Poems

Under the Answering Sky

I can manage being alone,

can pace out convivial hope

across my managing ground.

Someone might call, later.

What do the dead make of us

that we’d flay ourselves trying

Wow! You’ve Changed

You’ve changed.

You used to be so

and now you’re all

like, you’ve transformed

I don’t know how to describe

it’s like

you don’t like canasta anymore

you text IN ALL CAPS

Dear Diaspora Child

it's okay if you only learned about your culture from Google

it's okay if you only read your language at the public library

Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

C Wing 1

Your mother is missing,

the nurse hovers at the door .

Your mother is missing, a bit louder this time.

As if this was natural, a daily game of let's find the Italian,

All About My Grandmother

Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother

to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,

beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,

The Visions of Stone Carrier

    Stone Carrier was my grandfather, my father, my brother, and
my son. He was a good and brave man, and he taught me many
things. He shared some of his memories with me, memories

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)

Constantly risking absurdity

                        …

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

jules

a blunt thunderstorm delivered her

              to the doorstep of her kohkum

The Listeners

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Heat

From plains that reel to southward, dim,

The road runs by me white and bare;

Up the steep hill it seems to swim

Shots Rang Out on My Street Today

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Shots rang out on my street today

Three Black yoots lay dead

shot inna dem head

Nuisance

Only the thickness of log

and triple-paned glass

between my children and

the open maw

of a bear.

I slip warm chocolate chip

cookies from the pan

Heirloom

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;

No keys and ledgers were my heritage;

Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates…

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and…

Jesse’s Farm

We’re driving and the radio says mass marine extinctions within a

generation. No silence, no sirens — an unflustered inflection, then

stock markets, cryptic as Latin mass. I force myself: the interval

The Boxers

We were combatants from the start. Our dad 

Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten — 

Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius 

Wolf Lake

It was down that road he brought me, still

in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,

but it did feel expected. The way you…

A Psalm of Life

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

I’ve Dreamt of You So Often

I've dreamt of you so often that you become unreal.

Is there still time to reach this living body and to kiss on its mouth the birth of

the voice so dear to me?

Modestine

We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James, 

who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the

Cévennes

Laurentian Shield

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,

This land stares at the sun in a huge silence

Endlessly repeating something we cannot…

Leonardo DiCaprio

My ex-boyfriend got measurably more attractive

and all I got was a dad bod.

Leonardo DiCaprio has a dad bod,

and for whatever reason this is reassuring to me.

Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar

I Am

l am

gap tooth black girl

back corner of class

scribbling left-handed

poetry on blank paper

save the school's

curriculum for later

I am

overflowing tales by moonlight

Journey of the Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk

the wind and its satellite wait for me;

their meaning I will not know

The Blue Guitar

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.’

The man replied, ‘Things as they are…

The Bow

I only know rivers

Waters elongated to the unrumpled recitatif

of endless land

The Bow knows

Has tongued and grooved the firmament, baby,

of this Last Best

The Bow knows

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

To the Ladies

Wife and servant are the same,

But only differ in the name:

For when that fatal knot is tied,

The Men That Don’t Fit In

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,

A race that can’t stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

Passing into Storm

Know him for a white man.

He walks sideways into wind

allowing the left of him

to forget what the right

knows as cold. His ears

turn into death what

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things —

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple…

How Not to Spill

Dad has creases on his hands so thick they could split with a

poke. He gestures for me to try so I do. His skin bends on a

hinge and out spills every good and bad thing: cattails from our

St John’s Burns Down for the Umpteenth Time

Let’s say the fix was in. Let’s say history,
Being human and thus short on ideas,
Made change from an old bag of tricks. Say this

What Do You Believe In?

Do you believe in the ghosts of aunties and uncles that drive old sin-

gle-bench pickup trucks spotted with bullet-hole rust, sweetgrass and

I’ll Teach You Cree

with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki         frog

your mouth will be the web

catching apihkêsis words,                        …

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling…