The moon
Was an old, old woman, tonight,
Hurrying home;
Calling pitifully to her children,
The stars,
Begging them to go home with her
For she was afraid,
But they would not.
They only laughed
While she crept along
Huddling against the dark blue wall of the Night
Stooping low,
Her old black hood wrapped close about her ears,
And only the pale curve of her yellow cheek
With a tear in the hollow of it
Showing through.
And the wind laughed too,
For he was teasing the old woman,
Pelting her with snowballs,
Filling her old eyes with the flakes of them,
Making her cold.
She stumbled along, shivering,
And once she fell,
And the snow buried her;
And all her jewels
Slid from the old bag
Under her arm
And fell to earth,
And the tall trees seized them,
And hung them about their necks,
And filled their bony arms with them.
All their nakedness was covered by her jewels,
And they would not give them back to her.
The old moon-woman moaned piteously,
Hurrying home;
And the wild wind laughed at her
And her children laughed too,
And the tall trees taunted her
With their glittering plunder.

I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
    the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
    that only glows every one hundred years falls
    into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
    drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
    to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
    the tears from my birth pains
    created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
    out the sahara desert
    with a packet of goat's meat
    and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
    so swift you can't catch me

    For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
    He gave me rome for mother's day
My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
    as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
    jesus
    men intone my loving name
    All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
    the filings from my fingernails are
    semi-precious jewels
    On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
    the earth as I went
    The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
    across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
    except by my permission

I mean . . . I . . . can fly
    like a bird in the sky . . .

          which do you love more
a feather or a rock

                                                     to be good is to be ‘natural’
                                                              I mean to appear

              you are not good
you are holding up though

                                                              you are holding up
                                                     you are getting a drink of water

                    you are eating
          you are concealing your identities

                                                     this is like a riotous wilderness
                                                              but more like a persistent dread

                              your ferocity, almost mycological

                                           mythological

                    I said mycological

                                                     oh god

	                    oh my god
                                         
                                                     your laughter has undertones
                                                                      of oak and berries
and martial law
            conceived, as it were, in a garden

^{translated by Samantha Schnee}

They were so called because they wore god’s mask, and be-
cause their faces and hearts were resolute as stone. For days,
years, they walked with jade beneath their tongues, seeking
home. They worked the land and bejeweled their bodies. Not
as a sign of vanity, but because they tended the amaranth in
their yearning for fire. Xiuhtecuhtli was their god; xiuhtlatoa
their language, meaning “words of fire”—that which ignites
the heart. They were careful not to use xaltlatoa, “words of
sand”, fleeting, vague and un-understandable. At night
they accompanied the Sun on his descent. They were jade,
translucent, and purified the underworld, deciphering dest-
iny. Their essence dwelt in the Afterlife. Their petals arose in
song. They adorned their Home with hymns and flowers and
filled their desire with vision, fine chalice of the sagacious
seed. The upper half of their bodies naked; Their breasts
were buds of omexóchitl and their verdant dreams the
sprigs of a birch. From their legs blossomed the pure wh-
ite feathers of the quetzal. Coatlicue, the goddess mother,
gave birth to the Sun and Moon. With a sword of fire, the
Sun beheaded the Moon and tossed her body down
the steps, shattering it in a thousand pieces, Coyolxauhqui
covered head to toe in shining rattles of vipers. She fell
and entered darkness. And so it was recorded on the
tree of ámatl: Light and shadow will not last. So says
the history of woman: she sought to recreate what
was within her to rewrite the Book:
The song will be reborn
in each body in such a way that we learn
to redefine what is ours, as our daughters will,
too, and our daughters’ daughters, and their
daughters’ daughters will know that their
bodies are light on Earth, heat of the sun with
its tona, energy, fecundity, song that dances
along the perimeter of stars. And so, they watch
over us from the firmament at dusk and dawn
as the sun is born and dies. These goddess
-es of water were destined to be masters
of their own desire, guides of their own
light. We must engrave on our hearts:
The place where goddesses are born.

