i say a little prayer for you,

thats all i have today.

when i go to move my lips,

to raise my tongue

and speak life,

it is wrung out,

like the washrag that

cleaned the blood off the car seat.

all that comes out is a liquid prayer.

my hope has grown mold in my mouth,

my faith has grown stale in my chest,

mossy and foul,

from the same place i try to love,

from the same mouth with which i kiss my baby.

the same saliva that helped me eat

now chokes my throat,

the eyes through which i saw peace

now well with sorrow.

my face twists and twists and twists

like wood in decay,

warning of my body's fate.

every step i take may be the last,

every breath the same.

i wheeze when i cry these days,

over Black bodies yet again,

but if i do nothing else

with my weak breath,

high and thin in my mouth,

i will say a little prayer for you.

blood smashes against the inner walls of my body,

racing through alleys,

filing everything to film.

eventually my skin will give up,

and i will collapse like an abandoned city,

weak at the foundation,

alone in repair.

how could i follow the path of my ancestors?

how could i not?

how morbid it all is—

living.

it isn't this way for everyone,

just those of soil and bark,

those sun people

of timber and chocolate,

the coveted ones

of root and age,

the dispossessed

who keep the custom of trauma

and teach it to our young.

one day, the youth will have to choose between us and freedom,

and i hope they set our charnel out to sea

and wipe our cemeteries clean;

then they will move without the slave in their bones.

i will carry the slave in me,

but may i be the last.

i feel power in my ancestry,

for they were the ones that survived despite,

but i cannot figure out how to honor them without climbing in their caskets

and rotting by their side.

i want the freedom they sought,

but is it freedom if purchased in blood, in family?

i gave it all for liberty:

i gave my father so he could be free.

i gave my mother for the same.

i gave my sister so she could never know captivity.

my grandfather died before i knew what giving was.

me, a voluntary orphan limping in frail emancipation,

how could i have amounted to anything else?

how are you?

i ask,

"for real.”

i chase your eyes with mine,

trying to latch on,

but they dance a two-step,

followed by a shuffled smile:

a lie.

one half of your grin

rises higher than the other

when you're half-committed.

you don’t know i see you,

but i do.

the wet of my eye waters a dream

that one day your gaze will settle in mine,

that you will lend me your secrets to keep,

your heart to hold.

i will keep it warm and beating

even as i freeze.

i am not half-committed.

don't you see that?

sometimes, at night,

as true quiet wades through city atmosphere

and rests on our bodies

languid from all the lies we've told,

i can hear your heart grow loud,

then quiet,

all of a sudden,

as if coming toward me,

then running away.

he's hesitant to approach,

shy because i notice him.

what saddens me most

is that he need not be afraid.

i am stupid

and will guard him more fiercely than i do my own.

i can’t do anything else.

my silence

is my gift.

i suffer in it,

i suffer for it,

but it keeps others alive.

my silence is the elixir,

the first meal of all who eat,

the breastmilk that sustains

the little black mouths

that will eventually spit in my face

and call me faggot,

that will deny me life

in the end

but claim they always loved me.

they will eat from the tree

that fruits atop my dead body.

the trees won't say what i should have

and will give generously,

whispering our truth under their breath.

my coffin is made from my sister,

another person whose silence fed a village,

another tree nourished from the rot of a casted tongue.

i have her with me.

i am hidden within my skin,

obsidian mirror to reflect your leer—

don't you want to see yourself?

i see you, clear, magnified,

i hear you through lip, glance and stride.

play, play, entertain!

you say to me,

take care of my children,

but do not touch.

comfort me with hands

made of my lust,

prey to my power.

be ashamed of pleasure,

and most of all,

do not feel pain.

dark femme boy,

i want you to earn my desire,

trick me into loving you.

enchant me so i cannot help myself,

beguile so i cannot be blamed.

dazzle so that out of shame,

i won't wash my limbs to bone

when i retreat to a night

dark enough to remind me of you.

