Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

I always took it for granted, the right to vote

She said

And I knew what my mother meant

Her voice constricted tightly by the flu A virus

& a 30-year-relationship 

with Newport 100s

I ain’t no chain smoker

she attempts to silence my concern

only a pack a week. That’s good, you know?

My mother survived a husband she didn’t want 

and an addiction that loved her more 

than any human needs

I sit to write a poem about the 100 year Anniversary

of the 19th Amendment 

& my first thought returns to the womb

& those abortions I did not want at first

but alas

The thirst of an almost anything 

is a gorge always looking to be

until the body is filled with more fibroids 

than possibilities

On the 19th hour of the fourth day in a new decade

I will wake restless from some nightmare

about a bomb & a man with no backbone

on a golf course who clicks closed his Motorola phone

like an exclamation point against his misogynistic stance

He swings the golf club with each chant

Women let me grab

Women like me

Women vote until I say they don’t

In my nightmare he is an infective agent

In the clear of day

he is just the same

Every day he breathes is a threat to this country’s marrow

For Ida & Susan & Lucretia & Elizabeth Cady

& every day he tweets grief  

like a cynical cornball comic’s receipts 

like a red light signaling the end of times

The final night of 2019

& my New Year’s Eve plans involves

anything that will numb the pain

of a world breaking its own heart

My mother & I have already spoken

& her lungs are croaking wet

I just want you to know I don’t feel well

& I pause to pull up my stockings beneath my crumpled smile

On this day I sigh

I just wanted to dance & drink & forget about the 61.7% votes

My silk dress falls to my knees with the same swiftness

defiant as the white feminist who said “I’m your ally”

then voted for the demise of our nation’s most ignored

underpaid, imprisoned & impoverished citizens

Every day there is a telephone near 

I miss my mother

In the waiting room of the OB/GYN

Uptown bound on the dirt orange train seat of the subway

O! How my mother loves the places she can never go

Her bones swaddled with arthritis & smoke

So she relies on my daily bemoans

The train smells like yesterday, Ma

They raise the tolls & fix nothing for the people

My landlord refuses to fix my toilet, my bathroom sink, my refrigerator

The city is annoying like an old boyfriend, always buzzing about nothing 

& in the way of me making it on time to the polls

This woman didn’t say thank you when I held the door

& who does she think she is?

Each time I crack & cap on the everydayness of my day

My mother laughs as if she can see the flimsy MTA card

The yellow cabs that refuse to stop for her daughter

In these moments she can live again 

A whole bodied woman with a full mouth

to speak it plain

I ask my mother what hurts? 

What hurts? 

How can I help from here?

3000 miles away

Alone in a tower between the sea 

& the Mexico borders

My mother sighs a little sigh & says

Nothing

I just wanted to hear your voice

I was meant for all things to meet:
to make the clouds pause in the mirror
of my waters, to be home to fallen rain
that finds its way to me, to turn eons
of loveless rock into lovesick pebbles
and carry them as humble gifts back
to the sea which brings life back to me.

I felt the sun flare, praised each star
flocked about the moon long before
you did. I’ve breathed air you’ll never
breathe, listened to songbirds before
you could speak their names, before
you dug your oars in me, before you
created the gods that created you.

Then countries—your invention—maps
jigsawing the world into colored shapes
caged in bold lines to say: you’re here,
not there, you’re this, not that, to say:
yellow isn’t red, red isn’t black, black is
not white, to say: mine, not ours, to say
war, and believe life’s worth is relative.

You named me big river, drew me—blue,
thick to divide, to say: spic and Yankee,
to say: wetback and gringo. You split me
in two—half of me us, the rest them. But
I wasn’t meant to drown children, hear
mothers’ cries, never meant to be your
geography: a line, a border, a murderer.

I was meant for all things to meet:
the mirrored clouds and sun’s tingle,
birdsongs and the quiet moon, the wind
and its dust, the rush of mountain rain—
and us. Blood that runs in you is water
flowing in me, both life, the truth we
know we know: be one in one another.

I always took it for granted, the right to vote

She said

And I knew what my mother meant

Her voice constricted tightly by the flu A virus

& a 30-year-relationship 

with Newport 100s

I ain’t no chain smoker

she attempts to silence my concern

only a pack a week. That’s good, you know?

