you are leaving again.
i find myself saddened without tangible reason.
and i know that with my sadness should come some joy,
and if not joy, 
then relief,
because when you are half the world away,
it becomes just a bit easier
to forget the times when you were so painfully closer.
i can look up at the moon — a pale phantom sliver —
and know that you do not gaze upon it at that same time.
in that moment,
the moon is mine.
i do not mind that the sun rises for you
so long as i cannot see it.
so i should breathe easy;
your absence gives me a little more room to love myself.

and yet —
there is always an “and yet” with you — 
when the easier breathing begs for entrance to my lungs,
i turn it away.
to forget you would mean to forgo grieving,
and god knows i live for a good ache.

so i think of you,
faultless in the dim yellow glow.
images i shouldn't call upon.
small, soft moments when you seemed to see me.
i remember the time when you crowned me with a halo, deemed me an angel.
i imagine that you are the only one who could ever make me believe that i fit the part.

glowing.
i don't know if you were but i was.
glowing.
if we have to share the moon, then so be it.

i find myself saddened without tangible reason.
this is the part where you come in.

but you are leaving again.
i could ask myself if you were ever truly "here,"
but it always hurts the most to ask the questions i already know the answers to.
so i think, instead,
of you,
faultless in the dim yellow glow.
the pain is a little bit more bearable.
i imagine that maybe you were glowing, too.

(a.m.)

on tuesday,
dylann roof was sentenced to his death.
on tuesday we tried
to make one body feel like nine.
to make one body feel like justice.
on tuesday we said
there has got to be some price to pay
for entering the house of god
with a sinful tongue
and a handgun.

today,
six days later,
we remembered the rev. dr. martin luther king, jr.
we looked at the world,
called it a place with potential for change,
called it that because there has to be some softer way
to look at bloodshed,
for sanity’s sake.
if not then
all that remains is a solitary image of dr. king rolling in his grave because he knows,
knows that breathless black bodies
are a constant,
are transcenders of time,
whether sunken in rivers,
hung from taut ropes,
or bathing in blood on historic church floors,
singing, singing, screaming, shrill
for some messiah bringing mercy, mercy, mercy.

felicia sanders wants mercy:
prays for it, wills it down from up above,
unfolded from the hands of god
so that it might fall upon the head and in the eyes
and within the very being
of the man who killed her son.


it takes a certain grace —
one so foreign to me i can hardly write of it —
to see god in such men who deliberately defy Him,
to ask that heaven’s gates
be so indiscriminate and overt.
i would want him to burn for this.
but it is not my say,
not my life,
not my long, resounding, unflinching “hallelujah!”
not my certain type of grace.

breathless black bodies
are a constant,
are transcenders of time, a recurring motif.
but so too, then, is the black body full
of breath,
that inhales and exhales faith
without ceasing.

such is the black body
that sees a little bit of god in dylann roof,
that prays that he prays for forgiveness,
that thinks there to be but one kingdom,
and he, too,
a worthy subject.

the solitary image of dr. king rolling in his grave
is not a surprise.
the black body has always known
so well
how to die.

but felicia sanders hopes her son’s killer finds mercy.
perhaps the one thing the black body has always known better
is how to love.

(a.m.)

Train 85 leaves the station and bursts into the blinding sunlight with a surreal suddenness. Below, to the left of the tracks, a field of wheat sways as though still under a summer sun. Golden-brown and lively in spite of the snow resting at its roots. The blinding sun hangs high, glimmering on the water. It gives me a headache. I try to ignore it.

Ahead of me, the laughter of two young people fills the car. I wonder if they are strangers, engaged in conversation just minutes after meeting. I wonder if they have the same destination, if they are each equally happy to be heading towards it.

To my right, across the aisle, a woman no older than fifty talks loudly on the phone about her father’s tumor and the biopsy that will soon determine if it is cancer. She sounds optimistic, and I am happy for her. I tread lightly on the thought that maybe her loud optimism is a front. I want to be happy for her. But in an hour I will get off this train, and if her father dies, I will never know.

The woman sitting next to me returns from the café car with a Dunkin' Donuts coffee and takes out her laptop. I turn down my brightness so that she can’t see that I am writing about her. Even though I write nothing bad, it feels like some sick invasion of privacy.

My fingers feel heavy. This train feels heavy.

I want to be outside, before the sun sets, while the golden-brown wheat is still bathed in light. The sun is going to set without me. I try to be okay with that.

The last time I ever wrote on an Amtrak — the last time I can remember —, it was a song about loneliness and self-destruction. It was more than two years ago. I want to be able to say that I have changed more than I actually have. But even as the world rushes past me, snow and wheat and house and sun, I still feel impossibly lonely. The heaviness from my fingers is in all of me now. I can’t shake it.

The young people ahead of me, the woman across the aisle, and the woman next to me all begin talking at once now, and I feel hot. Their words bounce back and forth off the walls, and I need to get off of this train. Receiving these airborne snippets of other lives feels wrong, feels overwhelming.

