Fear Your Black Son Will Get Shot in the Front Yard in the Car Listening to Music Reading a Book—
There’s a tree in the backyard won’t grow
Half its hair charred those leaves on the other
yellowish in their greening infested
never-ready Sometimes I stand above it
in the sweat of a summer nightgown from
the balcony where I’m afforded time to watch—
my bird’s eye pain(staking)
clamping a beak on a worm
There are worms in that tree sick-like I’ve watched
without seeing All the things one holds to the mouth
& swallows I climb down barefoot
the rocks still hot from the sun though the sun
has gone down I take an axe
The Bowl of Life & the Butcher’s Knife
I threw away the butcher knife
my husband brought into our marriage
It was square could turn animals into other
I’m not a vegetarian & there’s ideas
being closer to what we consume
has more meaning the way of ice cultures
butchering the food & eating it raw
the children crowded around that open-
casket of fur kneeling on the sleet
with their red hands the organs still warm
I wondered about parasites & diseases
the way I won’t even touch raw poultry
not since the miscarriage which had nothing
to do with chicken but swine flu & only
in the way of memory the way it bleeds
I was standing in line at the fairgrounds
for a flu vaccine the pandemic fear—
two blue lines ghosted in a desert
returned & I couldn’t hold the joy
I wonder sometimes about the bowls we carry
My adopted son says life is a bowl in the stomach
you drink from one bowl that clear broth
he holds to his mouth sprigs of cilantro
in his teeth & the other bowl filling inside you
He fell asleep on my lap that night I bled
that baby out again like he knew he was losing
& it would be years I mean I’d get pregnant
again in a month & the daughter would come
but it would be years before I could account
for that knife in the kitchen drawer
the violence we carry that bowl overfilling
sometimes or emptying I’ve forgotten how
the metaphor goes I wrapped it in a kitchen towel
& tossed it in the garbage worried for sanitation workers
but less finally for my family