Cursed Assurance

When I speak of rain
what I wish to say is bones–
bones again wet with blood,
given flesh and eat,
speaking in a hissy seethe.

What I wish to say is
the rain, like the sea, is bones–
unpeopled and alive–that once
hit the ocean floor the way
droplets kiss my forehead.

What I wish to say is,
What are your names?

What they wish to say,
they write on the pavement,
on the hood of the car,
on the cover of manholes,
on the ship’s bottom,
in the rusty cracks,
in the flood,
in my belly.

What they say,
when I wish to listen,
brings me to grassy
plot, soggy kneed
and salt-water cheeked with
tight-jawed whispers
to the trees “Do
you hear what I hear?”

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This We Call Shekinah

You must open
the locked stage
your grandmother keeps
in your chest.

This is how you willow:
start with a center.
Move left to the backyard
or the yards in the backs
of knees and necks.

Dig a planet.
Fill it with bubbles.
Yes, blow bubbles
and name them.

Call on yourself
in the names of each
gentle burst.

Fill the darkness with
darkness and feed it
the salt water that pools
on your high cheeks
and lashes at your
mud-caked heels.

Call it salvific.
Call it the beginning.

This is how you sun.
High and harnessed
oracle, look down
and tell every begotten one
about paradise. Watch them
hack. Give them your scars
for soil and your myth for seeds.

Leave them fresh water
and story. Word them into
knowing they can believe.
Believe them into wording
you can be known in parts
of them. Exit.
Call it ascension.
Call yourself light.

Practice closing
the marked grave
only for your children
to confuse this dance
with open.

You must find the way
to the chest of drawers
with the good china,
and set the table for friends
who may take generations
to find your address.

Call it homelooking
for the diasporified.
Call it conjurewaiting
for the souls retrieved.

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A Phenomenon of Light

Black is the color
of my mama calling up the teacher
to say, “My Black child will stay in her Black
home this Black inauguration day.”

Black is the sound of fellowship hall receptions
with hot comb heat-drenched ponytailed recitations
of Margaret Walker and King and Hughes and
Jesus over sugar-syruped fruit punch
and our favorite deaconess’ oversalted fried chicken.

Black is the lone head nod in the great
white noise that makes
the Black in me feel less alone.

Brown is the color of my true love’s eyes.
Brown is the color of my mama’s skin.
Brown is the color of the lines running cross my palm.
Blue is the color of my pressing oil and my veins
and what we call the music of Black sadness
and what they used to shade the Gross sisters and
Doug’s Black friend Skeeter, and
I’m only white when I’m ashy
or around my Blackest cousins
or on a page, dialect free, talmbout stags
and finches and flowers
or on the phone
tryna get my overdraft fees waived
like a nigga.