Update

I love my friends so much. Below, I posted the poems I read at my poetry reading today (with the exception of "Odessa, AR" which I ended up replacing at the last minute with a different poem). I'm really grateful that so many of my peeps came out to support. I felt super loved and I definitely had the loudest cheering section! hurrah!

I am writing a paper now but here are many things that I want to talk/write about after i'm done with all my work on monday:
1)Libertarianism and its relation to the constitution (which is part of my con law paper)
2) What qualifies as an education
3) The Myth of the Dominant Black Woman (or reality?)
4)Emotional transparency
5)Economics and the auto industry bail out
6) I'm moving!

These are all things that I am interested in right now but who knows how i'll feel tomorrow.

A Notification Letter

You halved her like someone eating a chicken,
A casual separation of breastbone,
Her ribs arranged and flattened like planks,
The woman, a wooden walkway.

You forced her apart like someone reaching for change,
A relentless scraping and her insides pouring
like green pennies from a coin purse,
The mother you left me, made of copper.

You died like one death was payment enough.
But I am writing to notify you that
Upon further examination of your application:
I have rescinded my forgiveness.

I am writing to say:
Our azaleas are still wilted
And have dropped their
petals like eyelids
Through my fingertips.

Odessa, AR

When his mother gave away her son, time didn’t stop.

If it had she would have stayed
Thin hipped, thirteen,
Leaning on the doorframe.

She would still be
watching the arid expansiveness
the determined trees
And the moths that abandoned
their fuzz on her hands.

The orphan stop light
Would hang, mid-swing, always red,
Still bleeding into their side of town.

She wouldn’t have turned around,
Gone deeper into the house,
Gotten ready for work.

3 A.M.

When I knocked over the lamp, I knew
he was dead. In the hotel room with his coma
on my eyelids, my hand woke up needing
light. As if flicking a switch would unstring
The last three days, and re-pin the sheaths of skin
I saw his body shed.

In the next bed my brother
Sighed and through the dark
I felt him turn his back to me and
knew that he wanted to touch my shoulder,
to reach an ember of our father
still flickering in my body.
But we were still stopped by
the sound of his words as he'd unpeel his
belt like a husk from his corncob body,
"You can't raise a boy to be too soft."

Amy Winehouse

“They say decrepit pop hag Amy Winehouse is back in the sick house once again”~bossip.com

The tabloids say you smell of urine and unwashed hair
And smoke cold cigarettes that taste like refrigerator.

I read somewhere that when you’re tired or high
You and your husband lie beneath the windows
With a redwood growing out of both your hands
Listening to the paparazzi in your branches


But I bet that when everyone leaves,
You climb to the roof of your house
And miss those shiny droplets of light
Slow sprinkling like oil
With every flash.