Anyone who reads this piece will think I’m insane.

The woman next to me stops speaking. The young people ahead of me quiet down. The woman across the aisle is engaged in some other conversation that I can’t exactly make out. It’s quieter. I might still break the windows of this train if I could, but it is quieter. My fingers feel a little less heavy. It is quieter. At least the insanity is in words now.

my psychiatrist tells me i have holes in me.
she says it as though it is something
i should already know.
and when she says it,
the shift inside me is something i wish i could compare
to the grinding of tectonic plates,
if only i were strong enough to bring about an earthquake.

but since i am a stranger even to aftershocks,
i keep quiet.
my earthquake is stillborn,
expressed instead as a nod,
as a chewing of the lip,
as a silent, compliant “mhm.”
and the urge that nestles itself at the pit of my stomach
is not an urge to disagree;
it is an urge to forget.

because my psychiatrist tells me i have holes in me.
she says it as though it is something i should already know,
and she says it in a way that is not meant to make me feel incomplete,
but it is a way that still does,
and if i can forget this,
even for a moment,
i can forget that i am not okay.

i do not like not being okay;
i do not like having problems,
and my psychiatrist,
she tells me i have holes in me and she says it
as though it is a problem.

and so begins a slow disintegration:
i become but a bearer of problems,
a garden growing only weeds —
something in need of fixing.
i see myself a war-torn landscape,
dry and cracked and lacking life.
i see myself the kind of ground you step on and say,
“remember when things used to grow here?
remember when it used to be green?”

i am still trying to be green,
always trying to be green,
but my psychiatrist tells me
i have holes in me,
and suddenly green becomes a color i will never know how to paint.

outside my psychiatrist’s office,
on the wall of the waiting room,
there is a painting of flowers —
irises and a geranium —
and the leaves, i know, are supposed to be green,
but the paint is old and faded
and they don’t look it.

and for a moment,
i think
that maybe,
whether iris
or geranium
or boy riddled with holes,
maybe it is possible to bloom
even if you are not green.

(a.m.)

in the early morning hum,
in the beat of the drum of the white noise and the misplaced light, i
treasure you.
the sole familiar thing.

an old, cloying taste
clings to my mouth.
i think you are sleeping.
i know? you are sleeping.
i awoke to silence filled by your silence.
i know you are sleeping;
i felt loved by your silence, still.

i know this is love i imagine for myself in the ways i need it most;
i know how this goes.

in the early morning hum,
in the beat of the drum of the white noise and the misplaced light,
i allow myself to feel a very real fear that you
will be everything i needed
and almost everything i want.

and so in preparation,
a separation:
i shift and twitch and shiver until i am at once here
and not,
until i am at once here
and in the moment,
some way down the line,
that old, cloying taste magnified,
when all comes to pass as i knew it would and i can say
“i knew it would.”
i know how this goes.

you take the morning bus to secaucus,
and i, the one to new york.
when sleep greets me and leans my head
gently
against the window pane,
i will let it come.
i will let it try to fill your absence
in ways i know to be short-lived, for naught,
but i will let it try.

i will miss you when i wake up,
miss the silence that i thought you crafted for me,
but which was really just
silence.
i will miss you when i wake up as i miss you when you are next to me.
i want, for us, something infinite:
that which we cannot have and which you do not want,
hard as i wish you did.

but.
the sun rises —
i know how this goes —
and the misplaced light finds its place again.
the silence i thought you crafted for me, which was really just
silence,
becomes noise.
hectic. colorful without order.
i will miss you when i wake up,
but what ache is strong enough to pull something personal
from all that noise?

you take the morning bus to secaucus,
and somewhere in new york i try to live a life as though you have already left me.
if i had my way,
hopeful, futile grasps towards the infinite would not hold ample weight for a haunting.

and yet,
that old, cloying taste.

still.

(a.m.)

"What's your flex😳😳??"
"What's your flex😣??"
He repeats
All my life
I was a wanderer
Here and there
Money was my thing
Girls were my co-living thing

But I saved 4 people with my clumsy love
The door opens☺️☺️☺️
Go home
Go save others with love

you don't need to be with someone at that moment

it's  intimate

too intimate

maybe

a little breeze will be all you”ll need

like a kiss on your chin

or forehead

I  would prefer calm rain

as if

someone still will want to cry for me like in the old days

like when people were dressing up in black
caring neatly folded handkerchiefs

a dream

lost in thought
chin dropped to chest
clumsily will take it out
to shed a tear

then
bent like a willow

will leave


but

if the sunrise

the sunrise will come down with me
when the birds pour forth their song
and the thick grass breathes the sleep of first lovers

or

maybe

late rains will come on their own
in the winged world will come
for the thirsty  one

You can give to your children
Is your attention
They will bloom like flowers.
30/8/2022