when i talk about your mouth
i’m talking about a 35,000 year old flute made out of bird bone
when i talk about god
i’m talking about the joy in not-knowing
when i talk about faith
i’m talking about the beauty in believing
when i talk about love
i’m talking about the infinity in feeling
and when i talk about death
i’m talking about the measurement by which we cherish time

so walk with me out of this movie
notice with me under lit marquee
that it is dusk and it is raining
watch me as i immediately peel my shirt
to begin the long way home
see with me the sky a glowing blue
and the clouds fast and dark
projected upon its rice paper skin
imagine with me that we have stumbled
inside the magic lamp spinning shade
that sits atop a pristine white bureau
in the nursery that god had built
in preparation for a baby
that would never come
when i talk about your soul
i’m talking about a lullaby
the earth sings to the blackness of space
as it pirouettes around the light
by which all tiny miracles
are given birth

“I am robbing you,” the robber softly said,
his note a cipher to the cashier, wisp
of an impulse sketched in soft pencil,
paper rumpled soft like flannel. Sh.
“I am robbing you,” he said, wavering
fuzzy on the closed circuit screen.
No sound. No overt threat.
The cashier might have slipped him
her own note: “No, you’re not.”
Instead, she handed over soft bills
and crisp. He went his way and after,
the manager said, “I’m sorry”
to the waiting customers.
“We must close now. We have
been robbed.”
Go gently. Sh.
Go home, you seekers of snack foods
and cigarettes, and think about what
has happened and what has not.
You, sir, on your night-shift break—
put down your sandwich and go.
There is no supper for you here.
Quiet has stolen into this place—
nothing further to retail tonight.

If the desert cannot be settled,
let it be anxious and alert—its worry
a sandstorm.
Let it cover in protective
dust what it loves. If

the desert can’t be hospitable, let it
take solace in what it can offer: no
one appreciates water without

first experiencing thirst. All myths
begin with dirt—let the desert remember
this if it must be homesick.

If the desert finds itself
too vast to keep
track of, let it know it is a canvas—
night paints expansive its stars and black
glass, the scent of cactus flower.

If its scorched earth can’t be
fertile, let it feel it is not
alone—the desert lark in its cracked
jacket of mud, the sand-speckled
flesh of the spade-foot toad—let it know

camouflage is finding safety in family resemblance.

If the desert is ever accused
of storing secrets,
let it always refer back to its blue
scar of sky. How could a place

afraid to share itself hold this much
open?
If the desert can’t be lush,
let it burn metallic like molten
copper ore. Some people wait for

the rust and flame of sunset every day,
but the desert was born with this orange
in its skin.

My gender is the hand of my father
and so it is the unusually soft skin of my own palm
and so I have forgotten how my father’s hands feel

and I never really known to begin with. My gender is soft hands wanting,
is my father’s wanting and
my mother’s gift. My gender is her sold things,
it is my mother’s soft hands
and it is bloodthirsty and it has never launched a single ship

but it has always been in the water. My gender is the water,
salty and swam in and still

the color of life.
Gives life regardless,
my mother.
My gender is the Fifth Element: white men chase it across planets to save white women
and i know what the sun looks like.

Every mirror is telescope to the stars, is supernova ash Sunday,
holy water frozen over. My gender is the apocalypse disguised as the second coming of Christ and them,
is a warhead and the bomb shelter
and there is space for you.

Come in like someone taught you better.
Come in like someone taught you
Christ was nothing to look at and my gender
looks like everything.

Come in and bear witness to the water
is fine.

Like my gender is
a life raft and you be Jack.
Be begging
to get you
some of this ship door.

Like, I’m Rose
if she was a real one.

I used to joke about white tears,
The ones that my melinated friends collected in candles, teacups,
And vials around their necks to ironically season their food with.
It took me a while to understand the desire to collect a memory of someone’s complaints,
About a form of racism that does not, has not, and likely will not ever exist.

