I Want to
Wake up to
My favorite band and your hand
Between my thighs.

I want
Your *******,
Cold and steady,
Pushing inside to open my eyes.

I want a fifteen minute
forceful kiss; You
Rolling me over
With your lips.
I want
All ten of your fingertips
To draw me a pretty picture.

I want you–
When you see
My fingers spread,
Like my toes before curling,
Or my trembling legs-

To pull my thighs
Away from center,
Pushing each farther
From the other.
Like one bed
With two angry lovers,
Hugging its opposite edges;
Your hand in the space between them.

Sun leaks through bullet holes in the sheet-tin ceiling,
Sprinkling light on dead mens' clothing
Piled stiff with dried blood and dust of fifteen years.

What does it mean when the stained glass windows
Left intact
Let in less light to this church
Than the small holes in its brick walls
Made by grenades  
Thrown from the hands of its priests?

What does is mean when the left overs of dead believers are
Speckled the holy white color of
Bird ****
That drips
From the bullet holes above?

Nearing the aisle's end,
I feel an urge to touch
What I don't believe I see

And look more closely.

Tangled human hairs, crusted blood,
Loose threads torn from hand-stitched hems, in shreds,
And insects nesting in the decay of the dead.

I recoil and suddenly, reach...

The tour guide asks
If I'd like to photograph
The bullet hole
In his forehead.

He was one of six survivors and
Gives white people tours five days a week
Of the forty thousand dead,
Pointing out his baby brother's bones,
His mother's skirt,
His lover's toes.

This survivor knows.
With a bullet to the head
He escaped death,
But not the days he lived
Piled amongst the dead.

Standing still and silent,
I respond only in smiling
To his insistence I take pictures
Of tragedy's remaining pieces and
Strangers' screaming skeletons.

Take more, he tells me, always.
A smile, one arm folded formally behind his back,
The other pointing from bone to bone.

I hold my camera to my eyes,
Pretend to press a button every few seconds
While following behind.

I can not take anything from a place already *****.
Except for this man and the bullet he carries,
Nothing is left.

Here, I can not take photographs.

Junior high hallways of
Girls kissing, without meaning
It
Like boys getting the erections they
Did not hide
From those wishing to see them shy,
But not away.

Sisters were a specialty with
Incestual immunity-
A senior class with nine sets of twins and
Two-hundred, watching them share chapstick.

Girls at liberal arts school,
Painting our ******* like we were wearing the same dress
To the weekend's party
And could dance ourselves clean
Without touching a thing.

In Spring, the Bennington bookstore special-ordered
THE KISS posters
Stuck on girls' ceilings that semester like
Plastic stars
Glowing in the dark above their beds-
Alone, watching white-pantied girlfriends
Lick lips above their heads.

We moved mattresses,
Made floors into king-size beds, and mocked manliness
Our boyfriends' weariness when they visited.

Holding roommates and classmates naked by the *******,
We found by spooning each other
How deeply we fell asleep.
To wake up, stretching in the sunlight of open curtains
No one would tell us to shut.

Quickly, we were moving to Boston with our boyfriends and making
Pairs of plans,
Then abandoning each at our own pace,
Like we'd talked about at night before we'd have to have that pain.

Years later, I followed my lover to meet his parents,
Who took us to dinner, and after,
My head on his childhood pillow,
Looked up at two girls kiss.

Tonight it's stinging while I ***
Men plucking bottles from bins below the window
Must be watching me
Shudder
On the warm toilet seat.

I live where a man rubbing
White shoe cream on his leather loafers has ulcers
From malnutrition and constant cassava.

Where a man’s sister loves his Fossil watch
And avocados, but gives
The whole fruit to her hate child.

The road is walked in the morning by
Rwandans, the jerry cans on their heads wetting their chests
With water from the spigot, half an hour away.

Nike shoes are unstitched, laces
Washed white daily and
The drinking water is gone by seven p.m.

I live where black people go thirsty keeping
Their sneakers white; throats dry each morning
While lacing their shoes.

Claude spreads the legs of his first girlfriend and
Recognizes the in-between
From his sister’s.

She was seventeen and silent;
He, six and sobbing,
Pushing the bamboo deeper
After
The men who ate
Dinner with his father
The week before
Told him to.

They said he had to **** her; said
He was a Tutsi, and limp, and finally,

“Farther!”

She was wet with blood and he with tears
Crouched down in the grass.

At twenty-one,
Claude hovers above
His first love
With closed eyes and dry cheeks.
She is wet, with want, and
Whimpering.

Not from
A stick’s broken branches,
Or twelve men
Holding her knees apart
“Showing a cockroach how it’s done,”
One by one
Ants crawling toward her blood.

Claude hears her closed-lip whimpers,
Says how much he’ll always love her, and
Cannot come.