The night air is filled
with the scent of apples,
and the moon is nearly full.

In the next room, Jim
is reading; a small cat sleeps
in the crook of his arm.

The night singers are loud,
proclaiming themselves
every evening until they run

out of nights and die in
the cold, or burrow down into
the mud to dream away the winter.

My office is awash in books
and photographs, and the sepia/pink
sunset stains all its light touches.

I’ve never been a good traveler,
but there are days, like this one,
when I’d pay anything to be in

another country, or standing on
the cold, grey moon, staring back
at the disaster we call our world.

We crave change, but
turn away from it.
We drown in contradictions.

Tonight, I’ll sleep
blanketed in moonlight.
In my dreams, I’ll have

nothing to say about anything
important. I’ll simply live my life,
and let the night singers live theirs,

until all of us are gone.
I won’t say a word, and let
silence speak in my stead.

^{acrostic golden shovel}

America is loving me to death, loving me to death slowly, and I
Mainly try not to be disappeared here, knowing she won’t pledge
Even tolerance in return. Dear God, I can’t offer allegiance.
Right now, 400 years ago, far into the future―it’s difficult to
Ignore or forgive how despised I am and have been in the
Centuries I’ve been here—despised in the design of the flag
And in the fealty it demands (lest I be made an example of).
In America there’s one winning story—no adaptations. The
Story imagines a noble, grand progress where we’re all united.
Like truths are as self-evident as the Declaration states.
Or like they would be if not for detractors like me, the ranks of
Vagabonds existing to point out what’s rotten in America,
Insisting her gains come at a cost, reminding her who pays, and
Negating wild notions of exceptionalism—adding ugly facts to
God’s-favorite-nation mythology. Look, victors get spoils; I know the
Memories of the vanquished fade away. I hear the enduring republic,
Erect and proud, asking through ravenous teeth Who do you riot for?
Tamir? Sandra? Medgar? George? Breonna? Elijah? Philando? Eric? Which
One? Like it can’t be all of them. Like it can’t be the entirety of it:
Destroyed brown bodies, dismantled homes, so demolition stands
Even as my fidelity falls, as it must. She erases my reason too, allows one
Answer to her only loyalty test: yes or no, Michael, do you love this nation?
Then hates me for saying I can’t, for not burying myself under
Her fables where we’re one, indivisible, free, just, under God, her God.

You know I know what I’m doing.
I’m always with you.

I’m watching these lines get to you.
This is how we’re close.

We can’t have knowing looks
(we’re both as good as dead)

so we have these knowing lines,
typing till the clock says stop.

And if in the course of struggle
a foot slips and we fall,

what does that matter?
I won’t come back to you

when the song is over.
I will not want you

or your unsuitable house and lot.
Expect to miss me, though—

expect ice and snow, rain and hail.
To be embarrassed. To be changed.

To write the year on a check
and be one hundred years off.

To let it go
when I express displeasure.

To let my anger go. Just drop it. Just take it
as you drop it.

Just take it
and go.

The house was built,  
Brick by brick, pane by pane,  
Initially withstanding winds,  
The force of a hurricane. 

But over time, the faults are found  
As storm after storm  
Assails, the craftsmanship outdated,  
In need of reform. 

The windows break, one by one,  
Under the weight of wrongs, the structure strains, 
Until one day fire catches,  
And only the foundation of good intentions remains.  

While easiest would be to walk,  
To abandon, moving on to rebuild,  
The value is seen by those who have called it 
Home, desires to be fulfilled.  

Remembering the mistakes,  
Maintaining the hope of freedom,  
Hand in hand, we work,  
Entering a new season.  

The work is not complete until  
The walls protect all who live there,  
No exceptions. Abandonment of all  
Unnecessary despair.  

A job led by all, not by one,  
We work long days turn long nights.  
The creation of our hands  
Proving more than surface level acknowledgment of rights.  

The past is not buried  
But underlies 
What we have transformed  
Before our eyes.

