The Poetry Marathon

Love is a Geppetto, and

Wooden-mouthed dummies wish to be real –

To smell musk sharp and familiar;

To taste the salt of flesh;

To hear damp, ragged breath against the ear;

To see beads of sweat hanging from the hairline;

To drag fingers along solid dreams.

A thousand Pinocchios roam the countryside 

Running from Geppetto

Slamming into each other

in a mad attempt to finesse Love from its hiding place.

Because of contusions, Love evades them.

“I am ready for Love. Why are you hiding from me? I’d quickly give my freedom to be held in your captivity.”

At night, the desperate babbles of loneliness sound 

Cacophonous screams in cotton drift down to the streets.

Pinocchios lie to themselves during the day about their deplorable state, and no one knows

Except Natalie, who being a night walker, will promptly report the plight of the loveless faction, the pandemic of empty beds.

That bitch can never ignore a good scream.

Love hates manipulation.

Jina lako nani?

Puppets hate to be played with.

Jina langu ni Upendo.

Geppetto sits in the corner carving wood until his fingers bleed.

If it is true 

that hope is a thing with feathers,

You are plucked.

Blue Moon

The morning after you left,

the Moon refused to set.

As the neon sun rose, she – blue marble in a sea of pink sky –

still gazed upon you.

Full and bright,

She would not leave her sister Sun to mourn you alone.

Moon knows what she has done – what she showed you,

and she is not ashamed.

Why should she be?

She is marvelous, splendid, and resplendent.

Had she ever burned you?

Had she ever poisoned you?

She began to tug at you a week before

she fully unveiled.

Naked, she climbed high and turned her phosphorescent face toward 

you.

Leaned in on you sighing as Earth groaned under her weight.

You should have looked her directly in the eyes.

Not looking is what causes some to crumble –

Caused you to crumble.

Didn’t anyone ever tell you?

Full moons don’t drive people mad,

But the shame and hiding — well,

That will do you in.

The Moon glitters what we hide.

She offers us a chance to surrender,

and if we don’t, our glowing contraband is ripped from us. 

Didn’t anyone ever tell you?

Poor child, how could you possibly suffer the weight of her

unless you give up?

How else could you survive her splendor

unless you reverence the fractured reflection mirrored in her face?

How could you know the beauty and function

of your twinkling pieces, until you saw them fully formed by the light of the Moon?

So, she, with all of the full moons before her,

Silently absorbs the blame for

all of the ways we cracked under 

The weight and fullness of her gaze, 

beam of her closeness, and

might of her pulling.

The Holy of Holies
We
cousins would prostrate ourselves in play
Making believe in hushed tones
While above us two generations of uncles and aunts spun our lineage.

They were all swollen ankles, cracked heels,
trouser socks, and work boots.
Their voices would float
ethereal thick clouds of hymns rich with cigarette smoke
and guttural laughter and residue from midnight’s tears.
We would brush the hems of their garments careful

not to shake anointed threads.

They chronicled an uncle crouching behind a bush with a BB-gun
hunting a mean grandfather, who
journeyed by moonlight to Paris, TN for days at a time to visit
the family he had to leave behind.
Told of a sister whose dinners took too long to cook but appeared from bare cabinets like magic,
a sister who fought men like a man to protect her softness,
a sister who danced money out of wallets, the hip hypnotist.

They’d weave robes with golden thread for sharecroppers,
fasten blue ribbon to golden crowns for wanderers who’d lost their minds,
stitched ephods that sutured soldiers by reminding them of home.

They bestowed recipes like sacrement, and
hummed prophetic wisdom into our ears like poetry.

The griots burst with laughter that
quickened us from the floor into sukhasana and vajrasana.
As they chanted the names of the dead until they
conjured them from the walls, carpet, couch cushions, cabinets, and drapes.
Until the ancestors circled the room to the rhythm of the oscillating fan
GD                   Addie           James
Ruth                                                            Barker
Bertha Mae         Frankie
washing over us like anointing oil
while we played.

Bliss
Bubbles rumble from her belly
tickling her nose
crinkling the corners of her eyes.
The sweetest sounding alarm,
she vibrates with squeals and coos.
She gurgles on the saliva teething brings,
shamelessly bearing pink gums
thrashing chubby arms and legs.
She wriggles drunkenly with contagious, effervescent joy.

RBF

Daily, the companionless cougar slinks past the tabby cat

that like a gargoyle waits fixed on the step for her.

Sharp green almond-shaped moonstones meet round honey ones.

A brief moment of feline solidarity

A muted magnetism

A knowing.

Tabby walks Cougar to the door and 

saunters back to some secret place in the neighborhood.

Cougar chirps to herself, pleased that when she 

rolls her eyes at Tabby, he understands that

she does so with love.

Blackberry Picking in Kentucky

Ashy legs dangled 

from my grandfather’s weather-beaten flatbed,

wooden boards blanched from too many seasons of tobacco, potatoes, and corn.

