Three shades of afternoon light—gluttonous— / Salt me when I open the door / I wasn’t expecting it / Marigold mouths pout / Fresh leaves threaded to greet newcomers / What a betrayal then, to curdle with sweetness!

Late one night in April 2006, I heard an unexpected knock on my bedroom door. I lived at the time with a loose coalition of punks, anarchists, hippies, and nondenominational nonconformists in a squatted block of flats, across from rumbling tracks, in a working class suburb of Barcelona, Spain.

Who called Mirrellez C. Elliott and told her that her son had died in police custody? How many minutes did it take for the police to drive De’Sohn from where he was arrested in New Haven to the police station at One Union Avenue?

Our boys didn’t come home to the swamp after fighting the North, but James did. He came back with a phantom limb, believing he could feel the clench of the muscles that had been amputated in a surgical tent, bloody saws and chloroform rags and dirty knives.

For a while I thought maybe something was wrong with me, like you sort of hope there is when you're a teenager.

By the base of his steps, there was a flower pot with a sad, half-dead plant. She lifted the thing. Felt the small force of its weight against her. Stupid, she knew. But she was a container brimming over. And she needed to let something go.

It’s approaching midnight and this is not how I would have wanted it to happen: sitting by myself on my porch, drinking wine from the bag of a box and chain-smoking cigarettes...

Mom says a white deer means blood is coming. When I sleep, the forest floor is a lake of red, no matter if the deer are white or brown. A gunshot sounds.

And it was ordinary, that year, / when the artillery fired blanks, / and the glass hail panicking / the crowd vanished / where it landed, / and there was no hail, / but only the prosody of sleet.

My mother warns me / that Grandmother has awakened / from death, / taken a shower / and put on a dress / over her naked body

Do we all migrare: pass into a new condition? / Are we all natives—nativus: born in bondage— / walking toward no-border?

and the tour guide said what a shame how awful the heroin in Kensington but we would not be focusing on that today because this was an African American Iconic Hero tour and she smiled beatifically at the Black couple and the Black couple only...

But dying is a specific outcome of the world’s game. / I ask the AI what a Black solution would be. // “One that does not kill the player.”

how easy it is to erase rusting yellows? / how easy to let blues blue into zombi? / how easy / is ease?

I let him stand there for a few minutes, waving his arms while he rambled on about the wonderful days of our youth. When he finally fell silent, I told him that I had no idea who he was.

i open my hands & eat the bird inside the ball of light, the song of the bird of the devil burns a hole in my body & out of it a streak of feathers

On 9/11, with the radio transcribing the ongoing events and his white coworkers in the plant nursery going mad as though the place was burning down, all my dad could do was laugh. As far as he knew, the Omaha nursery was fine. The roof was still above their heads. The ground was unmoving. The sky still blue, and most importantly there was work to be done.

It means to want so badly. / How close win is to want is the distance / between his fast ball & her face.

You see the flower's form leak into itself. A self. Some things in America still make sense. I open my junk mail, Disney red. Your family. Liquid uttered out into the night freezes your dreams undone. Veracity leaves its whispers. Make an orchestra instead. Every bitten breath