Self-Traction (audio only)
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for Michele Antoinette Pray-Griffiths
Ordinary days deliver joy easily
again & I can't take it. If I could tell you
how her eyes laughed or describe
the rage of her suffering, I must
admit that lately my memories
are sometimes like a color
warping in my blue mind.
2019
Another time after she left
I saw a headless woman
hurrying after her like a jaguar.
She pried off her red mouth
like a scar. My father folded the window
so that it fit inside his silence,
pulled apart starlight
with his teeth. Then he ate the fruit
of his own wreckage
2016
When the light wakes & finds again
the music of brooms in Mexico,
when daylight pulls our hands from grief,
& hearts cleaned raw with sawdust
& saltwater flood their dazzling vessels,
when the catfish in the river
raise their eyelids towards your face,
when sweetgrass bends in waves
across battlefields where sweat
& sugar marry, when we hear our people
wearing tongues fine with plain
greeting: How You Doing, Good Morning
when I pour coffee & remember
my mother’s love of buttered grits,
when the trains far away in memory
2016