I ask a student how I can help her. Nothing is on her paper.
It’s been that way for thirty-five minutes. She has a headache. 
She asks to leave early. Maybe I asked the wrong question. 
I’ve always been dumb with questions. When I hurt, 
I too have a hard time accepting advice or gentleness.
I owe for an education that hurt, and collectors call my mama’s house. 
I do nothing about my unpaid bills as if that will help. 
I do nothing about the mold on my ceiling, and it spreads. 
I do nothing about the cat’s litter box, and she pisses on my new bath mat. 
Nothing isn’t an absence. Silence isn’t nothing. I told a woman I loved her, 
and she never talked to me again. I told my mama a man hurt me,
and her hard silence told me to keep my story to myself. 
Nothing is full of something, a mass that grows where you cut at it. 
I’ve lost three aunts when white doctors told them the thing they felt 
was nothing. My aunt said nothing when it clawed at her breathing.
I sat in a room while it killed her. I am afraid when nothing keeps me 
in bed for days. I imagine what my beautiful aunts are becoming 
underground, and I cry for them in my sleep where no one can see. 
Nothing is in my bedroom, but I smell my aunt’s perfume 
and wake to my name called from nowhere. I never looked 
into a sky and said it was empty. Maybe that’s why I imagine a god 
up there to fill what seems unimaginable. Some days, I want to live 
inside the words more than my own black body. 
When the white man shoves me so that he can get on the bus first, 
when he says I am nothing but fits it inside a word, and no one stops him, 
I wear a bruise in the morning where he touched me before I was born. 
My mama’s shame spreads inside me. I’ve heard her say 
there was nothing in a grocery store she could afford. I’ve heard her tell 
the landlord she had nothing to her name. There was nothing I could do 
for the young black woman that disappeared on her way to campus. 
They found her purse and her phone, but nothing led them to her. 
Nobody was there to hold Renisha McBride’s hand 
when she was scared of dying. I worry poems are nothing against it. 
My mama said that if I became a poet or a teacher, I’d make nothing, but 
I’ve thrown words like rocks and hit something in a room when I aimed 
for a window. One student says when he writes, it feels 
like nothing can stop him, and his laughter unlocks a door. He invites me 
into his living.

Related Poems

Nothingness

I don’t want to say anything. What is it to be saying? Force speech, rape speech. I have no subjectivity or light subjectivity. Speaking, defunct. Land mass floats. And the forests have been felled. And the antlers, snapped. Morphed lips, already sewn. Most of us are keen to mouth the word, “beast.” Everyone is talking talking talking like dentures, clack clack, but nothing is really said. Or so much chatter static. I am not saying anything either, am waiting and breathing. My body is speaking. Expressing the thingness of the thing. It chats at me, motoring. In the taxi, a tree shaped purple fragrance floats across face.

--

To be a red 
scratch or 
red scotch, 
depending on 
your liking,
calculation 
of the sublime, or 
the sublime itself—

Memory fixed— 
—and 
then splatter.
My mother in 
her pink kitchen 
washes what 
the garden 
and its grey 
chemicals produced. 
Outside, the gate 
ajar, the dog 
run wild-ing. A thing 
called girl splay
or wheat heart. 
We could draw 
a chalk line there. 

This is not conceptual. This is a poem. You are a poem. I am. 

The hesitancy.
The undoingness. 

More secrets: humiliation as release. 

The men all say “I want to stretch you out,” feel themselves big in this small corner of the world. How chivalrous, the ache of any obvious sliding down. What would the poem be without wings to block out the light?

Disarming of Shadow, Arming of Light

I wish I were like Johnny Cash
& thought my heart was mine.

I’ve worn a black suit
my entire life. It suits the war
my eyes ignite.

My sins sit on my lap,
bald, blind, desperate
for the mercy of lost roads,
glottal white lines.

Only smoke will take me
far to nowhere—

a woman living
between
her own burning road

& a charmed God—

the unmarked sky
where a plague of blackbirds

fell across my back
like an unlit cross.

I Have a New Obsession with Bones

you cannot read what you do not collect
the rain came in algidity after
suffocating heat still the ravaging of
marow is worth it tendons swollen &
seasoned with need madness is always
a hunger                                            that i
am even able to eat is its own feat
i have learned to swallow charitably
cede my mouth to the gristle cede my tongue
                         to cartilage
a former fixation on writhing now what is
left?      what is present when the flesh
rots away?
when the spirit returns to the magnitude it
belongs?                                                                            when my
mother
                                                                                         taught me
                                                                                         how to
                                                                                     properly eat
                                                                                         chicken, she
                                                                                         told me truly
                                                                                     nothing had to
                                                                                         be left behind.
                                                                                         there is
                                                                                     meat through
                                                                                         the bone. this
                                                                                         makes
                                                                                     sense like
                                                                                         Matter.
                                                                                         nothing is
                                                                                         ever lost.
                                                                                     nothing is ever
                                                                                         gone if
                                                                                         devoured
                                                                                     completely.