Recently my understanding of this tactic rings like a thousand rednecks at a Trump rally.
I understand now that collecting white tears is a form of reparation.
A return on the imposed investment on the bones of my ancestors.
Trails of Black tears that pollinated cotton fields,
That complimented the salt of oceans and sweat of slaves,
That created the taste of bitterness that would last for centuries,
Leaking out of the souls of Black victims of modern day lynching captured in high definition.
These tears mixed with the blood of my native brethren,
That had already been spilled to make room for white bodies,
Too full of their own egos to share the land.
These tears have been collected as pennies in comparison to the lives that were traded as cattle for profit.
Profit that now holds residence inside of old paper.
Generations of making a living off their ancestor’s hatred for my skin tone.
They carry Black tears in their Sierra Leone diamond necklaces,
They record them as they fall into another clip of poverty porn for organizations to make money off our pain.
They convert them into the soles of shoes made by children’s hands.
They’ve turned Black tears into gunpowder to mix with Black bodies,
Spread out over black tar streets that Black and Brown hands built.
Soon to be buried in Black Coffins, while their memories are polluted like the black oil they’ve spilled in blue waters,
Waters that have their own stock of Black skeletons.

So yes, now I do understand.
I understand what it’s like to take less than a tenth back,
Of the parts of you that you will literally never know without a blood test,
Parts of you that may exist at the bottom of beaches,
Inside articles of clothing,
And at the base of white folks fantasies.
I understand what it means to taste a bit of payback in food they could never cook like us.
To hold a drop of their discomfort in our hands,
To feel it in our mouths as nourishment,
To return the favor that we never asked for all those years ago.
White tears are a portion of debt owed to Black people,
And I now take them willingly into my chest,
Dye them obsidian, and write my poems with them.

it is so hot outside i am reminded of that scene in do the right thing u kno
wit mookie, tina, & the ice cube
cuz i’m out here sweating
naked & alone
in my bed
& in this movie i am both mookie & tina
& the ice cube is the salt above my bottom lip
i am so full of melt i cannot tell if it is sweat or tears
but this is the only thing wanting to touch me
& i am the only one here to lick it off
so i do
pretend it is as holy as it might have been in a tenement in bed-stuy
with a soundtrack & a lover
& cultural discourse & shit
no one knows what to do with my Worst Skin
when it spills out & over & says i want u
the way i want everything
too much
& again they leave, right?
all the men who wanted me & then suddenly did not
& again i fracture my spine over them
remember their hands & take their bodies communion
puddle under my tongue//
my body is a bible i refuse to preach out of
so i pray u
write about me one day
my heavy breasts & the fullness of my bottom lip
always trembling
& my lover is my hands & the ice cube is my hands
but my god can be u
because i am so tired of speaking in body
it is too hot.
smells like rotting meat now.

every week i get a call from Ohio asking if this is the Walgreens / i answer even though i know it isn’t for me / it’s good to know when it’s not for you / it’s not for me / it’s not you / it’s me / it’s not you, it’s all of this / discounted lotion & nail polish remover & tweezers & razors / you are what you love or whoever you don’t / hang up on / i’ll find you in the aisle where i think the least / about my body / i wish i could / be travel-sized for you / maybe a tester / or a sample / never a prescription / always a holiday on sale / when you leave / your shirt lumpy with everything / i let you take / the alarm will go off / there goes the beeping & the beeping / there i go making other people’s mistakes / all about myself / what am i gonna do, yell / what are we / gonna do / be friends? / what am i / gonna say / you’re not the person i want / you to be / by then it’s just me taking up someone else’s time / wrong store / wrong number / no worries / you’re fine / i will say / i’m used / to this / here i am / not the walgreens / just a girl without / a missed call / a wrong number with a full battery / who knows the mistake before she picks up her phone / you’ll know what i am because i am not / what you’re looking for / still here’s the ringing & the ringing again / i am ready to answer / here, i will do / the work for you / it’s me. / it’s me.

You know what? I like you.

I confess this to you in English, staring at the back of your dreadfully empty chair. Yes, I write you notes.

Page 1: In art class you told me that watercolor painting was less painting and more making mistakes and being proud of them. You have hairy arms and sometimes you forget to brush your teeth and me too, but I just don’t get how you can still wear short-sleeved shirts and laugh so loud. I think that the real reason I cover my mouth when I’m around you is because I’m afraid my heart is going to slip out the same way I do my bedroom window at three in the morning. You have to be real quiet when mom is a light sleeper, even though living on the second floor hurts.

