Contemporary Poems
Dance Red Lady. Dance From the first clack. It is no longer about pleasing a seated audience. It is about pleasing your moving soul. With lips pulled tense and hips at the ready. Make the right foot want to know the left. Boots mirror spotlight shine. Boots flash back light …
Tough as Crust When I spoke the other day, at first, you just turned away. It was rather abrupt. And I noticed. And I thought, perhaps, it was an errant twitch in the neck. Rather, I hoped. But that’s okay. They were words matching a melody only a songbird could dreamed up. …
Biblical I never quite caught on to this day. Like, what to do with all this space that surrounds? I stand on observant ground. Slow rolling grasses. Green and brilliant. Delicate and riotous in color, or quiet sound. Like the sound of limbs moving or a hinged jaw with a gulping …
Machine for Time This watch is full of nothing but time. Time. And memories. Time to give fate a head fake and a head shake. And then it mislead the other day. But I misspoke when I said to myself it was broken. It simply imagined it tried to stop. …
Clouds Suppose the sky could be made with swirls of velvet clouds, great and small. Like the shedding velvet which falls from deer’s antlers. Would the softness found in rain drops be the same? Could they be softer, like the stuff of snow? Or maybe they could be soft like the dew which wakes …
Menagerie I did once have a menagerie in my mind, or so it did seem. But I deemed to wind it down beyond my furthest finger’s reach because I detected a hinting sound. It was coming from one of its beings, having trouble breathing. Seems the mind above its chest was …
Imagination Imagination comes as if it was a child of me. Unbidden, but welcome. Positioned in front, as would an infant in a group photograph. There is a certain innocence. A certain awkwardness. Surrounded by maturity, while having none of its own. I am the first to see its eyes …
Mob Massacre, East St. Louis, Illinois (1917) (The Land of Lincoln) The beast must come to feast within the atmospherics of hell placed in hate. Motions in the night, like oil seeping through guardian palisades. In this universe, we do not know where evil begins or where it ends. The law itself, …
Only Passengers At my best, I had only a toehold. My grasp of things making up our footings was never strong and contained towering imperfections. So, my incessant solicitations within earned forgivenesses came to an end. And the waiting, too, ended. I realized that even if you were from the mountain of …
Safe? If you are Black, is there an expanding space you can name which is safe? Be it found at a front door? Beside a side door? Around a back door? There was a time the back door was safe. But no more. Be it in your car? Be it in …