When I Am the Reaper
after Aziza Barnes
I have a walk that confetties jibbles of pigeons
onto sills of second-story windows and enlists
cotillions of crows to post up and soundtrack
my trek with trochees of italic f punctuating
the power lines. I crash the happy marriage
of ex-smack den and turquoise-veined boutique—
one mouth foaming white and the other troubled
with chap and language harshened by wind chill.
They know me not by name but by increased
police presence. What I take is my damn time.
I hawk flares of phlegm, stomp everywhere
on the sidewalk, knowing nothing could break
my momma’s back any further than the mother
fucker who blew thirty years filing insurance claims
under the bell jar and watched her body curl
in the smoke. I come for his kid. Coated in blue
like a gullet full of Prozac, I balloon up that
advanced placement with inferiority complex
and clap a book on that ass ass ass ass ass.
When I am the reaper, God works me from
the blackest material known even to herself
to ferry all light frequencies to the curved back
of her eye. I mean black as you might not see me
but, black as clocking fuckery for eons, black
as an unlit corner in the church that I shouldered
together before they had a town for the devil
to tear through, blacker than before this dry
erase. I’m the wall the writing’s on and the last
three teeth in the loud throat of a bus, and yeah
I heard what you muttered in the pearly white
parley, but you don’t know I know where you get off.
A Leadspray of Starlings
Which was a compensation for songlessness
Which
was an accident
The particular ills of an able body
That it could be
co-opted
its diagrammable musculature
a breakable foal and if not
brought to heel
then
to infantry to
interstate medians There was
latent tremendous sickness His
he-ness for instance
which in this climate
festered
The figure of the
Nigger did its long-lidded hover A flutter over fields
Dragged
itself flat with a tractor
clatter
Combed a magnolia’s crown Shook down
its messy skirt
Exhausted we lay like
open graves Watching
the scatter con
stellate we called out
“cuttlefish” “bindle
stiff” “Moo
ring
sport” “POTUS head”
“nina”
until
scatter was lost in sky sky was full of night and night’s
foot
stuck in our mouf