I have never heard America described as quiet.
Even street lights seem to pulse to some interminable heartbeat
beneath buildings endeavoring for the clouds.
Our purposeful words often laced in ample volume.
In such social engagements
all varieties of people run together—
words flowing, ideas pooling—
eager to share and just as soon to hear.
But have ideas—opportunities—collaborations
extending beyond the bounds of our borders
with reverberations felt through every city, capital, and country
ever began with silence and seclusion?

My stepfather created opportunity
from the destitute nothing he was dealt,
consoled only by the American dream
that came as whispers under snow-dappled stars.
And from these muffled mumblings
he bettered his situation.

He is one of America’s thousands,
evidence of excellence obtained by
those in pursuit of changing their fortune.
And as snow-ridden summits yield to streams
and torrid deserts to the placid waltz of grassy plains,
each of us—
guided by the compass of our will—
is free to climb, swim, or walk
to wherever we may choose.

All countries of ample years have a shadow beneath their flag
cast by historical inequities amended too late.
But how it still catches the propitious wind!
Always endeavoring to fly higher and baste the somber shade beneath.
As it flutters, we stand reverently
for those who can no longer
and for those who cannot yet.
The horizon an interminable stretch of past and future
we gaze upon it, in remembrance of what was,
yet trekking forward toward what can be.

We are a coalescence of voices,
each with unparalleled inflection,
yet our conglomeration of somber and elated tones
still manages to reach harmony.

The diversity of our country
—of opinions and cultures and beliefs—
as extraordinary as the vast, varying landscapes.
Some tall, imposing, confident as the Rockies;
the great height of their achievements
not formidable but inspiring.
Still others humble and hushed as the plains;
yet their voice embodied in the breeze touches all.
From mountains to marshes to mesas,
we are united in the embrace of the same two seas.
Invaluable are contrasting beliefs
bridged by curiosity and a common desire for betterment.
A miscellany not of problems but possible solutions are we.
Speak up, I implore you,
for in your voice we might find the answer.

The American dream—
one smile, one sunrise,
one decision to pursue an insatiable passion
for words, for equality, for science
—away from the American reality.

When hardships splatter like ebony ink across the skyline,
extinguishing the hues still smoldering from the former day,
pinpricks of hope still remain.
And in these celestial bodies we find solace,
arranging the stars against the somber background into
symbols and pictures of progress.
And beneath them we endure in pursuit of dawn.

Today’s hope is a flickering candle that dwells in a snow-dusted window,
circulating the prayers of Christmas mornings.
Today’s hope is the crisp daffodil in colorless photos,
containing the soul of a small
child,
who only wishes and knows of
peace and love.
Today’s hope is the sparkling eyes that
truly believe in achieving
anything to reach unity.
Today’s hope is the palm to palm connection
bracing each other for the climb neither expected,
but couldn’t abandon.
Today’s hope is peering
beyond
the lingering barrier,
but still recognizing the diversity in ourselves.
Today’s hope has been dimmed and tossed recklessly,
but still generously stays with us,
for we cannot help but come back
like wide eyed children to candy.
We are said to be weak to rely on such strength,
but we are only believers.
That spark
That gives science a baffled case
And oceans an infinite plane,
is the eagle that dips
and soars
and fights,
which stands for
the hope of
today. 

I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, 
And laid them away in a box of gold;
Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth; 
I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found earth’s breath so keen and cold; 
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, 
And laid them away in a box of gold.

My therapist has approved my drinking of three whiskeys per night,
her eyes forbearing, knowing well the ruthlessness of night.

The sun having fled as a father might flee, my cousin fathered
a narrow terror while he robbed, with a pistol, a fellow citizen one night.

The encouraging lies of a mother are greatly underpaid job-keepers;
slovenly kings have dealt much wrong money to generals and knights.

My childhood was a lengthy scene of make believe and disaccord—
my favorite things being rain and watching my mother’s cigarettes ignite.

What of fire, among its timelessness and musculature, is not
more divine when burning past the open gates of night?