My mother survived a husband she didn’t want 

and an addiction that loved her more 

than any human needs

I sit to write a poem about the 100 year Anniversary

of the 19th Amendment 

& my first thought returns to the womb

& those abortions I did not want at first

but alas

The thirst of an almost anything 

is a gorge always looking to be

until the body is filled with more fibroids 

than possibilities

On the 19th hour of the fourth day in a new decade

I will wake restless from some nightmare

about a bomb & a man with no backbone

on a golf course who clicks closed his Motorola phone

like an exclamation point against his misogynistic stance

He swings the golf club with each chant

Women let me grab

Women like me

Women vote until I say they don’t

In my nightmare he is an infective agent

In the clear of day

he is just the same

Every day he breathes is a threat to this country’s marrow

For Ida & Susan & Lucretia & Elizabeth Cady

& every day he tweets grief  

like a cynical cornball comic’s receipts 

like a red light signaling the end of times

The final night of 2019

& my New Year’s Eve plans involves

anything that will numb the pain

of a world breaking its own heart

My mother & I have already spoken

& her lungs are croaking wet

I just want you to know I don’t feel well

& I pause to pull up my stockings beneath my crumpled smile

On this day I sigh

I just wanted to dance & drink & forget about the 61.7% votes

My silk dress falls to my knees with the same swiftness

defiant as the white feminist who said “I’m your ally”

then voted for the demise of our nation’s most ignored

underpaid, imprisoned & impoverished citizens

Every day there is a telephone near 

I miss my mother

In the waiting room of the OB/GYN

Uptown bound on the dirt orange train seat of the subway

O! How my mother loves the places she can never go

Her bones swaddled with arthritis & smoke

So she relies on my daily bemoans

The train smells like yesterday, Ma

They raise the tolls & fix nothing for the people

My landlord refuses to fix my toilet, my bathroom sink, my refrigerator

The city is annoying like an old boyfriend, always buzzing about nothing 

& in the way of me making it on time to the polls

This woman didn’t say thank you when I held the door

& who does she think she is?

Each time I crack & cap on the everydayness of my day

My mother laughs as if she can see the flimsy MTA card

The yellow cabs that refuse to stop for her daughter

In these moments she can live again 

A whole bodied woman with a full mouth

to speak it plain

I ask my mother what hurts? 

What hurts? 

How can I help from here?

3000 miles away

Alone in a tower between the sea 

& the Mexico borders

My mother sighs a little sigh & says

Nothing

I just wanted to hear your voice

I’m sorry, could you repeat that. I’m hard of hearing.

To the cashier

To the receptionist

To the insistent man asking directions on the street

I’m sorry, I’m hard of hearing. Could you repeat that?

At the business meeting

In the writing workshop

On the phone to make a doctor’s appointment

I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry-I’m-hard-for-the-hearing

Repeat.

           Repeat.

Hello, my name is Sorry

To full rooms of strangers

I’m hard to hear

I vomit apologies everywhere

They fly on bat wings

towards whatever sound beckons

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry

           and repeating

                       and not hearing

Dear (again)

I regret to inform you

I       am

here

Birthday, birthday, hurray, hurray

The 19th Amendment was ratified today

Drum rolls, piano rolls, trumpets bray

The 19th Amendment was ratified today

Left hand bounces, right hand strays

Maestro Joplin is leading the parade

Syncopated hashtags, polyrhythmic goose-steps

Ladies march to Pennsylvania Avenue!

Celebrate, ululate, caterwaul, praise

Women’s suffrage is all the rage

Sisters! Mothers! Throw off your bustles

Pedal your pushers to the voting booth

Pram it, waltz it, Studebaker roadster it

Drive your horseless carriage into the fray

Prime your cymbals, flute your skirts

One-step, two-step, kick-ball-change

Castlewalk, Turkey Trot, Grizzly Bear waltz

Argentine Tango, flirty and hot

Mommies, grannies, young and old biddies

Temperance ladies sip bathtub gin

Unmuzzle your girl dogs, Iowa your demi-hogs

Battle-axe polymaths, gangster moms

Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Lucy Burns and Carrie Chapman Catt

Alice Paul, come one, come all! 

Sign the declaration at Seneca Falls!

                                                                                                          

Dada-faced spinsters, war-bond Prufrocks

Lillian Gish, make a silent wish

Debussy Cakewalk, Rachmaninoff rap

Preternatural hair bobs, hamster wheels     

Crescendos, diminuendos, maniacal pianos

Syncopation mad, cut a rug with dad!

