Writing the Life Poetic

Dear Sam,

When I squint my eyes
I can make your hair a single star

points breaking around your head. 
Winter breaking inside of me.

Cape of discarded color at my feet,
I talk the dirt out of my mouth.

I am no expert.
I shine my dim light

and you're out there breaking glass.
I filled a whole notebook with you once

but still you were missing. There are pink stars
on the red formica table. The mattress

a pulse of argument. Next year
New York will be different

but tonight the moon
is a white spine

and a small candle burns
our shadows into the wall.

Civil War

Darkness circles like a dog.
Tonight there is no vision
in the cliffside trenches
so we smoke, souse a bit
of sock in olive oil,
make a tin can lamp that sputters
the outlines of our guns.

There is a sadness at the back of life.
Greasy tin. Ravine of excrement
and breadcrust. Photos grow cold. 
Papers warp, lose their ink.
An old mule heavy-jugged with water
moves slowly through the camp while
a young man bent under three coats
and a blanket sleeps standing at his post,
feet frozen in his boots,
breast pocket pounding
with love letters.

bees

bloated with the grief
of unrequited flowers,
drunk on the cruelty
of sugar they float
singed with light
slather of afternoon
blur of appetite
each thistle
of nectar shimmers 
an emblem, a gem,
tender petal
trembling stem

Dear Niya,

A year beyond the demand
I sit in Palio Café where

your hair a glossy magazine
fire still singes the air.

I met a man this week who
at age 12, in Liberia, convinced

warring militias to stop
giving guns to children.

As this man ignited
agreement from ash, let us

find a café with soft light
and firm chairs, let us

return to the faith you
made of pasted pages––

this imagined life
into which you lived.

Let us sit with a pot of tea between us
brittle leaves steeping to softness.

Dear Alison,

I couldn’t give you
what neither of us had:

a brother capable of staying alive.
And you couldn’t give me

what I didn’t know I needed:
welcome without blame. 

Adrift like a moon over my days,
you breathed in my breathed out light.

We shared monologues like cigarettes. I wanted
to erase your father, the thick, wet sound of him

hitting the floor when the neighbor
came to tell him. Memory’s chain

jangling your tether of tears
from twin bed to twin bed

we slept the thin sleep of bridges
the distance of expectation

dividing yours
from mine.

I want my eggs

I want my eggs soft
and in between destinies
the yolk undecided
the white a nimbus
of coagulated light
haloing its small yellow
sun as I have lived
trained to the perimeter
of what is most alive in me,
accomplice to
and bearer of
its diminishing light.