Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book …
Patricia Smith
i. the old marrieds …
"I seen it lots of times, I seen it, just from being …
Prairie winds blaze through her tumbled belly, and Emmett’s …
“We do not dig graves or put caskets into graves any longer. The decision was made and funeral homes were notified that families and funeral homes would have to supply grave-digging personnel.” …
Dear ferocious dreamer. Dear maven of song and surveyor of every flung star. Dear meandering romantic, audacious witness, dear listener with the whole of your covetous heart. Dear listener to the air’s brutal and gorgeous music, soft dancer to ballads not yet written or sung. Dear lost-ago sister, conjuring us behind shuttered eyes, dear mother of this shifting and cumbersome light, dear writer of moments and reader of lives, dear wide-aloud daydreamer, dear tenderly reckless, dear ceaseless pen, clacking keyboard and second throat— …
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, …
I was birthed restless and elsewhere …
In its beginning, earth was fractured, frail …
This is not morning. There is a nastiness …
Some lamp sputters …
Hurricanes, 2005 …
62. You would have been 62. …
Aloft between heaven and them, …
When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes. …
1. …
cane, cravats, and corsets tell and retell the body’s story the shell we …
I. …
When black, men drown. They spend their whole lifetimes …