Page 2: When I first started going to school I’d tell myself it could only get better, but then it got worse. And then I’d tell myself it could only get better, but then it got worse. And that’s when I first started imagining myself jumping from ten story apartment buildings and stepping in front of moving vehicles. I got so good at imagining the impact that falling in love with you wasn’t even a shock to the system.

Page 3: We both hate our fathers and love baseball. We make plans to combine the two and get home early so that mom can get some rest. We are both old in young bodies, and sometimes forget that our skin will not fall off in the shower the same way the blood does. Blood doesn’t wash out of clothes, but you wear a white shirt anyway and that night, we dye my hair red. Every day you’re not here I close my eyes and count to ten. It has been two weeks and nobody is sure where you are but whispers say you started taking the meds you shouldn’t and stopped taking the meds you should. I am still scared of the dark so I when I close my eyes, I imagine I am sitting in trains moving so fast I can’t even see the branches twisting above your head and kissing your pine-needle hair. You are made of circles so I study abstract art and pretend as though you are not colors away playing conductor and stopping trains with your teeth.

Page 4: I brush my teeth until my gums bleed because it reminds me of white shirts, and it’s at this moment I realize mom was never a light sleeper at all – she just stayed up all night cleaning mirrors and waiting for me to get home. I know that the sun lives in your mouth, but yellow is so hard to paint with that I sleep all day just to run away, and at night I stare in the mirror for hours and think of Van Gogh. I wonder if he would be any good at baseball.

you called to tell me
that when we are both online
it is like a staring contest

that you associate my voice
with the sound
of whatsapp notifications
more than with my own voice now

that your mom
can’t shut up about world war two
she watched a documentary last weekend
and works it into every
conversation

being on the phone with you
is better than REM sleep
better than a full eight hours
better than the watery night cap
stationed at the edge
of my nightstand
and better than any dream
you could’ve interrupted

like the one when you wouldn’t let me
sleep in your bed with you
until I let you pierce my nose
on both sides

or the one when I was walking around
with nothing but a bag of spinach in my backpack
and I stopped to ask malia obama
to help you with your nosebleed

and to tell you the truth

I consider it an investment
for the hours I spend
in the mornings and afternoons

waiting
for you to wake up
on the other side
of the world

which is actually the best part
of my day

I look at a message from you
and think that
from august until whenever
we are as much our phone lives
as we are our physical lives

maybe even more so

and I live in the space maintained
by software updates
and in the quickness of satellites

and where we can be quiet

strangely when my phone battery dies
everything seems a little brighter

like I have been groping
through a dream
and someone has just
turned the lights on

and I immediately want to jump back
into the glossy cracked surface
of my dead phone screen

like when blue ska-doos into a picture frame
and steve follows her

I want to become the smoothness
and coldness
of your phone

and hang on your thigh all day

and not because
I’m the jealous one
and becoming your phone
would grant me access
to your notifications

but because I would be treated by your hands

or because there would be moments
when you would desperately try
to turn me on

and because you would reach for me
when you didn’t have anything
else to do

If this list were found in millennia
like the fragmented torso of Ozymandius,
I would prefer to wrap their names
around my lips than wrap my lips
around the dry stone of him. What word
could I recite that way except
the exclamation of a single vowel.
If he were a woman, I could move my tongue
into letters against the marble of her.
Recite Rilke, recite Shelley. You must
empty your mouth of other people’s bodies.
Then what soft flesh would I turn to,
what imperfect vacancy but my own.
Would I lick the wet from my fingers.
Would I warm at the searing light
of roadside motel signs, at the pink shadow
they cast, and know this is my home.
A large bed in a small room. A lamp.
A bedside table. Enough light to see by
and a place to lay the phallus, silicone
instead of stone, a place to keep the damp thing
from collecting the lint of rough, cheap linen,
of bedspread and the stories it could tell.
Dear Penthouse, I could die in a room like this
and never be found. There are so many
and they are all the same, just like bodies,
waiting to be filled, then waiting
to be emptied, made only to be left.