AARON THE MOOR

Believe me, Queen, your swart Cimmerian
Doth make your honor of his body’s hue,
Spotted, detested, and abominable.
Titus Andronicus, Act 2, Scene 3

When we bring others into our lives,
we bring all their life into ours: not only
their family, their secrets, their dirty socks,

but also the warmth of their body next to ours,
which allows us to accept all the challenges
of our lust to belong. Aaron understands,

embracing the blood beating
between him and Tamora and the blood
hammering in his head between him and his foes.

But what’s the deal with this brother?
Jumping in bed with a Goth girl like that.
Running around in a country not his own,

beating his chest like that. He acts
like he doesn’t know those Andronicus boys
would kill him just as soon as swat a fly.

Aaron, who walks through their starlit lives
like a black hole filled with every desire
they ever desired, knows the snares of life

and, so, chooses to live his life with a vengeance.
There’s power in not apologizing for being
in the world, for embracing the legacy revealed

through, and adorned with, your skin. Yes,
coal-black is better than another hue.
When every doorway opens to another closed door,

why should he behave like a welcomed guest?
His body’s hue holds many colors,
and with the gift of his tone, he speaks

his mind through a prism of words. Yeah,
for this alone he could do prison time.
Next thing you know, every crime committed,

even crimes committed by their own hand,
gets blamed on the new brother in town,
and they’d just as soon chop off their own hand

before admitting their own wrong; they’d
cut out a tongue, before allowing someone
to tell the truth, but let’s be real:

These people can’t be trusted
because they can’t trust themselves.
But Aaron knows he’s not a traveler

in a foreign land but himself wherever he lands.
And all the water in the ocean
can never turn the swan’s legs white.

Andronicus may try to narrow
his choice between being a villain or a slave,
as the executioner’s blade raises,

but Aaron the Moor, the man, chooses
to lift his truth above the blade,
which can’t swing true enough

to silence the cut of his tongue.

OTHELLO THE MOOR

Only a Black face throwing light could cast so many shadows.
Only a Black man in charge could garner so many foes.

When only a Black general, when only a black lover,
when your only black friend is only yourself . . .

when your Desdemona’s so white she doesn’t understand
what went wrong. When you’re the only Moor, white men

say things like, “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago.”
Desdemona looks for you with a candle in the daytime,

but you still don’t see her. You can’t see her
when you can’t see yourself. Only the whites

of the eyes of the whites see behind you.
Only the eyes of the Moor eyes the shifting of the day.

When proof appears, who appears behind the man?
Even a handkerchief, dyed in mummy, the color

of your own hand, reveals a foreign touch.
You want to touch the truth with your eyes,

so you can see the magic in the web of your wife.
But even your body, begrimed in beauty, can’t be trusted,

if you don’t trust your own life.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award BROKEN SHOWERHEAD

 

Water pleas mercy before landing at the bottom of my shower. A loud smack announces contact with the black paint my landlord swears is waterproof.I put a blue towel down when Momma calls to ask, what was the best thing about your childhood? I breathe in before saying, it was my sweet sixteen party. Momma, clad in captain’s hat drove a decked-out school bus so me and friends could watch Titanic at a secret location. It’s my second favorite movie. I loved that Momma and Mama T smiled in sync. Two sisters reunited after the fault of addiction collapsed. Mama T made nachos and Momma made powdered sweet tea. In that moment, we were all teeth and all together. Back then Momma ain’t have to enforce Mama T to take her Skittles. Mama T danced my conception with a man I’m afraid to know. Momma took me in her arms at age one and changed my name. She said your name means dominion. But where is the kingdom I rule, if I am stuck on this bathroom floor watching the towel disintegrate? I can still hear water knock its head against the shower floor. Although I can’t sleep, I must say I enjoy that it doesn’t call on my birthday and vanish when I ask about lineage or loss or cause. Momma asks instead, what is the best thing I poured into you? I mosaic light bulbs and forgiveness and violins when all I meant to say was gratitude.

QUESTION FOR MY BROTHER RE: WARP DRIVE, THE SPEED OF LIGHT

Imagine an ant, you say
      as we eat sandwiches
at the table, windows already December
      dark. Imagine it at the end
of this placemat, the way it
      would look out over warp
and weft and see an eternity—

      its insect brain unable
to untangle each ridge of weave
      or envision an end. You
brush crumbs off the brown fabric
      square, which is now
space-time, and fold it so its edges
      touch. We watch

the invisible ant step from end
      to end. Then you let go,
and the cloth sprawls open.
      Younger sibling of physics
and logic, of the universe mapped
      out in ten dimensions,
you say that this is how we might
      move faster than light, say
did you know black holes
      would sound like static
between radio stations if we
      could hear them? You

explain that scientists saw matter
      squared and knew it could be
negative, anti, ready to annihilate,
      its other. Is there easy
math for the world—
      casually violent, reeling
up on the TV in the coffee shop,
      scrolled over, regular
enough to warrant the usual how
      did we let this happen? Alone
in my new city, I often feel far
      away from everything,
a soft pang stuck somewhere
      in the back of my throat
like the throb of prodding burnt
      skin with my tongue. Tell me
again that darkness hums

      static while it drinks fistfuls
of light. Say there’s evidence
      that we might pass over
fields of life woven too wide
      to cross. And, when we can’t
move, who is it that bends
      to fold up the space beneath us?