Oompa, tuba, majorette girl power

Baton over Spamalot!

Tiny babies, wearing onesies

Raise your bottles, tater-tots!

Accordion nannies, wash-board symphonies

Timpani glissando!

             The Great War is over!

Victory, freedom, justice, reason

Pikachu, sunflowers, pussy hats

Toss up your skull caps, wide brim feathers

Throwing shade on the seraphim

Hide your cell phones, raise your megaphones!

Speak truth to power

                          and vote, vote vote!

WARNING: 

Nitwit legislators, gerrymandering fools

Dimwit commissioners, judicial tools

Toxic senators, unholy congressmen

Halitosis ombudsmen, mayoral tricks

Doom calf demagogues, racketeering mules

Whack-a-mole sheriffs, on the take

Fornicator governators, rakehell collaborators

Tweeter impersonators, racist prigs

Postbellum agitators, hooligan aldermen

Profiteering warmongers, Reconstruction dregs

Better run, rascals     better pray

We’ll vote you out      on judgement day!

Better run, rascals     better pray

We’ll vote you out      on election day!

I always took it for granted, the right to vote

She said

And I knew what my mother meant

Her voice constricted tightly by the flu A virus

& a 30-year-relationship 

with Newport 100s

I ain’t no chain smoker

she attempts to silence my concern

only a pack a week. That’s good, you know?

My mother survived a husband she didn’t want 

and an addiction that loved her more 

than any human needs

I sit to write a poem about the 100 year Anniversary

of the 19th Amendment 

& my first thought returns to the womb

& those abortions I did not want at first

but alas

The thirst of an almost anything 

is a gorge always looking to be

until the body is filled with more fibroids 

than possibilities

On the 19th hour of the fourth day in a new decade

I will wake restless from some nightmare

about a bomb & a man with no backbone

on a golf course who clicks closed his Motorola phone

like an exclamation point against his misogynistic stance

He swings the golf club with each chant

Women let me grab

Women like me

Women vote until I say they don’t

In my nightmare he is an infective agent

In the clear of day

he is just the same

Every day he breathes is a threat to this country’s marrow

For Ida & Susan & Lucretia & Elizabeth Cady

& every day he tweets grief  

like a cynical cornball comic’s receipts 

like a red light signaling the end of times

The final night of 2019

& my New Year’s Eve plans involves

anything that will numb the pain

of a world breaking its own heart

My mother & I have already spoken

& her lungs are croaking wet

I just want you to know I don’t feel well

& I pause to pull up my stockings beneath my crumpled smile

On this day I sigh

I just wanted to dance & drink & forget about the 61.7% votes

My silk dress falls to my knees with the same swiftness

defiant as the white feminist who said “I’m your ally”

then voted for the demise of our nation’s most ignored

underpaid, imprisoned & impoverished citizens

Every day there is a telephone near 

I miss my mother

In the waiting room of the OB/GYN

Uptown bound on the dirt orange train seat of the subway

O! How my mother loves the places she can never go

Her bones swaddled with arthritis & smoke

So she relies on my daily bemoans

The train smells like yesterday, Ma

They raise the tolls & fix nothing for the people

My landlord refuses to fix my toilet, my bathroom sink, my refrigerator

The city is annoying like an old boyfriend, always buzzing about nothing 

& in the way of me making it on time to the polls

This woman didn’t say thank you when I held the door

& who does she think she is?

Each time I crack & cap on the everydayness of my day

My mother laughs as if she can see the flimsy MTA card

The yellow cabs that refuse to stop for her daughter

In these moments she can live again 

A whole bodied woman with a full mouth

to speak it plain

I ask my mother what hurts? 

What hurts? 

How can I help from here?

3000 miles away

Alone in a tower between the sea 

& the Mexico borders

My mother sighs a little sigh & says

Nothing

I just wanted to hear your voice

eenie meenie minie moe
catch a voter by her toe
if she hollers then you know
got yourself a real jane crow

* * *

one vote is an opinion
with a quiet legal force ::
a barely audible beep
in the local traffic, & just
a plashless drop of mercury
in the national thermometer.
but a collectivity of votes
/a flock of votes, a pride of votes,
a murder of votes/ can really
make some noise.