sobre quiénes eran estas diosas

Las llamaban así por ser portadoras de la máscara del dios, y
por tener un rostro propio y un corazón firme como la
piedra. Soles, años caminaron con el jade bajo su lengua en
pos de la Casa. Labraron la tierra y adornaron sus cuerpos
con joyeles de oro, no como símbolo de vanidad, sino por
ser cuidadoras del amaranto en su anhelo de flama. Xiuh-
tecuhtli era su dios; xiuhtlatoa, su lengua, lo cual quiere
decir «palabra de fuego», esa que enciende el corazón. El-
las cuidaban de no usar la xaltlatoa,  «palabra de arena»,
que escurridiza huye sin dejarse aprehender. Por las no-
ches acompañaban en su descenso al Sol. Ellas eran el
jade y eran la transparencia, purificaban el inframundo
y descifraban el sino. En el Más Allá moraba su funda-
mento. Sus pétalos en cantos se alzaban. Con himnos y
flores ornaban su Casa y su deseo llenaban de visión, fino
cáliz de fulgor y semilla. Llevaban la mitad de su cuerpo sin
cubrir; eran brotes de omexóchitl sus senos y su sueño, verde
yema de tepozán. Y de sus piernas florecían las blanqu-
ísimas plumas de quetzal. Así fue que Coatlicue, diosa
madre, dio a luz al Sol y a la Luna. Con su espada de fuego,
él decapitó a la Luna, y por la escalinata su cuerpo rodó, y se
fragmentó en mil pedazos. Coyolxauhqui yacía toda re-
cubierta de radiantes cascabeles de sierpe. Al caer,
entró en la oscuridad. Y por ello ha quedado
grabado en el árbol del «ámatl»: Transitoria será
la luz y su sombra. Dice así la historia de la mujer:
buscó rehacer su interioridad pra reescribir el Libro:
El canto renacerá en cada cuerpo de forma que
aprendamos a resignificar el propio, y así nuestras hijas,
y las hijas de nuestras hijas, y las hijas de sus hijas,
sabrán que su cuerpo es luz en Tierra, calor de Sol
con su tona, energía, fecundación, canto que danza
en derredor de las estrellas. Es así que nos vigil-
an desde el firmamento cada mañana y cada
noche, al nacer y al caer el Sol. Las diosas del
agua tenían como propio ser dueñas
de su deseo, guías de su luz. Y así lo
habremos de inscribir en nuestros
corazones:
Lugar donde nacen las diosas.

If for a day joy masters me,
Think not my wounds are healed;
Far deeper than the scars you see,
I keep the roots concealed.

They shall bear blossoms with the fall;
I have their word for this,
Who tend my roots with rains of gall,
And suns of prejudice.

okra, pickled just the way you like it,
             in the jar on the top shelf. oranges
in the ochre clay bowl you made right there

on the counter. clove tea brewing stovetop
             & there’s an orison that my mama
taught me, metronoming ’gainst my orbital

bones. orbiting around my occipital.
             come through. let’s be each other’s oracles.
we can hold hands, craft a shrine in the gap

of our palms, in the ocean of our breaths
             at the shore of our oil-shined flesh. listen:
this is my oath to you. i’m devoted

to you, the people, my folks, my kindred—
             not to the state. & i belong with you—
not to the state. our love is ordained

by the Black ordinary & spectacle,
             our wayward waymaking. we are the more
gathered together here in our own names

calling on otherwise. serenading
             otherwheres. singing we already here—
come through

When a mouth aboard said ship
called out to me, I was a berry
turned sour by sun’s
neglect, an old ornament gone
unglossed. It spoke to me & warranted
a new way of listening & at once
I heard two crows, heard both.
For years, that strange whistle
of new language nettled me sloppily
its orientation unmapped. I let it
holler too long untended, & after
too long an ignorance it came back
to beat me, a bullet of tenacity.
I took too long to know its nature
& now I count a debt. It takes
exactly this much effort to tell you
that I have been stayed. Stayed by
a new forgetfulness, stayed by
an urgent condition, a mother warbler
feeding me melons by the whole.
Is there a mouth as hungry
as mine? As wide in its receiving?
I open to a 30th orbit
& want for nothing more than the syrup
of fruit, than the blade of a garden
in the small of my back, than to bait
the braid of duty.
& so, for this wily bewitched reason
of little perspicuity
I regret to inform you of my imminent
departure, my eventual, divine
escape from cog-wheel
mandates, my prescriptions grown old.
What I love is a heaven
that vexes me—& to it I must become
a faithful wife.

I am a body
of ghost—
haint-kin cloaked
in earthen flesh

learning to see
my Self 
in the unyielding 
barrenness of my mother’s 
front yard.

The salted fault lines
become me. I bear
a trace of invasion
and reek
of a martyr’s will.

A tangle
of medicinal weeds
interrupts my molting 
descent.

Dandelion greens fuzz
up my apathy. A flower
dares itself to bloom
amongst my most quiet
scars.

When the rain comes,
I turn mud in my lover’s mouth.
Something fecund hums
through my blood

And maybe . . . this 
is the living. These 
would-be dead things in
the same place, the same time

that is 
my body. Ours. Not mine— 
unowned and fruited and
poor and black and ugly and Here

with you. I reach
a hand      out the wildness
And catch hold
a soft pulse
whispering:

                                                           Together, 
                                                      we nursed you
                                                      don’t you dare
                                                             give up

my love is black though my love is not black ::
think the darkness cradling the milky way ::
imagine quick light flowing down the back
of my throat, glowing—i swallow the day ::

my love is black, an absorbing array
of colors :: gold yolk escaping the cracked
shell :: a shiny silver moon-coin to play ::
a juicy peach, plump plums, cup of cognac ::

my love is black, the only way i know
to live :: now fierce and demanding, now free
and unpossessed :: so for my magnet, my
love becomes steel, then, for my butterfly,
will not a flower but a whole field be ::
my love and my blackness together go—

Violence thrives like violet on the vine, but I’m rare
today, with you. I came to Napa nappy-headed,
impressively unconcerned, with heft to me. Air
kisses the wine we bring to lip: I’m not wedded

to folks, I say, the way I was. Parts of me have died
with more to expire; troubled times have changed
us both. Left to silence, a question rises—if you lied
to spare me wrath turned inward. You’ve arranged

any moment of peace I’ve ever lived in: Love, it’s hard
to trust a good thing these days, harder still to be one.
Crimson colors in our stemmed glasses. Sorry-ass bard,
feeling no ounce of romance toward the world. No gun

could woo me, though. I want to be here. Need to be—
me, the half-full fool of us. I can’t imagine what you see.