STATE OF SORRY

My mother and I drive to the Blue Ridge mountains
listening to Bruce Springsteen and the fruit stand
in the flash rain becomes the last thing you said to me,

its red soggy arteries. I turn the song up, oh, thunder
road, oh, thunder road until I cannot feel myself turn
away from you shouting along with big helium eyes

last summer in the karaoke light. I look out at the range,
turning the furnace in my brain away from sorrow
level flames. They’re always blue, says my mother

and it’s true, they’re beautiful—these massive hills.
On a hike, she reads the brochure of George Vanderbilt’s
life—how he came here on doctor’s orders, fell in love

with the landscape and died soon after he built his
empire. All his focus on health didn’t help him
in the end, Mom explains and a passerby tells us

how silence cured her, expanding from her ears into
the lake. I hear a piercing when I hesitate so I apologize
for the noise we do not have in common. After you

died, my mother said depression and I hear myself
count the letters in goodbye—their shrinking. I want
to tell you how I’m filled with defunct rage, a gutted

socket people flick their sorry matches out in. I want
to tell you thunder gives me a false sense of shape
but I am stuck in a state of windless need. Give me

your most electric morning, brand me warm like
the cold Biltmore horses. Give me your silence
but don’t let me keep it. Show a little faith,

there’s magic in the night. I dream of setting fire
to the barn where goats lay sleeping. Not one
wakes for me to tell him, hey, it’s alright.

 

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem THEORY WHEN A WESTERN LIGHT GOES OUT

Tonight, the wind plucks leaves from their branches.
A coroner, it drops

the near-dead
in front of my door. I rise to the porch, gather the halfway

bodies. Pressed between dictionary pages, their veins
leave brown stains

like blood.
Little souls stamped between faucet and fog, dead and dreaming,

alive and alone. I hang their imprints on the wall.
As a girl, I played

a silver harmonica
that I swore would sound without a mouth to it,

a wind made by those mouths locked in meadows,
their teeth gone.

Once, I saw a stag
set to be buried in a coffin, satin-lined. His antlers sleeked,

his muscles glistened slick with embalming fluid.
Even then I thought

how strong—
the animal poised to leap in a different life.

In a different life, the invisible would not just be visible
but more beautiful.

Every past
wrong, undone: the stag not dead, but awake

in a green meadow; a hole in the ceiling not for a leak
but for rain,

warm rain,
to clean the interior; my father, not buried

but sleeping
the peaceful sleep of a body in love with the earth.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award PYGMALION

Your hands dig me
Out of my tomb of ivory,
Carve the mark of my eyes,
Open so the whites are white and
Guileless, onlooking, sand down
The apple of my hips, chisel
The dips of my back, every stroke by
Calloused hands, those yellowed
And aching hands, those coarse and
Clawing, cloying hands that wrench
Me into unmovingness. I’m made
More perfect by the cold, skin
Unknown to blemish but by the
Weathering of your running hands,
The wearing of your knobby hands
Only a man’s gaze to awaken me
To praise the pure expanse of
My impassive beauty, to linger
On the sheen of my jaw and my
Roman-column neck, earthly-globen
Breasts, the way I gleam under summer
Sun or by cavernous torchlight.
How your eyes frighten me, lingering
And you finger every mountain,
Every cavity, wish me awake, fervently
Pray I would take to your breath
Step down from the dais and down
To your feet, plead Aphrodite make
Me soften and melt at your body
But if heat came to me, it would come
First to my legs, like fire, and burn
All at once, and I would roil and churn,
And I would run, I would run, I would run.

BRAYER

From four fields down this morning, the Walkers’ mule
is braying as if he’s had enough, as if he’ll kick off
the human arms bringing his burden, as if he’ll have
no more of those days he works straight through.

Here is a flower. And here is an imperial moth.
Here is a kitten playing with a tennis ball. Here
is the shooter taken without incident. And here
is a child. Here is a congressman calling for prayer.

There goes the Walkers’ mule again, unbowing his head,
stretching his muscled neck, and letting out a bray
like a peal of trumpet and kettledrum as if he could make,
by breath or will, yesterday’s burden dissolve today.

ORION

This evening’s worn on. It’s late
by the time Orion peeks from the alley
(after the bar, the band, the brawl,
the last call). He rises, he peers around,
he steps out further, he cinches his belt.
He stands proud. He swears,
                                   every so often moved
by a well-worn notch or two, this
is the one belt he’s always worn—
forget his full belly bulging above—
since the days, seems just eons ago,
when he was young, a sparkle in your eye.

INVENTORY

        —garage

The wooden workbench,
scattered with half-finished
projects. The saw and drill,
the red tool chest,
its internal mechanism
allowing only one drawer
to open at a time. The
pneumatic jack, its long,
white handle. The cabinets,
bought from an online posting,
hung and painted gun-gray.
The carburetor, sitting on a table,
the spring that makes it work.
The bin with empty cans,
the overflowing ashtray,
measures of the time
he’s logged here.
The gas-powered heater,
its flame, the soft blue glow.
The overturned metal-bottom
boat. The mouse nest,
the baby mice, their wriggled
mass. The smoke-stained
posters, the boxes and boxes.
The vice clamps, the free weights,
the picture of the two of us,
tacked to the wall. His feet,
sticking out from beneath the car.
The draining oil. The mind
that knows the problem,
how to fix it. The delivery,
picking the right tool
from the box,
carrying it across the cold
cement floor. Its destination.
My father’s anticipating hand.