Excerpts
Drinking Senegalese Tea with Mint after a Visit to the Slave House of Gorée Island
(May 24, 2012, Dakar, Senegal, West Africa) for Idrissa Diakhaté This is what I said I wouldn’t do: let a West African man court me. Attempt to make him comprehend my confusion of languages and flavors: I am not a mulatto. I am the daughter of two Black Americans— who both are the children of …
Aurora Borealis
Before all this, there was the cabin, its basket of potatoes and jar of milk, its white enamel sink and heirloom Austrian rug we fell asleep on after midnight runs, curling with heat and thoughts of each other stretching like a road to either horizon, heater blasting, ploughing through the soundless white, the blurring lines …
Mediterranean
I A bright red boat Yellow capsicums Blue fishing nets Ochre fort walls II Sahar’s silk blouse gold and sheer Her dark black kohl-lined lashes II A street child’s brown fists holding the rainbow in his small grasp IV My lost memory white and frozen now melts color ready to refract
How to recognize a werewolf
The old verses suggest a cannibal; a man who can tell you you taste like pig. Here is the meaning in the myth: A real werewolf howls not to the moon but for the moon. He will say she is silver. Leviathan in the night window. So bright all he can see are stains in …
The Sun Sleeps in Your Womb
The orchard of uncertainty that we planted yields its fruit by night, when the sun sleeps in your womb awaiting my seed. We know nothing of the minerals and the buried toys, nor of the bumblebees that carry pollen between two warring states. The earth smells of forgotten damp and the footprints of our childhood …
To the Whirlwinds
It was on their second lap around Tsézhinii’áhí when the skies rapidly darkened. Late May and Red Valley hadn’t yet had much rain. But it was always this way. Always dry, even up to the tips of the mountains. Rain, when it does storm, falls so briefly in the valley that within the length of …
Migration
Last night and for some days preceding a holy migration: of praying mantises, earthworms, and a single black salamander with yellow spots, the slick shiny black wet body of him moved slowly just outside my front door, gentle, on the mat that says ‘‘Welcome.’’ I am thinking now of your ability to survive—somehow, amid fire, …
Sun Perch
for Karis It is late, but outside the night is glowing with snow & streetlight, quiet but for the occasional growl & skid of the plows. Winter, Syracuse, where the feinting snow fusses & scatters until it collapses roofs & power lines. And now sitting in that gauzy light, nothing but the sounds of sleep, …
Angel in the House
My wife is becoming an angel, or some kind of spiritual being, I’m not sure exactly what. The other day I moved to touch her and my hand went right through her—right where her shoulder used to be—and scooped out a light-speckled cloud of her into the air that took a moment to reform. She …