and what of me?

i am a mother-jester powerless in court,

queen regent with no sons,

just forlorn limbs and bedsheets soaked in exception

when lovers forgot what i was.

i know why people run away from home:

it hurts to be hated by your own.

we were the most us in the west,

somehow.

the sun rose and gave us light and warmth,

which we shared as meals for breakfast.

we consumed each other in the dark,

midnight snacks wrapped in low thread count,

we feasted because we had nothing else.

i do miss our home in the east

where we bathed in the honey of dawn,

ran in the fields naked,

dressed in robes of wheat and corn,

but we had to take the crops in our bones

and flee,

for the rope came for us.

somehow we were able to find home out here,

even though sometimes i feel the opposite of home is west,

the opposite of love is western.

today i got the news,

that the east came and found us,

found you

and took you from me.

that honey turned to gasoline

and burned the tongue from my throat.

i cried to put the fire out,

but failed at even that.

i wish i could tell you i'm sorry

because i need to feel worthy again.

only you can give me that.

but i know you would say,

with a loose laugh that always set me free,

"that's how i know you not sorry!"

and i would resign my head downward,

inching to the left,

a grin crowning on my face

"you right, baby. you right,"

i'd reply.

air rustles the leaves in my throat,

a sweet sensual scratching,

as i whisper who i want you to be

what i want you to do,

as i utter the secrets held at midnight

in the wood.

breath escapes me cooler than intended.

it was hot inside of me,

but it shivers the same.

i didn't know i could find fantasy in the bark,

crossing short bridges of arched backs,

still lakes of saliva

thick like wilted cobwebs

from a different kind of thirst,

a different kind of slick

for a different kind of food.

i want to be wild,

to live with girth,

and inside you i can be that,

in the dark,

where my face is the night,

and my voice, the trees.

we dampen in the field,

preparing to shower in the dawn.

the soil recognized our lust and forgave us of it,

and we left it pieces of ourselves,

penance in a way,

but also out of a gratitude just as strong

for a thrill often confused for love.

i felt something strange

when i heard his voice for the last time.

a voice like the sound of a dying home,

ashen bricks, steel rusting,

the sound of a house putting on its trousers

and abandoning me in an industrial wild.

the walls were tired of holding the roof,

the roof, tired of keeping out the rain,

the windows, tired of hastening air,

and the floors, most of all, were tired of me,

so they packed their shit and left.

what did i do to push away my home,

or was this my destiny all along,

to never know shelter,

to make love under lunar lamplight

with pillows of dewy grassland and uneven soil

guiding me through the erotic geometries of strangers.

i put so much into him that when he left i had nothing,

and this new poverty ground my future to dust—

dust, the ashes of the forgotten—

and in that dust i sat, holding my breath,

and, with my lonely, arrogant index finger,

i wrote love letters,

odes to what i once hoped for

sonnets of lust unfettered;

now i'll spend the rest of my freedom on being alive.

tonight i put everything to bed,

tired, spent,

hoping that sleep will come easy,

just as easily as lies,

smooth and unrelenting,

like the dreams i long to have,

if ever i get them back.

he made me feel like dirt,

but not just any dirt,

the kind that lives in cemeteries

guarding the dead,

presiding over watering grounds for those

who mourn the futures of the deceased.

tears, the sweat of straining faith,

exercised, over-worked from lifting

love into the ground,

fall with the hope that the body departed

would find a love so great and whole

that other lives would spring from it and thrive.

i do not host my death, thankfully,

like so many others.

i do not share that fate,

but yet i am filth,

supporting the steps of disappointed lovers

whose hopes are dashed away,

swatted into the distance like mosquitoes and fireflies

as they stare onto the graves.

that's what he gave me,

the feeling of dirt,

as his parting gift,

a gift that lasts—

that and comic strips that remind me of my grandfather, my hero,

a man i loved deeply and thoroughly,

a man who is also dead.