And That Fast, You’re Thinking About Their Bodies

At a rooftop party, you dance near every edge. 

Someone drops a ring in glass, in your head 

the clink of a used bullet, still hot, and that fast 

the rooftop is covered with wires, riflemen, 

and you’re thinking about mutiny, MK-47s, 

two cities clawing at each other’s bruised 

throats while boys try to hold your hips, 

keep dancing. The war is on your hips. 

Your hands. You wear it all over. You wrap 

your hair in it. Pluck it from your eyebrows. 

The rooftop is wide and caring, too rained 

or sometimes incensed, and you never once 

think to be afraid of what could arrow a cloud 

and kill it. You eat volcano rolls, pink pepper 

goat cheese, and the war enters you. You stare 

at Still Life with Flowers and Fruit 

and the glade of roses scream 

war. Here with a doctor and your pregnant 

aunt who hasn’t yet learned English, only speaks 

in war. Friends in Greensboro get picked up 

by bored police, get beat up for no reason, 

and those fists carry war. At a job interview, 

you carve yourself into a white-known shape

and that renaming is a kind of war. 

You take a passport photo, told to smile 

without teeth, the flash a bright war. 

You’re on the other side of mercy

with your meadows and fluffed spillage,

where nights are creamed with saviors. 

Here everyone rests on roofs graduated 

and sung, gazing at a sky that won’t 

bleed them. At the beach, you’re buried 

to the neck, practicing dead, snug in your 

chosen tomb, gulls flittering on all sides, 

waves fleshing closer, and that fast you’re thinking 

of a grubby desert girl who placed small stones 

in her scarf, shook it back and forth,

said, This is what the sea must sound like.