from dead end into underground railroad just add
vowels and massage your shredded money
with lemon juice and salt

it will still taste like kale but the next line
of letters might open up the machine
to reveal men behind the screen

admiring in a mirror their robot brains
like our own looking to see in corrugated
metal a shiny reflection

our faces before we were born

April—I am free enough from the dirt-
slobbered, cold-rain, thin-spined-trees winter

to wear the free rags I like—the ones that parade
the hairy bulge of my belly—I am free

to trample the thousand nameless flowers
in my white-columned small town—a leaping

squirrel extinguishes suddenly in the roadway
near the projects near my own house—is

my greatest fear becoming a “good” white
person though I am not white—worse

fears exist then, worse fears and worse
.....there is running water in my house

but the guilt of privilege bores me, the tiptoe-
around useless privileged guilt

i reserve the right to feel
nothing. i keep for myself
myself. i wanted so many
things. propped. top shelf.
i find my feet. they sink. & i cannot
travel. i have not touched a body
like me. i release my feeling of rights.
nothing of myself like me.

don't ask me how i'm feeling.
it's not a fair question.
incrementally, you are american.

are a schedule of trash and debil-
atory fire. a sad face. the kind
that slips off when
wet. half of a whole mountain.

i dullard dot seem a sad toy
am the happiest i have been
forever! in fact am a steep joy
marinade… pruned jasmine
boba black are my fingerprints.
carefree to avoid thy thighs & not
lick (wowza!!) electro fences.
so seems i the dense dot?
I have lost not one drop this year
more far than my trust for man's
words & slurs. SO, is it spiced clear
to glean in the field sits wo man chan
securely undeported, wrung-through
cheering generations, incomprehensibly unto?

tree, dead / the day after
a country tried
deporting my family. and me

squat in the dunes, blessed
the granular earth, and made
the sound of crying – teemingly, unfished
in the broad Atlantic mouth.

i have always loved the ocean     i love it
for its size it keeps itself hidden

from the interior of no imagining
saltwater is one long sentence
saying your pain is a chuckle
compared to how I’ve held a billion glass lives.
I gave no consent to what would and wouldn’t live.