Where is my prize for most unreliable narrator? 
I would never lie to you, but I lie to me all the time. 
I say, Look at that bird, this childhood memory, 
that light falling on his body in the steam, 
and say, Boom. A stone truth. A poem. And you trust me. 
You trace your finger along the constellation I’m insisting into existence 
and let my rickety astrology determine the weather. 
But this is all dominos. 
I am just trying to place enough words between now and The End 
to trick The End into coming later. 
I slip single doses of myself into the pockets of everyone I love, 
worried about serving sizes, hoping they do not sour once I’m gone.

UNRELIABLE

1. 
At the border checkpoint, the detention center behind her, a woman through a bullhorn asks, “How does it feel when you lose your child for a minute in the supermarket?” What if that minute turned into an hour, a year, a lifetime? Would you run crazy through the aisles, the streets, your head? Like the time you thought you left your daughter at the campsite under the West Texas sun, everyone else gone to the archaeology museum? How you imagined her at night, a lone wolf circling her, a pack of men? This is the second protest in four days. To get here, you had to walk down a long road, sheets of sand cutting diagonally into your faces. You forgot the sign your daughter made, a diptych of a mermaid submerged in the ocean singing, her arms, her hair waving above her freely. And next to her, the same mermaid—no musical notes orbiting her head, her hair limp—in a tiny cage. With the sign you could have shielded your daughter from the elements. How many more speeches, she wants to know, as an actor from your childhood is finally passed the bullhorn. You and her father take turns carrying her back to the car.

WOULD YOU?

like swallows on my longboard; roll slow through shadows 
 
under trees, filtered light like water on my skin. Breathless green. 
 
One can get so lost in movement, in the comfort of immediacy; 
the quiet certainty of going somewhere. I was fuller then, sure 
 
and bright and bigger, on my terms. Black boy as sunflower. 
 
But the soil here is poisoned. Tuscaloosa’s backbone whiteness 
like a rot; tradition’s claws sclerotic on my roots. Now cautious, 
 
almost photonastic, I’ve gotten so much smaller here.

OXALIS TRIANGULARIS

I was at that age when I’d do anything for twenty bucks. My skin was royally pissed off and I spent every minute working out ways to have sex with boys without having their babies. Obviously I was still susceptible to bad advice. Mum told me to do the job because it’s not like anybody would ever know I’d helped the neighbourhood scum. 
 
“Just feed the mutts while they’re on holiday,” Mum said, as if those kind of people ever go on holidays. 
 
As usual, she sat in front of the tellie watching wrestling and complaining that the summer heat was killing old people and her vegetable garden. Her lettuce was already dead. Magpies had beak-fucked her tomatoes. But it’s not like she really gave a shit. She just loved to complain, and admittedly she had a lot to complain about.

SCUM

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