The tiger makes it all so easy, the way it sweeps the woman’s house, packs a satsuma for her snack, accounts for the taxes.

‍

He was NBA-player height
converted to Judaism to marry

‍

And the town crier cries la localende! This is one of the stories where a stranger
‍
        comes to town. A stranger with a stranger tool.
‍
Come down from the hill freckled with mustard gesare. You know the stuff, Mara
‍
        how it explodes in middle spring.

‍

Don’t ever say
I didn’t see it
coming.  

which summer is this
             arithmetic is one thing, freckles another
                  power drags from the east in a late august storm

‍

reparations begin
   here,
within
    the body,   within
the striations of muscle
   to tendon, nerve to tissue

‍

did they forget
the vibration
of our throats
humming
in the shade?

‍

In Clark County, Washington – Oregon with a sales tax – the measles are back like jazz standards.

‍

O sleepless wives of Mount Sinai, do you fear your dangerous proximity to the sun? The last strip mall in Kansas closes down with little fanfare, and this October night’s unseasonal heat touches me deeply.

Listen: nobody photographs the moss-smothered trees in the swamps of Florida, not when traffic’s gridlocked on the bridge and the tour of the Spanish monastery starts in an hour.

‍

O hunter, I was wrong: I want my casket made of particleboard.

The pistol shakes in the sheriff’s right hand when he hauls me in for trespassing. O father, I have never seen your face.

‍

Orange [a president...
…and now a vice-president
who just got the taste of segregation
out of his mouth after fifty years
sweeps through South Carolina
with Clyburn at his right hand

‍

Grip the neck of
this coveted steel
I'm your dirty letters
and naughty numbers

I know it’s unfathomable to see
after the way we’ve anointed him
patron saint of peace
prophet of nonviolence
priest of martyrs sitting
at the right hand of Jesus