In a nearby field, the cherry trees
go dizzy with their own sweet juice,
get drunk on their own bloodstream.

Are angels jealous of birds
because they can fly without having to carry God?

What kind of violator are you?
The world is a ridiculously human place

that wounds forever.
I want to be hungry ‘til I die.

We put an ad in the local paper, but no one has any interest in purchasing our Franco-Austrian cloud machines.

The great lone Spanish words, like a Castilian ship
come into full view when the air is still.

I’ve tried to make West Virginia home:
the crunched-up shacks that pock the avenues,
the narrow roads that vault down hillsides like ceramic crazing

if/when glass enters the bloodstream try not to panic you can cry you can
drink detox tea phone a friend take the call in the tub go to urgent care...

  There is a time and place for falling safes,
another for pianos. Wake up with a horse's head and
fall asleep with bees...

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A woman in my workshop
Once told me that the way in which

I had adopted you & Al Copeland
For my poetry was convenient

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Let the ballerina find relevé on

Soft surfaces of migrating meteors

in Louisiana and Haiti, a hat is a hat
is a hat? bitter? is the ash of the ghost  

of Ophelia?   we taste it now.

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My lover is a furry beast, except at the tail.
I want to skin him and make myself a coat
before the harmattan gets here. The cold is
always curling in, claws becoming a fist.

i even went to college. but i studied African American Studies which is not
The Law or The Medicine or The Business. my mom still loved me.
so i invented her sadness & asked her to hold it like a bouquet of fake flowers.

every day in your absence,
I take less comfort in the growth of living things.

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Were you there that groggy afternoon

I crawled inside a playhouse in my

childhood city?

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