GREAT AMERICA

Where even in death, in miniature
carved stone, we never escape
the fucking guy on the street
when I’m just walking
to the gallery to meet a friend,
who could be a lover in a different
eclipse season, because this one is
about destruction, it makes you say
Stop looking at me when I ask to be
a vindication, it is about a heatwave
that drives out the sort of company
I want to write spells for, say
“indefinite” as if it were a word
with a real concept behind it,
as if it had any context,
as if there were any imagination
left from the fall of our stinking
expanse of sweat and dahlias and wartimes
and insects and escapes and
sinkholes and caves and patterns and jokes
and consumers
and televisions and invisible numbers
and scandals and every kind of boat
and religions and mammies and world
champions and natural disasters
and spooks and illegals and casseroles and celebrity
baby names and prizes and trophies and
wives and discounts and loans and skin
and skin bleaching and
civil rights and McNuggets and shipping
containers and emojis and slurs and amendments
and disco albums and priests and maps
and security systems and galas
and job titles and car mufflers and good
deals and altars and defunct
social networking websites and
brothers and niggas and magazines
and grudges and watermelons and
conspiracy theories and colleges
and special editions and deluxe editions
and holocausts and relief workers
and con artists and domestic partnerships
and rubies and law firms and elegies
and Uncle Toms and neighborhoods and excuses
and police procedures and plastic bags and mosques
and raccoons and skeletons and hate groups
and negotiables and investigations and blind
dates and types of cancer and ways to
kill yourself and forms of identification and
fetishes and Bibles and consumers
and performances and wedding venues and livestock
and macchiatos and epiphanies and names,
when it could have been an otherwise easy day,
that specific fucking guy whose eyes prick
and ravage, pathetic, as he says Nubian.

Magical Negro #1: Jesus Christ

They make his eyes that color
so he can seduce you. Literally
every white boyfriend tender
until they’re not. Y’all know
that nigger was a nigger.
Y’all know those whores
were whores. Sometimes
I go to the sink for water
and I come back with a jar
full of wine. Every second
I breathe, I forgive.

Parker’s Mood by Charlie Parker

I am only as lonely

as anybody else, I say

at lunch downtown, examining

my worth. It isn’t

summertime. At the end,