Beatific
My father beat me when I fell and
chipped a tooth,
my mother when I used our Black maid’s
hairbrush.
“Someday you’ll thank me,” my mother
said as I fought
back tears. Someday wasn’t today. Today
my tongue
was too busy exploring the shimmery
slit down there.
I can still taste you, the surprising
saltiness of hallelujahs.
Dead Language
In the surviving fragment
of
his book On Analogy,
Julius
Caesar tells us to
“Avoid
strange and un-
familiar
words as a sailor
avoids
rocks at sea,” which
sounds
like sensible advice.
But
even so, I’m not about
to
take writing tips from
the
man who started the fire
that
in 48 B.C. destroyed the
Great
Library of Alexandria.
To Those I’ve Wounded
What I didn’t do
I should’ve done,
and what I did do
I shouldn’t have,
and now I can’t
escape my own
history, a stench
like dead-flower
water in a vase.
