flesh of kerosene and black fire.
Their arms were always open and they surrounded my father,
Keeping him warm for as long as he chose to stand on the earth
Watching me.

A second ago my heart thump went
and I thought, “This would be a bad time
to have a heart attack and die, in the
middle of a poem,” then took comfort
in the idea that no one I have ever heard 
of has ever died in the middle of writing 
a poem, just as birds never die in mid-flight.
I think.

^{Translated from the Mandarin by Arthur Sze}

Dr. Xia Kejun said today:
there is no poetry in hell, and heaven does not require it either.
Great literature can only come from purgatory.

Sure, I agree. Destroyed in hell,
like in a gulag or the Jiabiangou labor camp—
there’s a crowd of hungry ghosts and idiots there.
But are we in Dante’s purgatory now?
No, I am reminded of Jonah’s legend—
The prophet Jonah was thrown into the ocean,
and a large fish swallowed him.
We, too, are in the belly of a fish;
it is dirty, but it seems warmer than the ocean outside.
This fish belly has hurricanes, floods (sometimes,
it floods up to your chest, like when you are stuck in a subway car!).
There are eerie clouds as dense as fish scales.
Yet there is care in this fish belly, and they summon us
to get vaccinated in the middle of the night.
In the fish belly, we just can’t find
a table on which to write our great literature.
Does literature matter? We just want to live.
Jonah’s eyes were wide open, and he prayed
in the fish belly for three days and three nights.
And we don’t know
who the master of this big fish is.
We don’t know if we can make it to the very end
or if we will be spit out by this giant fish.

Good was shot in the face three times.
Good was shot in ICE-cold-blood.
The President stated that she weaponized her car, but Good 
     did no such thing.
Good was a poet. Good can come of poets.
Today, Good can’t breathe either.

^{With Peter Datcher}

Dirt could run up and over a mountain
before a slave mother could see her child again

In Shelby County, the sale of a baby
could buy a pretty calf or more land
for a white woman’s inheritance

Selling babies in Alabama financed
more plantation property
Healthy, fat babies and first born children
handed away for dollars and dimes

Groomed for hire, for ungodly servitude–
taught to put the wash out
before they could speak
They were raggedy dolls for white children

Some carried the blue eyes of white daddies.
In the backyard quarters where the moon
hid from the earth
Can you hear the crying of those mothers?

Of the land where the crash of the ax marked
the hard dirt?