dream:
the opening night of a production by tuesday
new performance piece
seat in row 200-something
fishing wire marking rows
somewhere in new york
on the trajectory towards big-time
dimmed light
red velvet
dark blocks of concrete for walls
_______
we manipulate my body
so that my legs even themselves
so that the spaces in between my bones crack
it takes some cooperation
and arms X’ed across chest
_______
overheard while sipping iced berrypatch tea:
it’s your world
i just live in it
claudia rankine’s
don’t let me be lonely
opened in my hands
_______
i really like being
around all those books
lydia says over
skype from the bay
she in two sweaters
me sleeveless
another difference is the quality of light
_______
from 217’s porch:
snowless mountains
(the near layer and the far layer)
and a green moving cloud
wild parrots
flying low without sound
_______
i never talk this much about my family
she says
her dad’s postcard-sized watercolor
in my hand
_______
fava mountain
shelled and plate piling
summer sweat behind denimed knees
rectangle of sun migrates across quilt
_______
do you have anyone like that?
she asks
after we talk about the kid she helped raise
whom she lost
two years ago
_______
kate i say
kate is one (the only?) reason i believe in books
(which is to say
i am easily overwhelmed
and it helps
if i think
if for no other reason
i want to publish a book
so i can write her name
on the first page)
_______
los rakas
she says when i ask who
before pronouncing the soft t
in reggaeton
_______
white people don’t get excited
i laugh in the wake of
complications regarding affluence and isolation
just after defining the term socialized female
_______
take it somewhere interesting
she says
handing me audre lorde’s sister outsider
_______
approaching the corner of texas and university
i hear it before i see it
thinking first:
soccer game?
race?
party?
confused at how the sound rises from both sides
instead of from one general direction
(air horn whistles bells cheers)
and then a river of blinky lights
rolling down university avenue
for at least a mile
if not more
(if i leave out the cop cars
it sounds more empowering)
_______
killer moon and redblue star
die-cut into nightwalk sky
accompanied by
saxaphone spilling out window 6018
_______
from page 92 (sister outsider)
in a dialogue between adrienne rich and audre lorde
audre says (about teaching at tougaloo college in jackson, mississippi):
i didn’t know what to give or where it was going to come from. i knew i couldn’t give what regular teachers of poetry give, nor did i want to, because they’d never served me. i couldn’t give what english teachers give. the only thing i had to give was me. and i was so involved with these young people – i really loved them. i new the emotional life of each of those students because we would have conferences, and that became inseparable from their poetry. i would talk to them in a group about their poetry in terms of what i knew about their lives, and that there was a real connection between the two that was inseparable no matter what they’d been taught to the contrary.
(wherein my history and future of teaching tendencies
assert themselves as something greater than coincidence or habit
wherein, despite the tears, i am gifted
some kind of future sight
some kind of galvanizing
around teaching as not just something i happened to do
for the past 10 years of my life
but something that i have clearly carved for myself
from here to the horizon)
detail collector 