When I was a kid
I wanted to hear the rest of “Sister Golden Hair” so bad
I watched those ’70s-themed infomercials with the giant CD packs
I wanted to be those people
I couldn’t find the song anywhere so when the commercial came on
I lost my ever-loving mind
Screaming, “America!”
I wanted to look like them
Dance like them
Play guitar like them
God damn, I still want too
I would turn on classic radio and just wait all day
To record every song I loved
On my cassette tape
U R…
U.
B U…
…always.
It’s cute.
It’s a positive message.
It’s like one of those “Instagram Poems.”
But I don’t speak Portuguese.
So it probably means something totally different
To someone else.
Like light on the water,
a thrill is always closer than it should be,
the buzzing blindness of wings beating just overhead
As light, as sure as a taste
a wren touches down lower than it should be,
tossling the ruffled-feather tops of blueberry bushes
Its pinched flight beneath the net now a nervous, jerky chore,
now fully stuck with what it’s stolen.
after The Cranberries’s “Linger”
“You know I’m such a fool
for you,” plays in my head
as I check my phone and avoid
responding to your text.
We went to a bookstore
together, and I wanted to be
holding your hand, but
we stood too far apart.
It burns, and it’s tearing me apart,
but I will glue myself back
together with the pieces you left
me to hold in my pocket.
I’m in so deep, and I’ve been
pulling myself out inch by
inch, but I should have realized
earlier. I love you endlessly.
bend my elbows at a keyboard
smack smack
electron waves through the ether
smack smack
another pair elsewhere in reply
smack smack
until it ends on down the line
smack smack
like Big Frank when he drove spikes
smack smack
down Dawkins line past the store
smack smack
where mamaw picked up the milk
smack smack
a quarter, nickel, dime on the counter
smack smack
our worn shoes trod the path home
smack smack
the screen door shuts behind us
drawing the silence of this house
You’ve done your best
Said what you came to say
Now let the B vitamins and beta blockers
Help you drift away
Who could I’ve been if
my father had been there?
I’m now a senior citizen,
my eyes well up
when I think of my loss.
It really isn’t about him.
It’s about my paternal family
an intact large loving clan.
My paternal grandmother,
seven aunties, two uncles
and many many cousins.
Now I have their funerals.
I needed them alive
the family celebrations,
backyard picnics, weddings,
births and graduations.
My adult fantasy is childhood
summers with all of them.
Instead I spent my summers
alone with library books,
a single friend, swimming
and a single working mom.
I look like my creole paternal side
fair skin, freckles, curly hair
not my black maternal family.
As a child I needed the
feeling of fitting in.
not standing out.
The silence around my
conception was loud
in my brain and around
my contemporaries I was
anamoly and a freek.
I dreaded meeting new people.
Strangers were taken aback with
the fairness of my skin, fine hair
and angloid features and had no
problem verbalizing their discomfort.
As an adult, I told someone to talk
to my parents if my looks were an isssue
and my black mother would take offense to me
not considered to be a black woman.
I know a lot of my reticence in life
has everything to do with my childhood
and knowing this doesn’t change my interactions.
Like most people I have accept it’s who I am.
each time around town, a
brick-colored station-wagon-thing
(not sure what it’s called)
brings to mind a few people whose
names i seldom enough recall.
it’s not yours or yours or yours,
but it makes a ghost for you all
like a cicada shell clung to a tree.
I walk on the grass with bare feet after watching the news.
Searching for some way to remember what’s real.
What do I see? Hear? Feel? Smell?
How can I focus on what’s in front of me
when lives are ending across the world
as quickly as I brush my toes across the ground.
All I see are those images of broken bodies and terrified children,
all I hear are their cries,
feel their anguish, and smell?
Smoldering. Gray dust and heat.
Nothing at all like these lush hills
holding me where it’s easy to pretend
everything is okay.
I walk on the grass with bare feet after watching the news.
Searching for connection to this land, this place I call home.
So much like any other place across America, the world,
but also not at all.
I get dirt under my toenails as I dig them into the earth,
this place holding us all, and I can’t understand
why it seems so hard for everyone to be nice to each other.
Because here we are.
Together on this planet,
breathing, drinking, eating, connected,
like it or not.
I walk on the grass with bare feet after watching the news.
Examining leaves and ants and bees and so much
life my eyes aren’t capable of seeing,
so much it’s hard to fathom.
I walk on the grass with bare feet after watching the news.
And all I can do is breathe.