* * *

one vote begets another
if you make a habit of it.
my mother started taking me
to the polls with her when i
was seven :: small, thrilled
to step in the booth, pull
the drab curtain hush-shut
behind us, & flip the levers
beside each name she pointed
to, the Xs clicking into view.
there, she called the shots.

* * *

rich gal, poor gal
hired girl, thief
teacher, journalist
vote your grief

* * *

one vote’s as good as another
:: still, in 1913, illinois’s gentle
suffragists, hearing southern
women would resent spotting
mrs. ida b. wells-barnett amidst
whites marchers, gently kicked
their sister to the curb. but when
the march kicked off, ida got
right into formation, as planned.
the tribune’s photo showed
her present & accounted for.

* * *

one vote can be hard to keep
an eye on :: but several /a
colony of votes/ can’t scuttle
away unnoticed so easily. my
mother, veteran registrar for
our majority black election
district, once found—after
much searching—two bags
of ballots /a litter of votes/
stuffed in a janitorial closet.

* * *

one-mississippi
two-mississippis

* * *

one vote was all fannie lou
hamer wanted. in 1962, when
her constitutional right was
over forty years old, she tried
to register. all she got for her
trouble was literacy tested, poll
taxed, fired, evicted, & shot
at. a year of grassroots activism
nearly planted her mississippi
freedom democratic party
in the national convention.

* * *

one vote per eligible voter
was all stacey abrams needed.
she nearly won the georgia
governor’s race in 2018 :: lost by
50,000 /an unkindness of votes/
to the man whose job was purg
maintaining the voter rolls.
days later, she rolled out plans
for getting voters a fair fight.
it’s been two years—& counting.

1 

The century speeds along

Sound & dust & color & light

Clouds speed over ballgames & wars

Nerves hanging off them      Women watch 

early election results      Stressed-out women

in hats & choirs     Women sitting under

suburban stars      Women with husbands 

or wives      Housed or unhoused women

with herbs or guns      Women with 

friends & cats       who are always tired   

New medium or old       to the world order      

Who pull their masks tightly after the fires

2

Over 52,000,000 minutes... ...since the 19th 

Amendment,,,,,,  Over 26,000,000 women voted

after that ;;;;;;  mostly only white women because 

of the poll tax...  Now let’s just think about that... 

There are 53 minutes in a micro-century:::    

We place extra dots as eyes for extra vision: : : 

There are two periods in the 19th Amendment      

i place them here .   . for women 

who want to be women or don’t     

We were dodging the little zeroes between mystery 

& meaning.,. history & hope      We were walking or

driving   i was flying left till my left wing broke

3

Some women vote with armed guards      Some 

have their forearms stamped      The branches

of the oak are breaking off      The particle 

spirits are being used up      There are two

men in amendment   There is gerry in gerrymander

There are eyeless vans from Amazon outside  

like hearses carrying the corpse of profit

Some women do not like to vote    They think

the revolution will come faster       The land

is blighted Muriel      Is weather better if you 

order on line      Is earth’s orbit polyethelene        

i thought of not voting but there isn’t time 

4

The great dead teach the living not to hate or   

to try to love imperfectly      At what point

did voting really begin      Wyoming (oddly) 

was the first state      Some practiced law 

but couldn’t vote      Seneca Falls 1848

Lucy Stone abolitionist could not vote

Impossible to reconcile    what you want 

with what you are …… i’m voting extra 

with my shoe ✔✔✔  Applying text corrupter

here for how long justice takes   1̸̡̛͍̫̝͚̍̒͊̂2̴̨̙̱͚̀̽̒͘͠ͅ3̷̻̪̥̗̥̈́̽̎̓͗1̸̡̛͍̫̝͚̍̒͊̂2̴̨̙̱͚̀̽̒͘͠ͅ3̷̻̪̥̗̥̈́̽̎̓͗ 

We leafleted in 1968     Come out of your 

house & stand now      You count too

5

The right of citizens to vote,,,’’’ shall not (she’ll not) 

be denied      or abridged  /// ;;; ;;; 