Today’s hope is a flickering candle that dwells in a snow-dusted window,
circulating the prayers of Christmas mornings.
Today’s hope is the crisp daffodil in colorless photos,
containing the soul of a small
child,
who only wishes and knows of
peace and love.
Today’s hope is the sparkling eyes that
truly believe in achieving
anything to reach unity.
Today’s hope is the palm to palm connection
bracing each other for the climb neither expected,
but couldn’t abandon.
Today’s hope is peering
beyond
the lingering barrier,
but still recognizing the diversity in ourselves.
Today’s hope has been dimmed and tossed recklessly,
but still generously stays with us,
for we cannot help but come back
like wide eyed children to candy.
We are said to be weak to rely on such strength,
but we are only believers.
That spark
That gives science a baffled case
And oceans an infinite plane,
is the eagle that dips
and soars
and fights,
which stands for
the hope of
today. 

I have never heard America described as quiet.
Even street lights seem to pulse to some interminable heartbeat
beneath buildings endeavoring for the clouds.
Our purposeful words often laced in ample volume.
In such social engagements
all varieties of people run together—
words flowing, ideas pooling—
eager to share and just as soon to hear.
But have ideas—opportunities—collaborations
extending beyond the bounds of our borders
with reverberations felt through every city, capital, and country
ever began with silence and seclusion?

My stepfather created opportunity
from the destitute nothing he was dealt,
consoled only by the American dream
that came as whispers under snow-dappled stars.
And from these muffled mumblings
he bettered his situation.

He is one of America’s thousands,
evidence of excellence obtained by
those in pursuit of changing their fortune.
And as snow-ridden summits yield to streams
and torrid deserts to the placid waltz of grassy plains,
each of us—
guided by the compass of our will—
is free to climb, swim, or walk
to wherever we may choose.

All countries of ample years have a shadow beneath their flag
cast by historical inequities amended too late.
But how it still catches the propitious wind!
Always endeavoring to fly higher and baste the somber shade beneath.
As it flutters, we stand reverently
for those who can no longer
and for those who cannot yet.
The horizon an interminable stretch of past and future
we gaze upon it, in remembrance of what was,
yet trekking forward toward what can be.

We are a coalescence of voices,
each with unparalleled inflection,
yet our conglomeration of somber and elated tones
still manages to reach harmony.

The diversity of our country
—of opinions and cultures and beliefs—
as extraordinary as the vast, varying landscapes.
Some tall, imposing, confident as the Rockies;
the great height of their achievements
not formidable but inspiring.
Still others humble and hushed as the plains;
yet their voice embodied in the breeze touches all.
From mountains to marshes to mesas,
we are united in the embrace of the same two seas.
Invaluable are contrasting beliefs
bridged by curiosity and a common desire for betterment.
A miscellany not of problems but possible solutions are we.
Speak up, I implore you,
for in your voice we might find the answer.

The American dream—
one smile, one sunrise,
one decision to pursue an insatiable passion
for words, for equality, for science
—away from the American reality.

When hardships splatter like ebony ink across the skyline,
extinguishing the hues still smoldering from the former day,
pinpricks of hope still remain.
And in these celestial bodies we find solace,
arranging the stars against the somber background into
symbols and pictures of progress.
And beneath them we endure in pursuit of dawn.

two arms in air, 
in dance, after catastrophe. 

  the body                     the universe                       the body

the fabric held at two points:

i am lamb.                                   i am shepherd.

a star waits.
the stars are a map in the noon of it all.

a letter, a relic from a gone civilization.
a ن holds the tail of the snake.
a ن holds a star in its ark.
a ن is a prayer before Time.

hearsay: the whale swallowed the sun.
there, an eclipse, the sun’s wispy corona.

ن

hearsay: the whale spit it out.
returned our sun to us, this time.

a small circle silences.
a set of small teeth doubles.
this, the machine,
my grandmother’s language,
gifted her by holy fish,
forbidden her by man.
in a dream, she and i, 
two pisces fish, whispering friends
in the noon of it all.

a ن today
on my brother’s door.
a ن between my legs.
a ن on my neighbor’s cheek.
you, you hold the broken in me.
you, you hold the setting sun.
you, you escape 
the mouth of death.
reconstituted 
in the noon 
of the universe.

single seed. bijou in float.
there, there waits the ark. 

