Gender & Sexuality

Because I gazed out the window at birds
doing backflips when the subject turned
to diamonds, because my eyes glazed over
with the slightly sleepy sheen your cake will wear,

never let it be said that I’ d rather be
firing arrows at heart-shaped dartboards
or in a cave composing polyglot puns.
I crave, I long for transforming love

as surely as leaves need water and mouths seek bread.
But I also fear the colder changes
that lie in wait and threaten to turn
moons of honey to pools of molasses,

Half the women are asleep on the floor
on pieces of cardboard.
One is face down under a blanket
with her feet and ankle bracelet showing.
Her spear leans against the wall by her head
where she can reach it.
The woman who sits on a chair won’ t speak
because this is not her dress.
An old woman sings an Italian song in English
and says she wants her name in lights:
Faye Runaway. Tells about her grown children.
One asks for any kind of medicine.
One says she has a rock that means honor
and a piece of fur.

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards,
wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some.
Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Chile, 1834

Two guys sucking each other in the steam room
didn’ t want anything
to do with me, evidently —
I left them to their comedy.

*

Legato longings:
wish for walnuts, wish for water,
wish to exorcise this morning’ s debauch —
two Fauré nocturnes.

*

In slow motion
Steve tussled with a motorcycle
trying to run me over
on the boulevard of moon smut

I was a man
and I was trying to save a woman in danger.

I picked her up in my arms
and flew.

Flying like a frog swimming in air
I ditched our nameless pursuer

and landed. There was a guy
waiting for us

who looked
like a king.

Caught.
Now I have to accept the punishment

for saving the woman.
First,

we have to take a shower.
The effect is to loosen

the skin from the muscle
until it peels off.

The woman
picks up the pieces of my skin and

Man is so afraid, he look down at cock, long ago many
centuries ships land on the enemy’ s beach, take down
mast in the dark, climb up cliffs in the fog, ram
enemy’ s door, do bad things in castle, oh yea, man
go crazy play in blood like baby with duck in bathtub,
man think about favorite dog, got worms in heart, takes
dog to field trial, dog sniffs out man’ s lies, point
at fool in frozen water, fool man, dead dog, man look
at leaf frozen in pond, man think about woman in new

(Oakland)

Make it
the place
it was then,

so full it split
vision to live
there in winter

so late & wet
abundance
toppled toward

awful — birds
of paradise
a profusion

the ripe colors
of anodized
metal; in gutters

umbrellas
smashed
like pigeons,

bent ribs bright
among black
slack fluttering;

camellias’
pink imagoes
dropping

into water
& rotting,
sweet stink —

& did not
stop :
the inundated

As a child
I put my finger in the fire
to become
a saint.

As a teenager
every day I would knock my head against the wall.

As a young girl
I went out through a window of a garret
to the roof
in order to jump.

As a woman
I had lice all over my body.
They cracked when I was ironing my sweater.

I waited sixty minutes
to be executed.
I was hungry for six years.