Your best friend calls you up to tell you he saw your boyfriend on the Internet doing some “sex stuff.”

Baby’s kissing bruises into her boyfriend’s neck, branding him black­-and­-blue.

I’m pretty sure that ISIS is to blame for the death of my grandmother.

The movie you both went to see isn’t important. How this date leads to the car, to the windows fogging is what matters.

Her placenta, a jackfruit dangles beneath— and patriarchs return beloved amongst the trees.

I find it hard not being a hero.

Mom said our bodies were for God’s eyes only. Once, when Bobby Kafka tried to look down my pants in our back yard, I told him so.

When they grimace, she thinks they’re smiling. She smiles back, or does the closest thing she can to smiling.

Like anything—the finch, the tortoise, the coreopsis—we pass on, and so then, what else but for today?

On a queen-sized bed, an Oshun-picturesque seductress, who should have been Billie Holiday’s twin, said hello in that way good gin gets you.

I’ve never been much / for reading / in the dark

A strip of me, between my belly and throat, began to cry out. But I silenced it.

The first writer I ever slept with stole my watch off the nightstand.

There’s not even a pen, and we all claim to be writers. 

You never saw it, but there was a rabbit on the ceiling.

Before my wings melted, they were golden.

One eye wonky, there is no smile.

My dying mother never did let the priest come.

As your editor, I don’t like your book, but I do want to know how it ends. 

Mère, Maman, Madre.

When they ask of their father, you will tell them he loved jazz. 

Get up boy, goddamn. Get up just one more time.

Allow me to taste something pure and holy, have it pound on my body.

Death, to whom you lost this bet, came calling in spit-shined shoes.

In your case and mine, our poetry and the way we live are entwined.

I was a king once.

This poem is to George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, NYPD, and KKK–

The thing with afro hair is, sometimes, it grows upwards. My father had never seen this. He fell in love.

I woke up one morning wondering when the last time I’d spoken to me was.

Somewhere a trashcan is on fire warming a pair of hands.

You remember the ancient Egyptians lined their eyes with kohl, watching their cats watch them. They could not see the Romans coming.

Isn’t there a song that goes “mix me up with water, it quiets down my edges?” Well, anyway, there should be.

Not old enough to vote, but old enough to drive, to ride the ferry to the city alone, to bear between us the heartbeat of life, brief, astonishing, with all its oh shit and what’ll we do and what if.

Don’t act brave when they come. Don’t open your door. Change your name. Run.

A stranger, as strangers are apt to do, approached.