Dust
Night comes faster in September when the bank is on the phone & I’m explaining again how my New York Sports Club closed, how I stopped leaving home, how hard I tried to end my membership. By now I’m yelling across the world at an associate who says I understand, so sorry to hear, like all HSBC associates before & after her. In sleep I grind my teeth to fine powder, dreaming of bodies in the towers, pulverized as each floor fell on the one below. I watch it all crumble on hold while my associate contacts Disputes, the narrow downtown streets, survivors fleeing like ghosts through clouds, even the leggy mannequins in Wall Street shops hip deep in it. first published in OneArt Liberty Laundry She hauls my bag onto a scale, speaks Yoruba on her cell. My English interrupts, tells her to write No fabric softener. Yesterday we set the clocks in our too-small apartment back. It’s dark in five-pm Flatbush. My English says I’m in a rush to swipe my card, take an Uber. Between washers & dryers her children fall down, laugh. I drop our whites & colors off. first published in Alabama Literary Review 1609 It’s been so long that when I text the link to a Times piece about Manhattan’s tulip trees out of whose soft, straight trunks the Lenape carved their canoes, the trout teeming in streams, the West Side’s white sand beach, so many flowers Dutch sailors smelled them from the sea, and say I thought you’d enjoy, my sister texts Who’s this? first published in One Sentence Poems, Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press |
The Training
We rated ourselves on a scale of one to five on how often we asked for the person in charge, found flesh-colored blemish cover that matched ours, how often we waited in long lines, called the cops or had them called on us, then stood against the window- less room’s walls holding our numbers to our chests, highest to lowest in a U-shaped line, us facing them & all those ugly chairs & tables in between. first published in One Sentence Poems, Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press
Sviluppo What a weird word looked at too long in my Easy Italian Companion at the Church Avenue Station -- definitions I daydream: holy sieve, svelte wolf. The F doors open, a hirsute man bearing the news in Urdu shuffles off, elbows akimbo as I Google sviluppo: development. There goes C-H-U-R-C-H spelled out on terracotta tiles, all CH & UR. first published in Big City Lit Augustine What did he love in those days but his theft? Not for their shape & taste, but for the act of plucking them did he devour those stolen pears, sweetened by sin. Itching with passions in his sixteen year, he would confess, he was enamored of error -- error itself, not what he erred for. first published in The Southern Poetry Review |