once. (1) Shake. (2) Serve… for old time’s sake.

It’s a piece of junk.

I fell in Lolita with the first two,
They were so ungroomed and took to the nakedness of wisdom as easily as expected.
I told them nothing. I gave them suck. They liked the lie of silence.
The latter I adored with all my dwindling optimism.
It loved the secret of my ankles and for that I told it:
“I know I can narrow my gaze, growl my desire, lick my fangs like any trained predator,
But when you hold me I want you to feel innocent, my blood.”
That was as close as I could come to “I pray to God I don’t turn you.”
But I did and when it died
It pumped its final breath out of an opium pipe.
I mixed it with magnesia and to old age be true
I have lived a hundred lifetimes in those last words.

The river of analyses, I’ve played in. Pon de river. Pon de bank.
My head beat like laundry against the rocks and I thought
Of ironing boards and getting everything straight
But I fell inside the wrinkle of another dream’s forehead.
In the trench war – memory versus records- I met Athena
And I’m telling you she couldn’t weave hair (or victories) worth a damn.
She was no virgin, she slept with my rage and I swore not to tell my religion.

When crossing my fingers
I am fickle as a mojito with a twist,
And in the peaceful decadency of Old MacDonald’s rolling pasture
Surrounded by lilac blooms, fastidious bumble bees
And the dainty cough of summer
We lived for the damnation of doing so.

Here’s to choice!
Here’s to the bacchantes!
To the laugh!
To what’s all the rage in the black-eyed skull of night!
To the corpse, she river-dances!
And life’s yawning zipper!

Knee surgery – woman. Aged

happiness

blind, blind, blind.

The night fought the moon with a night stick
in the dark
One night, two moons ago.

Two moons ago, one night
the moon fought the dark.
It was a pale moon.
The moon looked like a moon
full of rocks.
The moon loved the night
It threw itself at the night.
The moon got its rocks off.

The moon hated the night.
Threw rocks at the night.
It was a Palestinian Moon.
A big pale Palestinian moon.
The night was not.
The night was black.
The night was a nigger.
A nigger named Night.
A muslim named Moon.

So basically there were two men in the night
under the moon fighting love…

But men love fighting, so were they really men?
Fine.
Two women in the night
Under the moon fighting love.
Women love to fight.
Especially over lovers
Especially about love.
Two women in the night under the moon fighting about love.

It was a love tap
It was a love punch.
It was a punch, love.
Run in the morning.
No, I stick to the Night.
It was a love slap.
His hand felt like a night stick.
He hits what he loves.
So long as he doesn’t leave what he loves.
Men don’t love love.
Men fight things they don’t love.

So it was two men in the night fighting love
And men love a good fight
and never leave a good fight.
Two women hating the fight.
But loving the men.
And women never leave a good man.
So there was hate and love one night under the moon
Two moons ago.

Separating sea and segregation is a thin
diet of road
where during the day I guarantee
each house sits
bloated, white wedding dress.
Longed after but not
touched the houses
crystallize.
And the afternoon, inside an iron
maiden, sobs its age.

Time changes sex.
And when night
is at its most masculine,
stroking its mountain beard
full of star lice,
the antebellum guards stand
watch, platoons of porches
stifling laugh lines
in their floor boards.

For you, love and slavery are the same beautiful.
Only a virgin’s imagination has dreamt the sordid adulteries
spreading hand to mouth
in the spaces
between a light switch.

[What an Old Southern trick! Secrets sausaged between who we are
and what we’ve done.
Secrets only
the help can whisper ]

In my cab, a man with powdered sugar English
shows me the southern hospitality only middle easterners know.
He hears in my voice a twinge of distain for the Anglicized
name he slave-labors in. Mansur,
I too know the sound of
distance. He sees draped
around my neck
the rags of my best friend
and Home [previously unwelcome] bullies its way through his throat traffic.

“You speak Arabic?”

“You are my family.”

I think Home few times in life.
But to call today familiar
would be too white of a lie.
It is mine.
Down to the hopeless toes, five peninsulas praying to God-rock.
It is mine.
Every confederate-refugee-thick-tongued-lowland-skin-covered inch of it.
It is mine the way
baby teeth were

mine… an interesting word for possession.
They mined the banks of the river
all the way to the Big House
looking for their bones.
A fortune
promised in the break.

…Swamp seek
Knee deep
Air boat
Lynch rope…

And somewhere
nearly far
enough away
people are spoons, salvaging the nothingness
and serving it over rice.
Everyone is a hunger
pain’s earthquake further from whole
closer to gaps with
another beginning to stomach ache.
Another land before time
that could have been mine and was almost
theirs
but today is standing in its aftershock
philosophizing over rubble.

One Home
3 generations still digging underneath it.
Betting everything on the dog fight between poverty and pride.
I overheard them
talking triggers and Patois
in kitchens, stranding
history
on the gutter islands of our palettes.
Je ne sais pas le mot pour la mienne.
Is it a presidential palace
dipping against
the skyline, looking nothing like a tango?
Mish arfa al kalima lii baytii, lii 3latii.
Is it the skinny neck of a desert, guillotined between
some people and no place?
Is it swamps and Spanish moss with Corinthian capitals whispering about wealth?
Is it strip malls so suburban it’s sickening?
I’ve walked in rooms black women were raped in.
Then went shopping.
I don’t know the word for home.
Is it anything
close to bastard?

coaxed me into

its blunt

and I cannot argue.

I am filthy with a weeks

worth of myself, whomever.

Maybe now, maybe soon,

tomorrow but the past is no fiction.

Editorials of dirt

publish from my back

stories scurry and

drain

as I think,

“I am no intellectual.

I cannot think and

write.

Only feel. There is nothing rational

the way I scratch my

thigh for blood.”

I grabbed the body wash with glowing silver

specks marketed to

housewives all of

them as

glamorous as Tuesday.

Idea of it on my hands,

I scrub.

Skin cries shivers.

This is what its like to

be done with it.

I think, I feel.

I left my jewelry on, trying to prove

a point.

My ring

eager for the floor tried Virginia suicide

but I stopped it with my foot.

I wished all silvers could be stopped by a foot.

Not all can. Not hope

not time.

Maybe hope.

I stand there till pickled,

the bitter

smack of rag

and wash convincing my arms

the world never used me.

open up before you- a constructed

pearl in oyster dark.

It does not snake, like most cities

thickening

and thinning, emboldened by a sudden dip/ sink in the landscape

Gotham asserts its trauma on the skyline. Unapologetic

a child striking an immense and wonderous piñata till it caves.

This weekend, we thumped to electro pop, spiked the sprite

and gorged fast food in fast cabs driven by taxi drivers

with laughing black tongues.

To be young and scale 4 flights of stairs older than our mother’s mothers

press wildly into the arms of expensive sheets,

rest in the thought of my thighs.

We strolled in the finest of November light,

admired street artists

and purchased foreign fruits in the markets of Chinatown.

We were underdressed amongst her groupies and

thus remained uncompromised;

holding hands as the hours fanned into color panels and sound.

Then we went home, claiming the itis, to the same sheets

as the night before.

Writhed for awhile. Did not struggle with our honest bodies.

Watched porn with subtitles and felt cosmopolitan. 

I claimed I was disturbed.

Secretly, I was wet.

What is it about this city

that turns us all into such eager sluts

such willing experiments. 

photographers

taking pictures of

geniuses. I don’t know

why,

we’ve all seen

dicks before.