A harvest of cousins, aunts, and uncles piled on with all manner of rinsed bucket

as my grandfather slowly dragged us into the woods to find wild blackberry bushes.

It was the hard red berries that gave the bushes with bruise-colored clusters away.

We — sticky with sweat

warned to watch for thorns

and snakes — 

reached into the thicket to the promised obsidian clumps.

The flesh yielded beneath our fingertips as we 

plucked and plopped the bouncy fruit into

pails.

It wasn’t a race because there were so many berries among the thorns,

and for the children

Time meant nothing.

Our voices joined the birds and frogs as we

blew on and ate a few of the more irresistible drupelets

pressing the balls of the fruit to the roof of our mouths until they were

flooded with juice sweet and tart like memories.

When all the buckets were heavy laden with fruit,

we meandered home.

With fingers stained the color of sacrifice,

We offered the buckets to my grandmother

to be made into a plethora of dark and delicious things.

Wash Day

Use a wide-tooth comb and warm water to part 

the mountains of black coils into manageable sections for detangling. 

Light a candle, grab a towel, spread coconut oil for good slip

Put on a movie or long-awaited series.

The mind needs an escape from the repetition of spraying, raking, unlinking, and twisting.

Run the water in the kitchen sink until it feels like blankets from the dryer against the skin.

Pour the shampoo into your palm ignoring the quarter-size suggestion on the bottle.

Rub you scalp until you are convinced that you love yourself deeply

No hurried motions. You’ve given yourself the entire day for this.

Rinse and wrap your hair in a tee-shirt to prevent tangling.

Use a wide-tooth comb and warm water to part

The mountains for black coils for deep conditioning.

Use a plastic grocery bag to trap your body heat and activate the conditioner.

Pop some popcorn and dance to your favorite songs for 30 minutes.

Run the water in the sink until it feels like blankets from the dryer against the skin.

Rinse your hair and embrace the weight of all that makes you purified.

DIY 

The parent of one of my 10th grade students tagged me in a post 

about a Do-It-Yourself solution in case of an active shooter.

Supply List 1

• Heavy duty stainless steel wire rope (with loops)
• Stainless steel ferrule and stop
• Stainless steel carabiner
• Heavy duty wall mount ring
• Power drill
• Diamond bits

The teacher in the post said that she looked all over for something 

to keep the students and her safe.

She found her solution at Home Depot,

a business that got an F rating in 2019 for

supplying money to Congressional recipients of NRA dollars.

Supply List 2

• Union dues

For this DIY project, the wire rope loops like a noose around the dummy door lever.

        (The dummy lever is one inch away from a glass panel.)

The other loop joins the carabiner that is 

hooked to the wall mount.

       (Don’t ask for permission to drill into the wall.

       You’re doing it for the kids.

       You’re doing it so that you all can make it home.)

Supply List 3

• Belief in miracles
• Health insurance
• Life insurance policy
• Anxiety medication

I looked through videos that showed what an AR-15 can do to structures.

There is a guy who shows five different types of barriers

that AR-15 bullets can penetrate.

I paid special attention to the one that looks like a wooden door and the cinder block wall.

(The trainer noted that the cinder blocks used in schools like mine were hollow.)

The bullets designed for the AR-15 are created to tumble when they make contact with flesh.

They rip at a velocity of around 3000 feet per second as they 

plunge through the soft tissue.

They destroy all of the organs in the regions they hit.

They are not the types for bullets that usually lodge in the human body like they would a wall.

They make grand exits.

Supply List 4

• Bleach
• Gloves
• Heavy duty paper towels
• Trash bags
• Trauma kit

The magazine of an AR-15 can hold 30 rounds.

The class that the parent’s child was in had 28 students in it. 

If we were in Uvalde, no one would have escaped the room alive.

Supply List 5

• Trauma and grief counseling
• 28 Sympathy cards
• 28 Floral arrangements
• Lawyer for will
• Casket
• Headstone

I don’t respond to the post.

Don’t know how to tell him that it will never work.

Don’t know how to tell him that I can’t save his son.

Even if I lay my body on his,

The bullets will still get through.

It won’t be enough that I tried.

It won’t be enough that I did it myself.

Ode to the Messiness of Making

The small, the short, the delayed, the imperfect, and the pitiful are not honored nearly enough.

Watching a butterfly quietly escape its chrysalis is as magical as any show in Vegas.

Late blooms make us pause in awe just like the first buds of Spring.

Wobbly first steps will make us cheer as heartily as Olympic victories.

The lines we scratch in our journals can stir the spirit as deeply as the lines of legendary bards.

Long roads sometimes lead to dead ends. 

How else would the boundaries of the map be made?

True revelation sometimes cloaks itself in paltry epiphanies.

Small movements unlock heavy doors.

We open them and find truer versions of who we are in this world.

Today, we sing the praises of the small things.

The first drafts.

The erasure marks.

The balled up pieces of paper.

The scuffed knees.

The fender benders.

The early morning practices.

The dry chicken and burned bread.

Today, we honor the signs of trying.