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