Dark children reaching up to touch my neck,
A bead of sweat rolls down my fleshy cheek
In I they see a moment, torn from wreck.
a shudder, search for sounds apart from speech.

My children, what is it you leave behind,
To find this woman, knife has never known?
A kiss of strife, my life to yours it binds,
As I reach out to you, my flesh, my bone.

The raft that gave you birth will stay with me.
Your wrinkled, hallow gaze will keep my mind.
When you were carried by the neutral sea
for me to wrap you in these clothes of mine.

“How God, can You be there? You are not there.”
Think not for now; for now You’re in my care.

Do you think
God held the sopping clod
with warm hands,
lifting and bending to
kiss it? Did God wipe the mud
from those worldwide lips
or stick out a slippery tongue and
taste the beginnings of
new joyous life?

Or do you suppose God never
bent down or breathed or buried
warm hands in an untilled field?
Did a soft stirring of wind eventually
crash and thunder and roar across
nations of trees before an expected rain?
And once it did, did it fall to
find the beginnings of you
and I? And when it found us,
did we look back to our sister of dirt
and up to our mother the sky
and laugh and breathe
and call both a holy prayer?

When they taught me to fear the world
I listened.
I read each revelatory word
and strained to cherish
and bury it like treasure.
What I didn’t realize
was that the field I buried it in
was meant to grow little tomatoes.
What could be more wicked than
the engorged flesh of a red and watery orb
that gasps and stretches to caress
a cow’s steaming pile
of ****?

Please do not feed
the birds.
$100 fine.
As if to say to ask
with an open hand
to be taught the way of gentleness
is not worth the out of pocket
expense.

If we knew the value
Of timidity and pigeon toes,
If we understood
A delicate look of apprehension
As it wrestles with
Hope,
You and I would search for quarters in the street
And skip each tender dinner
And declare our overall bankruptcy
Until we had enough money to
Proffer the judge
and take our communion
with the seagulls.

To my beloved family,
mourning alone
without a sanctuary to
gather,
And to
the 49 bodies my
eyes know only as
that:
My body calls you
my own
and feels your absence
achingly.

He crawled into our homes
as children.
He took his position,
aimed, and unloaded
from the disappointed eyes
of our fathers.
He shot his rounds
of shame in the words of
our mothers.
But he did not leave us there.

He found us again
in the pews.
We threw our bodies
face down
under the altar,
eyes closed and bodies heaving.
He held us in his sight
through the prayers of our pastors
that erased you and I.
He called for support
from the holy assembly,
teaching them to gag
again
and again
and again
and again
and called us Abomination.
But he did not leave us there.

He placed the target on
our chests
when we sat quietly in class.
We sat there drawing pictures from
our dreams;
pictures of dancing bears and
rainbows and flowers
and tall queens.
His war cry, “******,”
echoed in the halls as
we counted each step towards the
shelter of home.
But he did not leave us there.

So you and I,
we found each other.
We held each other close and
wiped the tears away with
the gauze we knew to
carry
close at hand.

We built our own
sanctuary
And sent out a search party
to invite our God.
I remember our surprise
when we found that she was
already there,
laughing and dancing as our priests
conducted their holy music.

We invited the tall queens and dancing bears
that we thought only existed in
our minds;
bulldogs in tuxedos and foxes and a
princess. And we all
laughed and cried
and danced and
kissed

Because we were safe.

And our walls and hymns and
sacred prayers
kept him from finding us.
But he did not leave us there.

He found us again.

They call him Omar, son of ISIS.
We call him natural fate,
familiar face,
child and messenger
of every word and deed and stare and sermon
we have ever run from.

In the midst of celebrating our life
you ran,
trampling over those you loved as he
hunted us like dumb animals.

You ran for the exits as our family was
mown down,
member by member.
Each scream systematically and
irreversibly
silenced.

In your final moment you
let out a desperate cry,
fingers still on a keyboard;
your words forever unfinished,
forever unsent
to the mothers who
still loved us.

I heard your cry that night.

