Category: Poetry

We Never Wanted to Look

Based on true events.

A black student, resolved never to let them
make him feel lesser, is expelled when he
stuffs slurs back into the mouth of some
privileged white kid. The white kid finds a
rally coming to his aid, pouring out
sympathy for the injuries delivered by the
savage, the tiger, the animal, the thug he
provoked—they’re just so loud and violent.

In the same breath, kids on the football
team reenact the brutal qualities of their
fathers as they wrap stones in sheets of
paper and chuck them at the queer kids
when the adults aren’t watching, and I
swear, these mother fuckers are never
watching. This way, when the queer kids
open up their wrists in the hope of ‘better
luck next time,’ the adults can claim they
never saw it coming.

In a classroom, Mr. Peterson, a nominally
qualified science teacher, tells the
brown kids that systemic racism is a lie—
racism, he tells them, ended with the
civil war, biology was settled in six days,
and the most important question you can
ask yourself is: is there life after death? I
wonder if he knows the number of kids
racing to uncover the answer because of
people like him.

The spirit of cruelty is alive and well, here.
Cultivated by a system and culture caught
up in the march of June 1929, when over
three-hundred klansmen made their way
down Draper Street to insist this small
town is for whites only—with the exception
of that one black family they allow to live
on the outskirts to prove to the world that
they’re not just a bunch of bigots.

Broken mirrors and skipping records have
a lot in common with this place. We are unable
to see ourselves with any honesty,
unable to get up and change that goddamn
minstrel tune we’ve been playing since
1873. We’re afraid to look up because the
trees have eyes. We know this because we
hung them there, like the brown Christ we
nail to a tree annually, on every Good
Friday. Is it a wonder, then, that the image
of breaking the shells of rainbow colored
eggs is lost on us?

Look, there are a lot of things you can try
in our small town, just not love or
compassion or mercy or acceptance,
because that—that is just some anti-
American, communists bullshit, and we
don’t take kindly to that sort of thing
around here.

I’m The Imposter

Listening to the cadence in your voice
lets me know that even the best have
their bad days. You can’t be on all the
time—I know that—but the sound in
your throat throws me. It makes me
believe magic is unlimited for those
who know how to tap in. Teach me
how to tap in.

I feel like a fraud standing next to you
and him and her and every one of them
who can sing, and my god, can they sing.
Octaves of grace that move me like a
choir lifting its broken voice in defiance
of God. Meanwhile, I just hope that I can
make a joyful noise.

Horror-Things

I imagine horror-things. Not horrible things, those
I don’t have to imagine, but horror-things. Things
that skitter in deep shadows, or tap on the glass
of the window where the pane is reflective of
something deeper, or the late night shifting of
dishes in the kitchen–it should be frightful, but
instead, I just feel less alone.

This head is too full of ghosts. Not the movie kind,
but the you kind; the you and them I’ve tried and
failed to leave behind kind. The you and them
reminding me that the dead don’t rise, that there
are no clean getaways, and that none of us get
out of this alive.

So why

do I have to feel so prematurely dead inside?

Silence Fell

The first time I found the courage to ask questions,
I placed them sideways, set them crooked because
I was too afraid to shoot straight, so I chose to shoot
like a star—cascading across heaven.

But your fluency in crooked was limited to speaking;
hearing was never your strong suit, so when—in the
midst of our firefight—I finally said the quiet part out
loud, clear as a bell, you stood still, and then everything
got very quiet.

A Tired Mom

God’s not dead,
She’s just tired
Of all this Hell
We put ourselves through.
It was never meant
To be like this,
The hurt.
But like so many new parents,
She’s still learning.
She’s still growing up,
So be gentle,
Because this
Is new for all of us.
We are all
Making this up.
So, please,
Let go of the guilt
Held hostage
Over your hearts,
Because someone
Has to teach God
How to let go of a grudge.

A God to be Pitied

Ought God be feared?
Or pitied?
To have formed us
In divine likeness,
She sought to love herself.
She tired of being alone.
So from the dust we arose.
And we
Could not make her happy.

So what then is God
If not abdication
And abandonment?
A damning silence
From beyond the stars
Watching our suffering
With such knowing.
Listen,
She is begging
For our forgiveness.

When This Veteran Came Home

I am young and old, here and now, then and yet to be. A 41-year-old husband and father, a 21-year-old kid upon the sea, and the child loved by his father’s fists. I am a convergence removed from time and space in temporary condition only to be returned to find former things replaced by new. The world did not wait for me, and in many ways, nor I it. And like myself, it was familiar in appearance but radically transformed.

Conflagration of Rome

And so, the black smoke rises, and the sky falls, and those who’ve drawn heaven down upon our heads dare not look up. Cowards and curs fault sin beyond the chapel step and disregard the unsettled bones preying within the holy sanctuary.

O, that we might blot out our forebearers and cast off their crimes. Is there no justice in Heaven? Has God been so struck blind? Do not the angels watch in wonder and rally to our cry?

Divine stars! Align yourselves against the wicked of this age who, with braids of gold, fashion a noose for us all. Let them sway as leaves in their gallow groves. Or let the rattling rebuke of their little god empty their thoughts and bid them sleep and sleep forevermore.