The moon assumes her voyeuristic perch
to find the rut of me, releashed from sense,
devoid of focus ’cept by your design.
I never thought restraint would be my thing.
Then you: the hole from which my logic seeps,
who bucks my mind’s incessant swallowsong
& pins the speaker’s squirming lyric down
with ease. You coax a measured flood, decide
the scatter of my breath & know your place—
astride the August heat, your knuckles tight
around a bratty vers, a fuschia gag:
you quiet my neurotic ass, can still
the loudness murmuring beneath my skull.
Be done. There’s nothing more to say.

 The tired cars go grumbling by,
        The moaning, groaning cars,
    And the old milk carts go rumbling by
        Under the same dull stars.
    Out of the tenements, cold as stone,
        Dark figures start for work;
    I watch them sadly shuffle on,
        ’Tis dawn, dawn in New York.

        But I would be on the island of the sea,
        In the heart of the island of the sea,
    Where the cocks are crowing, crowing, crowing,
    And the hens are cackling in the rose-apple tree,
Where the old draft-horse is neighing, neighing, neighing,
        Out on the brown dew-silvered lawn,
    And the tethered cow is lowing, lowing, lowing,
And dear old Ned is braying, braying, braying,
And the shaggy Nannie goat is calling, calling, calling
    From her little trampled corner of the long wide lea
That stretches to the waters of the hill-stream falling
    Sheer upon the flat rocks joyously!
    There, oh, there! on the island of the sea,
        There I would be at dawn.

    The tired cars go grumbling by,
        The crazy, lazy cars,
    And the same milk carts go rumbling by
        Under the dying stars.
    A lonely newsboy hurries by,
        Humming a recent ditty;
    Red streaks strike through the gray of the sky,
        The dawn comes to the city.

        But I would be on the island of the sea,
        In the heart of the island of the sea,
    Where the cocks are crowing, crowing, crowing,
    And the hens are cackling in the rose-apple tree,
Where the old draft-horse is neighing, neighing, neighing
        Out on the brown dew-silvered lawn,
    And the tethered cow is lowing, lowing, lowing,
And dear old Ned is braying, braying, braying,
And the shaggy Nannie goat is calling, calling, calling,
    From her little trampled corner of the long wide lea
That stretches to the waters of the hill-stream falling
    Sheer upon the flat rocks joyously!
    There, oh, there! on the island of the sea,
        There I would be at dawn.

I’ll say it—the most remarkable way a man 
has touched me is when he didn’t intend to, found
the heat of me on accident. I’m saying his hand
punctured the gap between our backs, rooted around

for the blanket we shared and swept my rib-ridged side.
In movies, that touch is the domino
that starts the chain, but his bed did not abide
by rules of fantasy. He touched me and, oh,

I held my breath. Waited for the regret
he never felt. My God, he touched me then slid
closer beneath the duvet, our spines close-set
arches that joined in the dark, kissing. I did

not know it then, but his fingers flexed with want
into the night. His heart at my back. Desire out front.

I think of Whitney Houston    in her sequined glamour
   She’s centerstage      It’s 1988           Her head
             Thrown back against a black backdrop     She is the only thing
      glowing       So distant                        from us in the universe

    of her voice                 She is already dying       when
I hear her sing the first time          When I slip inside
   my rhinestone leotard white tights          Before a mic
              My vocal chords are still elastic                  Vibrating harpstring

    Not yet sclerotic with unlovely smoke                    and shame
    I’m drawn to Whitney like a cardinal on a branch
in winter            Beauty too bright for camouflage                 Her story
a constellation twinned with mine. I love myself 

          because of her. Our sweet lip sweat sparkling in the flame
light. I went home inside myself too. The world became so small.  
          Secrets collapsing my life into a vacuum. To burn a little longer—
Whitney, you know           no one is coming—you must        save yourself.

^{[a do-over]
 
for Mr. Douglas}

been screamin all night          god      why daddy gone
dress all distress(d)    hair dyin          fo(r) a com(b)
tussy done los(t) its hold on her         her stank
                                    bruh try to lif(t) her off flo(or)  but cant

ma’dear say    leave her on de flo{or) we late
            dress steam(d)-press(d)         miss-my-man bake(d) on her face
                        & den her yell  joe we leavin   den stan(d) still
                                    her forgot dat quic(k)              her man’s deff real-real

now ma’dear join sis’belle screamin on flo(or)
dey cabaret to prove who luv(d) joe mo(re)