I heard it as I left
another sanctuary.
I clasped my heaving chest
trying to hold it together.
I ran my hands along my body,
pushing fingers into bullet holes
that I felt
from miles away.

According to what I’ve been told
The voice of God is deep like a river,
does not quiver, and would never have
my gay lisp.
It rumbles in its righteous wrath while simultaneously
Whispering to all the sleeping children in America.
I have nodded my head in agreement
But I’ve secretly tried my best to              
Rearrange His pronouns.

From what I’ve heard,
The voice I should hear would be located somewhere
between my ears
Or behind my sternum.
However, the only voice I’ve heard
Coming from those places
Has sounded oddly vague and often undecided,
What a funny way to describe
The sound of a prowling lion!
Ha!    

If you would like me to be honest with you
The voice of God does not sound like a Father, a Son,
Or even a pale benevolent Ghost.
Because of this
I try to wrangle it into the throat of
my grandfather
or at least the mouth of
Morgan Freeman,
But it just hollers and squawks and eventually I find
That it wiggles out of
My bunched up fists
And perches in the rafters, smirking,
Always just out of reach!

When I am listening for it
it doesn’t sound like a voice at all.
In fact, it sounds oddly like
The throb of veins in my temples
Or the ocean of air
Harnessed by the gravity of
My lungs.

I do not explain it in those terms
to most people
Because I’m afraid they’ll figure out
That I'm the kind of person who
Smokes ***.

Maybe somewhere in my doughy brain
A battery has rotted into a pool of acid
Or one single electrical chord has wriggled free
From the gaping mouth and geometric eyes
of its socket.

Even still, would you believe me when I say
no one has heard God speak?
Not even Moses!
But I am sure even he
(and especially Tagore)
have heard God’s voice.
Yes, that must be right!

My friend heard it on the sidewalk
just last week.
This man let out a primal grunt
After he kissed his boyfriend and
A stranger stabbed him in the shoulder.  

No! Actually I hear it often
from cousin Tamir;
The one whose vocal chords no longer
Clap joyously together.
Somehow I can still watch as it thunders and crashes
with uncompromising power
Across sterile court rooms and silent mothers.

But please, don’t stop there! That’s almost right but it’s not
everything.
I think the smell of Auntie Walker’s breath
could contain at least
One syllable.

What I know about God’s voice is that it is
set loose by everything.
It shakes and dances and tickles the bellies
Of everyone
And everything
that lives in this holy space.

My head, my heart, and
All the fathers on the earth cannot contain it to
A single bass.  

My only prayer is that maybe
God’s voice wouldn’t always sound so deep to
the people who have told me this.
I pray to God,
Whoever she is,
That she would let her words
land upon the vibrations of my own
gay lisp
From time to time.

Wrinkled Right Hand,
with your heavy weight of dull iron veins:
Today you find my shoulder through streams of
morning light.

“I need you
my son.”

Do you remember the night
I journeyed to the kitchen to find
A cup of water?

My shoulder was two feet closer
to the earth then,
But you would still plunge down to find it
Anyway.

All of a sudden I saw
the body you belonged to
(that severe, vertical line)
pale green in the light of the clock on the
Kitchen microwave.

Those neon numbers made you look just like
You’d fit perfectly on the arm of
a great alien god.
In fact, I think you ****** the brown
from the freckles on my shoulder
once you found
it.

And what about the Indians and Pilgrims
scotch-taped to the skyscraper cabinets?
All they ever did was
wave down to me with their hands,
fat faces grinning in
two dimensions.

You did not let go while
Your extraterrestrial colleague stashed the *****
behind the Cheerful White Squanto.
Words hovered above the surface
Of my head:

“I need you,
(please don’t tell
your mother)
my son.”

I stopped believing in Martians
And God
When I left for school.
Still, my shoulder follows your familiar pressure to
the piles of wood in
The kitchen cellar.

When you have finally left
and the fury in my shoulder
loosens all the knots,
My hands throw splintered logs through the air
But for a moment I mistake them for
flying saucers.