ن

A note on this poem, an invitation:

Oh noon, the letter ن, intoning the -n- sound, pronounced noon. 
A Semitic letter, really, in Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and through some 
starcrossed lineage, it has a cousin in Sanskrit, maybe even the same DNA. 
Some say the letter got its shape from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a snake. 
Some say the snake morphed into a whale, a fish, a dolphin. In the Qur’an, 
the Surah of The Pen begins by saying that the ن and the pen are in the act of 
writing, as if the ن were capable of script, were it not script itself. Were it not 
a snake, a whale, a palimpsest. What writes us as we write it. In Arabic class, 
Professor Hani drew a ن on the board and asked us what it looked like. 
He wanted us to say a cup. We saw an ark instead, a boat. And true, 
the ancients believed it might be a cup. And true, the scholars 
believe it to be a boat, holding a seed, the seed of the universe, 
awaiting rebirth after apocalypse. Birth, as in pregnant 
womb, though this isn’t in the scholarly texts. 
Some liken it to a setting sun. 
And Jonah, prophet who found God in the whale. 
The floating diacritical dot, Jonah escaping death. 
A noon as the beginning and end of existence. 
These days, in Iraq, in Syria, elsewhere 
being ravaged by death squads, 
a symbol is painted on people’s doors. 
ن 
for Nazarene. 
For anyone who does not submit to tyranny. 
There, there waits the ark.

At first we don’t answer. 
Knocks that loud usually mean 5-0 is on the other end.

                                 Señora ábrenos la puerta porfavor.
                                 Estamos aquí para platicar con usted.
                                 No queremos llamar la policía.

The person on the other side of the door
is speaking professional Spanish.

Professional Spanish is fake friendly.
Is a warning.

Is a downpour when you
Just spent your last twenty dollars on a wash and set.

Is the kind of Spanish that comes
to take things away from you.

The kind of Spanish that looks at your Spanish like it needs help.
Professional Spanish of course doesn’t offer help.

It just wants you to know that it knows you need some.
Professional Spanish is stuck up

like most people from the hood who get good jobs.
Professional Spanish is all like I did it you can do it too.

Professional Spanish thinks it gets treated better than us
because it knows how to follow the rules.

Because it says Abrigo instead of Có.
Because it knows which fork belongs to the salad

and which spoon goes in the coffee.

Because it gets to be the anchor on Telemundo and Univision
and we get to be the news that plays behind its head in the background.

one has to have
a reason for living
a guiding philosophy
a purpose
a goal

the best way
to communicate
an idea
is to act it out

no work
no eat

i want to have something to say
about my own destiny
something i care about
something of value
something important

^{*Coda: The Human Micropoem is a call and response choral form. It amplifies the speaker’s words by those listening. The poet says a line aloud and then everyone repeats it. Micropoeming was collectively devised by Chicago writers during the Occupy Movement of 2011. We continue to perform together in public spaces and hold the words of others in our mouths.}

churned to agitation. We fastened a cloak round
the nape of nation. We have clustered to bear
the weather. 40 jewels for 50 thieves.

To spackle our sorrow in ochre,
to carve a sun from a carcass of grapes.
We will knead the wine’s mother.

We will sip her from a lake. Three
gold eyes above a trellis.
Three gold eyes bespeak.

            vine
            lattice
            midnight seed

A thousand eyes for 50 thieves.

Change the bedding.
          Rescue the last
                                 clean shirt.

Heads on top
of each other.
              Feet unshod.

This genocide 
                   is yet

to tumble into
memory.

Garbage rots, reeks
                             under the sun.

Smoke rises
from
bodies
in
flames.

There's nothing impermissible
in the bunker.

What's the value of this blueprint?

Something quite other than
god-awful rumor,
guns trained on their backs.

Air-raids, rubble, fog.
Evidence heats up again, and again.

