Can you find me a good kisser?
Can you help me with this socket wrench?

The great lone Spanish words, like a Castilian ship
come into full view when the air is still.

Tallulah I don’t want to keep
You I want to conspire Pssst!

There is a time and place for falling safes,
another for pianos. Wake up with a horse's head and
fall asleep with bees.

oh how we would love to run             and be called horses

I thought about ending it, and shame followed that
—I’d like to say age helped, but that would be a disservice            
to the rust-hued maple, rain tapping the yard.

a name paints a person—
not me— a map. as soon as some

one terror eases, another
pair of men, in tatters, team in.

i even went to college. but i studied African American Studies which is not
The Law or The Medicine or The Business. my mom still loved me.
so i invented her sadness & asked her to hold it like a bouquet of fake flowers.

My lover is a furry beast, except at the tail.
I want to skin him and make myself a coat
before the harmattan gets here.

The hickories bear witness
to the light which bears witness to disease:

inching of blisters
across yellow-tipped leaves, branches

Were you there that groggy afternoon
I crawled inside a playhouse in my
childhood city?

Send the dancer to space
Let them learn how to inhale
Without air

I hear the slide
Of a shotgun
Racking in my mind.

Not things that float—moon, jellyfish, dust in sunbeam, skins of ice, skim on warm milk,