Banquet and Moths The banquet lamps quietly sink into stillness, The light inside the black tent is like the sky— Dim and swaying; the lamp's dark base is the colour Of earth, turning up the faint candle-glow.

An occult pain God is a brute Eves hummed in evil tongues Their approval ratings dipped

Not river, not creek - give the ditch its due, that narrow cut behind the grocery store where summer storms leave bottle caps, a shoe,

Big hands of caustic nights rubbed on the biofilm The world changed its color Our man went south

The light stays on for no one and for all; at three, the empty avenue is small. A moth keeps striking at the yellow wall

"Engentado" I'm peopled out Even Kintsuigi couldn't mend my dirty pretty shattered pride

Emboldened with warm breezes, the buds appear. They are shy And fatten from branches, long for leafy leaping of green. But hold, at tip of stem and axil, a little longer with sacred ply Of tight, grim perules and protect, from last gasping, obscene...

No integration. No communion. Just isolation. The space between us was cavernous.

The nest remained above the porch, a gray cup hardened to the beam. Each spring, the birds crossed the threshold with mud in their beaks,

The old hall groans with cluttered might, A riotous, crowded delight. Bronze gleams beside porcelain's sheen, A thousand whispered tales between.

The highway ends where the blue ink breaks. A town is printed twice, then disappears. The highway ends where the blue ink breaks;

Two months after leaders signed the official armistice amid the rubble of the capital, news came that we would leave the ford and return to the city garrison. The infantry were ecstatic.

When the owl soars in the shadows of night and black centipedes fall from the sky; when the grey-footed stallion shines white in the glow of Coyote’s fey cry...

Still in the absence of wind and cosmic touch lies the lonely prints with earth above as witness, but there’s no confetti raining down, where noise becomes still.

He who feeds the soil knows not that I hold him so, between my roots, a bulb of cradle earth in mouth and eyes and all

I used to take the Strassenbahn from my apartment to my work where I was paid to focus on odd books as an accounting clerk.

To my cousin, Vinny, sleeping over, you and I were eight beneath the covers with our flashlights

I can’t claim to know the makings of Godly hands: Perhaps they’re fibers, coarsened by fresh silk or leather, resistance to water or bloodshed.

I would have left behind sweat drops like breadcrumbs, crisscross footsteps along country trails

When my tongue was still hog-tied from Liberia’s civil war, you unknotted my colloquialism and syntax,