Explore Poems: Anaphora

We were wild children / we moved through space / like blades
We were tame children / we fell to sleep…

Have you ever searched for tunnels behind bookshelves? Have you ever zoomed out quickly on Google maps…

I’m here
             to tell you 
                             an old story. 
                             This
Appears to be
                 my work.
                                I live
                                in the world,
Walk
         the streets…

1.
If a house is haunted like a radio
is haunted         If a body is a radio
of blood         If a body of ghosts
hums like blood over a valley of
bone         If blood is a...

I come from the kidnapped,
                                    the assaulted—
my country’tis of reparations as in-store credit
                     ...

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
     unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

If you could hear, at every jolt, the building quiver—

If you could hear fossils stirring—

If you could hear sand from the fathoms rise—

If you could hear calf thrum to whale—

If you could hear dogs stand still as a deer before...

Here is the encyclopedia where I learn first position
Here is where I begin ballet: at 12, in a class of 6-year-olds
Here is where I get my period
Here is where I substitute dance for childhood
Here is studio “B” where I practice
Here...

I feel like
I feel like shit
I need a
I need a drink
and not vinegar neither
I don’t want to die
I feel like a freak
don’t let me cut out
I wasn’t cut out
to go out virgin
I want my cherry
squashed man
hammer amour
love me
live me
hour to...

you mean well, but
when I say I hurt         when I say some part of
my body hurts      and you say oh, did you do something?
I hear       what did you do? As is, it's your fault,
there's...

If you’re swimming
then you have lost something important.

If you’re flying
then your heart’s been broken.

If you sit at a table before a deck of cards
then you are afraid of getting older.

If you undress beneath a single spotlight
then you are about to...

Girls are coming out of the woods,
wrapped in cloaks and hoods,
carrying iron bars and candles
and a multitude of scars, collected
on acres of premature grass and city
buses, in temples and bars. Girls
are coming out of the woods
with panties tied around their...

First Psalm

Let there be a God as large as a sunlamp to laugh his heat at you.

Let there be an earth with a form like a jigsaw and let it fit for all of ye.

Let there be the darkness of...

because we know distance too well
because the blood bank didn’t have enough blood for nana & her new knee
because I see your car a car like yours parked across the street from my apartment
because the same night awaits us all
because...

I must be the heavy globe
of hydrangea, always bowing
by summer’s end. Must be salt,
like sadness at a burning city,
an ethical disobedience. I must be
a violet thorn of fire. These days
I don’t taste good, but I must
be singing and boneless, a...

Holy the days of the prune face junkie men
Holy the scag pumped arms
Holy the Harlem faces
looking for space in the dead rock valleys of the City
 
Holy the flowers
sing holy for the raped holidays
and Bessie’s guts spilling on the Mississippi
road
 
Sing holy...

Seventeen suns rising in seventeen bedroom windows. Thirty-four eyes blooming open with the light of one more morning. Seventeen reflections in the bathroom mirror. Seventeen backpacks or briefcases stuffed with textbooks or lesson plans. Seventeen good mornings at kitchen breakfasts...

goodbye city. goodbye stoop. goodbye rush hour traffic plume.

goodbye feminist qpoc weed delivery group. goodbye cheap noodle

spot on the corner. goodbye drag bar next door serving the messy

deep into the dead eggplant evening. goodbye drunks screaming

about literally nothing below my...

I’ve stopped asking:
                                                       ¿Why?
             I’ve let a man whistle
  ...

you save me half a bag of skins, the hard parts, my fav, dusted orange with hot

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you say we can’t go to the bar cause you’re taking your braids out
i come over, we watch madea while we pull you from...