Three Poems
When This Train Comes
When this train comes crashing
It’s okay cause I’ve got Je-sus
The lights flicker
And go dead
There’s a woman reading the Psalms
We’re under 100 million
Tons of water, Under
100 hundred million gallons of the Hudson
The lights have gone off
But she’s still gripping her bible
In both hands like it’ll be her phoenix
Like it’ll point its nose upward
And return her to daylight
She’s reciting from memory
The words, speaking it like a lullaby
I swallow hard and attempt to listen
Through one man’s coughing,
The heavy breathing
And someone’s blaring headphones
I hear cracking granite
Turning Day
When the World Wakes up
If there is no poetry
The world will not know what to do.
And the world will sit up scared
In the middle of the night
And the world will be frightened
And it will cry, rocking itself to sleep.
It will curl under its blanket,
Frightened and shivering
In a room filled
With its own
Imaginary Monsters.
My Country’s Achilles / The First Time I Saw Ethnic Cleansing
they came in dressed
as officers whom we thought
were friends. And they dragged
her to the washroom and they
made her strip her blouse first
and I could see her exposed back
and these men became elated that
she wasn’t wearing a bra and they
began to grope themselves. They
slid their fingers in at the waist of her skirt
before pulling on it, before tearing
the light cloth and embroidered stitching,
to shreds. And they began to touch her
and hold her and violate her in ways
that were so much worse to hear than
see. And they took her and they held
her and they filled the tub with bleach and
these two giants who pretended to be angels
they tied a rope around her neck and they
stabbed her and slit her until they couldn’t
hear her breath and then to cover up the
evidence they dipped her in the bleach
and they let her body float a moment
and I could see the younger holding her
so that the liquid would seep in, I saw
him holding her ankle between his thumb and
his index. And I saw her ten years later walk
up to them, these same two demons,
her skin ghost white, and
she threw her leg up on a hydrant and
then she lifted her skirt and
exposed her ankle, and she
showed the world that
She was still Brown.