(i’m adding 46 marks of punctuation for 46 

years till 1966 Voting Rights Act)

by the U******nited States or by any State 

.…..>>>>>> & the names will survive

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,,,,,, Hallie 

Quinn Brown .     .  Mary Church Terrell      

& Congress shall not remove cage kill & undo 

citizens because of age ability gender race 

etc.   Some vote despite perfectionism 

Messy marks     in tiny tiny hollow squares 

6

i voted first in 1972      tear gas    My Lai      Weather 

Underground       mostly voted against things then 

Agent Orange      the draft      had gone 

to the trailer park with leaflets      We were new to 

the Pill     nice sex or terrible      with skinny stoned boys

Smog in LA      We stayed in the dorm      burning incense

Can’t remember who i voted for      ankles showing

under the curtain    Metal bar on top 

like you were taking a shower      Mostly always voted      

Just had the habit      Once wrote in my friend    

The land is blighted Adrienne     Absentee ballot 

i tear the numbered stub then i mail it in

7

Seatmate on the plane      speaks first

older woman      taking care of herself      dental

assistant from Virginia     i suspect she voted for t

Friendly over-60s whiteness is our commons      

Our legs stick to fake leather      flying over some

cleaned up rivers    still adding carbon to the air

Her $12 cheese plate dwindles      We talk     We both

love our jobs    She puts small instruments in patients’   

mouths    i use small instruments with patience      

She’s going to Las Vegas to play black jack Laughs

Our story sails along      inside oblivion     

Our electrons     speed inside oblivion

8

The yellow minutes of our coasts

The saturation of our voices

Centuries of women sick on a ship

Decades of women sick at the office 

Women in tents in a marketplace  

where the orange canary sings beside

the masterpiece they made      At times i hear 

the queen of ants      At times i feel the great     

dead choose for us to keep unreasonable 

joy       & revolution in the craft we made  

   

We fed refusal to the storm      to live

in the dream      in revolt      in realism

          <sub>for Adrienne Rich & Muriel Rukeyser

            for my granddaughters

            for JB, AH, ER, JR</sub>

I make peace with this being a beginning:
speaking
when commentary makes me unbelieve
in my body / saying No
when asked if I found a church home
in my respective
shelter city / saying Because
they’re not good people when asked why I don’t attend
family functions / spreading the good word
of moving out 
of a town you could never call home
If home is really where the heart should be
my heart is somewhere in Fort Worth, Texas 
between sundry items at Ramey Market
or sinking in Kool-Aid
at Madea’s Down Home Cooking 
I don’t remember a time I wasn’t lying
about how much something harmed me
I run with the opposite
of progress
every time my father speaks
Congress is no match
to the grave I choose to lay my mind
in / I’m making peace
with all of the I’s in this poem
unfortunately being the speaker
& I am tired
of making peace with small
progress being a precursor
for my death
& ignoring the pleading for A/C
permeating through my clothes every time
a Texas summer gets hotter / I make
peace
with all the living things around me
shaking my hand as if we’ll make it
through this
unscarred & together
& the sun 
is just a metaphor for my falling–

Clean up after yourself. Pick up

that book chile, you still got

a good back. Seek therapy.

Don’t kill the creative in you.

Don’t kill Black people. Get a job —

one that doesn’t make you

the dictator. Take back 400 years

of overcontested leadership. Give

thanks to the futures you’ve stolen.

Give back what your people call

inheritance. Wash your hands; cut

the grass; don’t kill Asian women.

Don’t have what you call bad days.

Don’t think that — due to fear planted

in the roots of your kin — you can’t get rid

of yourself today. Get a job —

one that doesn’t require blood from me.

I’m low on iron & desire to tell you

once again. Quit playing. There’s a puddle

of blood you’ve shoved into a corner.

There’s a mop and my people

wringed into a bucket of waste. I’ll wait.

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

we are in an ark
 

not a passport in hand
 

    tinted windows and air the taste of spit  

and body oils     the pregnant woman

squeezes her abdomen     the child will not  die

in the middle of a journey   too weak   to jump  

into the sharks     no emissary in sight   we want to sing

can barely clap     a groan rises from our ribs  broken

we lick the sweat     from each other’s sweat  the mother chews

on her placenta  she wants to share  but  we allow her greed

we laugh  the wind    responds     

we pray  into    our mouths  only the breath    in God  in us

makes music    of our meditations  we mark the distance

from  our mother’s     nipples with these    fragile fingernails

what we see     in each other’s spirits  is fear    I must have

two left    the Liverpool rocks roll like they fell from an archangel’s

vineyard    what praise can we give    with bound hands

they still     out talk      with a reason    of existence

in pairs     they drag us     out like animals

My body has a legend, he says
midstory, and wipes his mouth.

