Prose at This

In the black history month of 2012 He cut his white bed sheets into yarn, wrap- ped them into strands, and pulled the rope from the master’s hands and tried to take the reigns of his own life.

But his “this little light of mine” broke in the dark- ness of his lonely bird cage and he lived on as that crazy boy that sang the song of innocence to a justi- ice that was more than blind—or maybe justice was just deaf on the day of his arrest.

In 2013 during the month of thanks and giving, and after freedom was given back to the bird he tried to clip his wings again from the bannister in his parents’ home.

Three years of asking why made his life feel like an unanswered question. Freedom came with southern horrors imbedded in his brain—do you even trust yourself after two years of forced solitude?

No one listens to the 'I didn’t do it's of someone in solitary confinement. A trial that doesn’t happen feels like a sacrificial burning, but trials these days burn bodies after they’ve been hung just like they used to in the Jim Crow trading cards.

What is price of three years stolen beginning at 16?

He succeeded in clipping his wings the third time with an air conditioning power chord.

We can only eulogize what he could’ve been, he only could’ve flown from the ground.

There isn’t a rap sheet to discolor his wings.

Spells are called spells, and we spell out words, say them for their sounds.

Apply them to bodies, and those bodies feel the seq- uence of letters for their cur- ved vowels, and sharp consonants

forever.

The tittle is the sentence.

We are all witches.

There are too many haunts in the house.

The ghosts have polluted the quartz.

A milky harvest. A smoky silence.

A tree will strive and green in spring even as the grass that covers its roots browns.

Miss C.(e)G.(e) Nation is not

Welcome where she loves.

No one wants to see her black

and white photos.

  All of her children are bastards.

Her heels are too high. I see more

of her skin than my own. Her first

husband’s last name was Crow.

When I say:

I can’t breathe.

You start serving, and protect my life.

He lay in the street like

Polyneices, and the kites

kept the Antigones away.

  In defiance of the natur-

al order the Creons spoke

in lies that woke the Sphinx.

in another life, you were Pangaea; i was Panthalassa.

or, maybe it was the other way around.

either way,

I want to get back to the time when our cratons were one, when our waters bound- less.

For H.P.

Marine layers over the  sun.

Living near the ocean,

taught to take precaution  in seizing the day.

does pulled pork and ham break down the same in the gut?

does one blacken and dis- solve, as the other is glori- fied in the throat.

the moat around the king- dom is molten.

I came with books and I'm leaving with more.

Sometimes mid- summer devotions linger until hands meet again,

keeping each- other warm in winter months.

Hands, kisses like a keeper--

no one de- serves to feel  the wrath of an- other's rage--

which should  be spoke-  n into a mirr- or.