Author: tgifreytag

"I'm Rooting for Everybody Black"

     — Issa Rae

Everybody Black is my hometown team. Everybody Black
dropped the hottest album of the year, easy. Everybody Black
is in this show, so I'm watching. Everybody Black is in this movie,
so I'm watching. Everybody Black wore it better, tell the truth.
Everybody Black's new book was beautiful. How you don't
know about Everybody Black?! Everybody Black mad
underrated. Everybody Black remind me of someone I know.
I love seeing Everybody Black succeed. I hope Everybody Black
get elected. Everybody Black deserves the promotion more than
anybody. I want Everybody Black to find somebody special.
Everybody Black is good peoples. Everybody Black been through
some things. Everybody Black don't get the credit they're due. I met
Everybody Black once and they were super chill and down-to-earth.
I believe in Everybody Black. There's something about Everybody Black.

■

Killdeer

You know how it pretends
to have a broken wing to
lure predators away from its
nest, how it staggers just out
of reach . . . if, at this moment,
you're feeling metaphorical,
nest can be the whatever
inside us that we think needs
protection, the whatever that is
small & hasn't yet found its
way. Like us it has lived so long
on scraps, on what others have
left behind, it thinks it could live
on air, on words, forever almost,
it thinks it would be better to let
the predator kill it than to turn
its back on that child again,
forgetting that one lives inside
the other.

■

Barter

Life has loveliness to sell,
     All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
     Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder in a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
     Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
     Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
     Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
     Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstacy
Give all you have been, or could be.

■

The Santa Ana

Desert born. Wild
     As corn. Dry
Bitch. Itchy clit.
     Meteorologists
Measure me

     With mercury;
Police with murder rates.
     But I’m neither
Mercurial nor monstrous.
     Everything I touch

Explodes with flame.
     Everything got the hots
For me.
     I’m flamboyant.
I’m a witch

     Still burning
At the stake.
     My red dress
Right off the runway.
     So Vogue

I make you death
     Drop. So gorgeous
I make you drop
     Dead. Jesus Christ.
My winter will last

     Longer than Wintour.
Foehn named
     After Saint Anne
—mother of the mother
     of the Messiah—

I’m the only testament.
     Apocrypha.
Apocalypse.
     Take my word
For it. For God

     Sent me to Eden.
To Sodom.
     To Southern California.
Like a Real Housewife
     Holding a butter knife

To her husband’s neck,
     God sent me
Here to rinse and repeat,
     To singe this land
Of sin, singing

     That Eagle’s song.
Haven’t you heard me
     Howling down the cliffs,
The dark desert highway,
     Swishing my hips

Into the Cajon
     Like a lovesick coyote?
All thrash. All ass.
     Deep-throat. Whip-
Lash. I bat

     My eyes, and Los Angeles
Lights up
     Like a cigarette. Ash-
Tray to ashtray.
     Angels no different

From Lucifer
     Falling all around
me. LOL. So wow.
     Much merry-go-round.
Very Mary. Go

     Round up
Your little lambs.
     Nothing is safe
From me. Try me.
     Give me the trial

Of the century.
     Give me Liberty,
Or give me Death
     Valley. I want
all the flowers kneeling.

■

CHECKING OUT

I turn off the Xerox machine and the fax and the other fax
and the PC tower and the fluorescents,
put the check register in the desk, lock the desk,
and take the elevator eleven floors down
to the narrow front of East 21st Street.

When I come out, the space between the buildings
is so thin it's an upside-down skyscraper of sky,
narrower at the street. There will be no sky at all
for the next two hours of trains back to Brooklyn.
Someone once told me I should come to New York, so I did.

Two trains and three stations later—and a walk
past a housing project like a cliff made of bricks—
I am back in my windowless basement room
with the tile floor, staring at the square grate
in the middle, wondering what the drain was for.

I eat the same sandwich I eat every night.
A car alarm punctuates the seconds of the dark,
as if to say how few hours of single-malt sleep
stand between me and tomorrow's trains.
Someone once told me I should come to New York,

so I did. Tomorrow I will try to buy food
for a different kind of sandwich and it will not go well—

I will see the word California on a bag of mandarin oranges
and start crying in the narrow aisles of the supermarket—
and a man with a cart full of cat food will ask me to move, please,

he is trying to get to the checkout. Where I come from,
I want to tell him, they make the grocery stores
big enough for someone to cry in the produce section
and someone else to move around them.
And when you get to the parking lot

you put your oranges in a car, not a backpack,
and you drive the car home, and you park the car
in a driveway above ground, never under,
and you eat the whole bag of mandarin oranges
at a kitchen table bigger than Brooklyn.

■

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

■

Perhaps the World Ends Here

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating the last sweet bite.

■

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
          And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
          And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore,
          And the tide rises, the tide falls.

■