Then, as to recite grace,
stands at the table to prove it.

Beneath the drape of his shirt
a savanna of skin ripples slightly.

For a blink, i don’t understand
what’s missing:

He had no belly button,
             his stomach paved mythologically clean.

We’d been so casual
playing catch with origin stories
                                         after class
              over crepes and pancakes,
our roll call of scars.

We’d been speaking of doctors and mistakes
when his face shifted gears,

he landed his fork like tapping a baton.

This is how boys are. Show
and prove.           Tale of the tape.

People are terrified by skin
              not meeting their expectations.

For years, white women were forbidden
from showing their navels on TV.
The networks were alarmed
                                   over what they symbolized,
                                   how they seemed to prove something,
              root us together.

Seeing the placenta as nebula
              a star-field skin
                            a chandelier from which
                            we’re all suspended
flaring out from the same light.

If men can write shame laws over belly buttons

it’s no surprise the fumbling
of a Black child
steaming new and helpless
in a cage of fingers.

A rabbit midwifed by a hawk.

                                          I know this now.

Yet, how I doubted him, Lord.

My sticky, maple fingers trembled in prayer all night.

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 . . .

grand·fa·ther.  (noun) 1. the father of one’s father or mother: As in, my father’s father, my grandfather, sharecropped on a farm in Midway, AL. Angry all the time, he fled to Ohio for cleaner work, but the same dirt beat him down through his day. 2. the person who founded or originated something: In 1832, Thomas D. Rice, grandfather of Jim Crow, popularizes the phrase with a song of same name, dancing and singing in blackface, to play a trickster figure, without the wisdom of Anansi, but “nah, uh-uh, nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah,” was all black people heard when he sang his song.

grand·fa·ther.  (verb) [with object] 1. North American informal exempt (someone or something) from a new law or regulation: Landowners, who stole land from indigenous people before the Federal Land Policy and Management Act struck this behavior down in 1976, have been grandfathered in to keep these hallowed grounds. Grandfathered in, their children’s children also can keep the land. Those from whom land was stolen, those who were raided, raped, and run out of town—Greenwood, OK; Eatonville, FL; Wilmington, NC; Vicksburg, MS; etc. —leaving their homes behind, have been grandfathered in to continue looking for a place to feel safe to call home. 2. to permit to continue under a grandfather clause: As in, to pass down privilege, which is grandfathered in the blood of law, passed down, grandfathered in speech to mean passed down to continue but not to offend just to understand, with your grandfather and with mine, passed from one kin to another, no fault of mine, just passed past your grandfather to mine to me, just law, just an idiom of life, you understand; we all started the same and no grandfathering of my grandfather bears down on you, maybe just on your grandfather, son.

The city’s streets are densely shelved with rows
of salt and packaged hair. Intent on air,
the funk of crave and function comes to blows

with any smell that isn’t oil—the blare
of storefront chicken settles on the skin
and mango spritzing drips from razored hair.

The corner chefs cube pork, decide again
on cayenne, fry in grease that’s glopped with dust.
The sizzle of the feast adds to the din

of children, strutting slant, their wanderlust
and cussing, plus the loud and tactless hiss 
of dogged hustlers bellowing past gusts

of peppered breeze, that fatty, fragrant bliss
in skillets. All our rampant hunger tricks
us into thinking we can dare dismiss

the thing men do to boulevards, the wicks
their bodies be. A city, strapped for art,
delights in torching them—at first for kicks,

to waltz to whirling sparks, but soon those hearts
thud thinner, whittled by the chomp of heat.
Outlined in chalk, men blacken, curl apart.

Their blindly rising fume is bittersweet,
although reversals in the air could fool
us into thinking they weren’t meant as meat.

Our sons don’t burn their cities as a rule,
born, as they are, up to their necks in fuel.

1. Because no woman will leave her domestic duties to vote.

2. Because no woman who may vote will attend to her domestic duties.

3. Because it will make dissension between husband and wife.


4. Because every woman will vote as her husband tells her to.


5. Because bad women will corrupt politics.

6. Because bad politics will corrupt women. 

7. Because women have no power of organization.

8. Because women will form a solid party and outvote men.

9. Because men and women are so different that they must stick to different duties.

10. Because men and women are so much alike that men, with one vote each, can represent their own views and ours too.

11. Because women cannot use force.

12. Because the militants did use force.