Look at us, scorched and scornful black-burnt stick-limbs scratching messages on the walls, pencil scrawled profanity to make you stutter and avert your eyes like you never thought those words in pleasant company, gloves stretched tight white painful across your knuckles buried deep behind your teeth, tasting blood at the back of your tongue, fighting…

I am not prepared to look at the place you left your shoes (I see them at night, behind my shuttered eyelids, I picture them side by side, one laid over sideways discarded with the laces struggling to catch up) I have a towel, here I have hot coffee you can have my robe. The…

I said this then I forgot what it meant in the haze of lost remembrances and words skewed catty-cornered from the way they should have read In my myopic misanthropic misalignment of the margins I let slide the focus and the letters I was sending in my head slid off the page burnt down to…

This avenue ain’t for the downhearted, the heavy steppin’ This is where people walk who got five pounds of flour under the stairs and enough sugar left over to make a cake This where folks walk who got a dollar in their pocket without the corners torn off already half spent on nothin’. This is…

Right now I hate everyone I pass on the street who isn’t her. I don’t know why she left her shoes, left her car, shed her scent when she walked across the sand I only know that her seat on the couch is still waiting and when she comes back, I’ll cook and listen to…

When I was 5 or 6 years old, I came home from school and told my mother I couldn’t play with Jerome and Michael anymore because they smelled bad. “What do you mean, they smell bad?” “They’re black,” I told her. “My friend told me not to play with them, because black people smell bad.”…