The air in the high school is swollen. My heart balloons
as I smooth my name tag down. The woman checking
me in at Austin East Magnet High School has a warning,
“They might not have much to say.”

I have not come to measure their verbs or their vowels.
My vested interest is their red blood cells. East Knoxville,
where six students in one year, from one high school,
are dead by gun violence.

As I walk to Ms. Hall’s young writers class, 16-year-olds
with the mud-red beauty of the Maasai fly past me in the
hall late for class. There are no visible signs of bruising.
A blood test could reveal the damage done these last 400

years. A blood test is a fine modern measurement of the
homocysteine levels moving through precious growing
creative bodies. There are no blood tests in my bag and I
only have one hour to measure what I have traveled here

to know. East Knoxville, fifty years before, every grocery
store, bakery, doctor’s office, barbershop, pharmacy, juke
joint, Miss Lucille Reader of Palms, closed down and laid
to rest on the new Civic Center pyre. Blood sugar levels

bought season tickets to the Moon. Families on the East
side came to know American architecture intimately, how
the right side of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard arced
into the halls of the high school, and the left side dangled

at the front door of Jarnigan & Son Mortuary, oldest Black
business in town. A swelling is how the body begins to heal.
A blood test can be historical marker for the inflammation
of disparity. My ballooning heart enters the door of their

A, B, and O world. I am met by 14 framed faces of curious
encyclopedic sunlight. Their Wolof and Benin mouths follow
me around the room like awakened cicadas. I ask them to read.
They stop buzzing, mid-air, hold their patterns, wondering

if I have come to take something else from them. The one
in perfect white sneakers with BEATS dangling off his ears
keeps his head under his hoodie. The two by the window
use the glass as dream portal, watching, then aiming, their

father’s eyes farther out into the rising Blue Ridge Mountain
light settling the pitched roof of Jarnigan & Son. The room
is a clover field of hide, luck, and chance, but the burning
tenderness of their inflammation wants out. Inflammation

is a fight response from the body when the immune system
leaps into action even when there is no visible injury. Angelina
extends her grey tablet out to me. Her dark Motown eyes
begin their return to Earth. I read her poem as if it belongs

in my mouth. Their words reach and ricochet. My immune
system kicks in just as Jamartray decides I might be worthy,
handing me his fragile worry-filled word rope, his mother’s
Lindy Hop, in and out of the Double-Dutch rope of illness.

Shiasia’s spunky Afro-Latin is read with Black girl attitude
kept under my tongue for moments when the fear in their
eyes is molten and strawberry. She cheers. Leonard begins
with a piercing refusal to never be a statistic and ends with

his mother’s double helix—HeLa—never-ending cells of
extraordinary love alighting every face in the room. It is
9:00 am on a Friday morning in East Knoxville. I have lost
my tally and count. The young poets have broken my fever.

So the world turned
its one good eye

to watch the bees
take most of metaphor
                        with them.

            Swarms—
                        in all their airborne
                    pointillism—
                                shifted on the breeze

for the last time. Of course,

the absence of bees
                                    left behind significant holes
in ecology. Less


                                    obvious
            were the indelible holes
in poems, which would come
                                                            later:

Our vast psychic habitat
shrunk. Nothing was

            like nectar
                                    for the gods

Nobody was warned by
a deep black dahlia, and nobody

grew like a weed.

Nobody felt spry as
                        a daisy, or blue
                        and princely
as a hyacinth; was lucid as
            a moon flower.            Nobody came home


                        and yelled   honey!   up the stairs,

And nothing in particular
by any other name would smell as sweet as—

Consider:
the verbal dearth
that is always a main ripple of extinction.

The lexicon of wilds goes on nixing its descriptions.
Slimming its index of references
for what is

super as a rhubarb, and juicy
as a peach,
or sunken as a
comb and ancient as an alder tree, or
conifer, or beech, what is royal
as jelly, dark as a wintering

hive, toxic as the jessamine vine
who weeps the way a willow does,
silently as wax
burned in the land of milk and

all the strong words in poems,
they were once

smeared on the mandible of a bee.