Waking Up Before Noon


Bird chirps like katanas, slice through
my late morning sleep. Sunlight 
pours through the broken blinds

and spills onto the pile of blankets
I'm sleeping in. I pull myself deeper
into them, trying to hide, I can't help

but notice how the holes in the fabric 
covering my face look like stars 
as the sun seeps through them.

I need to see the beauty 
of a sunrise, people say. My body
chained cinder blocks, I want 

to sleep. I've come to accept 
that I will never see the sun rise
or see its white light jump up 

the horizon like ices cubes popping
from a frozen  tray. I've come to accept
the fact I will never see the beauty in it.




Ideations 


Most nights during the summer, 
I sit in my living room, on a couch
with cushions like quicksand, 
counting the days until fall,
watching the fireflies
across the street as the road
gets swallowed by the encroaching 
night. A pick up basketball game 
keeps looping over and over 
in my mind. The game wasn't 
important, but I can still see
the light bouncing off the gym floor
and thin shadows the lights
overhead cast. I need to write 

something that exposes me. 

Write a poem about how you miss 
playing your cobalt blue bass
even though you could barely snap 
the bass strings like rubber-bands.

Write a poem about how you're afraid
of your mother dying. Imagine the stretcher
wheels grinding against the sidewalk. 
Each caster has sand in them. 

Write a poem about not being 
black enough. Each rattle of your
tongue, pronunciations guessed from 
books reaffirmed by your white mother. 

Write a poem that's a fantasy. Something
where you could almost be in love. Let it 
obscure the burning emptiness 
through you.  





Pinwheel 

​
Standing in the middle of the public 
library, talking with an old man with 
thinned rimmed glasses about poetry, 
I thought of the first time my mother
came to see me in a play. 

She sat at a round table in the middle
of a baptist gym with a floor 
like old Styrofoam. I watched her 
from the hall, slowly following 
the setting sun and drifting dust

specks caged in the rays sifting 
through a nearby window screen. 
After the show, she gave me 
a few yellow daisies and a rainbow
pinwheel toy.  The corners of her 

mouth curve upward as if they were
sakura petals rolling through the wind
as she blew on the pinwheel. 
The man asks me who I'm reading, 
I list a few authors, he goes on 

about Cummings. I kept thinking
about the pinwheel and how 
its multicolored blades 
broke long ago.