Sometimes the thing that may destroy
your home sings. I love that song too.

Room for uncertainty.

Make room in yourself for the longest sentence
you have yet to say. That was my only singing lesson.

For safety, I abandoned any clothes preoccupied with language, even
a dry rotted rice sack

with the word sweet. Even hair clips inscribed
with clarity: don’t and touch.

Today, I looked for the smallest iteration of myself.

I am thinking of ordering plums from California
because at this moment they are on the tree

and at 11 a.m. they will not. I am in love
with this kind of transparency.  

Room for uncertainty.

A friend reads fortunes in my hair when my lover won’t, love
refracted between us to make everyone in the room more beautiful.

And still, someone enters to ask if I wasn’t born lucky.
I keep a whole rabbit to help me survive. Oh, it eats

and eats at what I was born with. Beloved, if I titled this poem
My Mother’s America, would it contain her mother? How long

before you know the urgency of this sentence is lost?

‍

Note: “I’m Interested in How Animals Teach Us Pleasure” first appeared in print in Copper Nickel

Cottonmouth sunning on a pine berm
after a loud shake in the leaves,
by shake I mean earth-shaking. Green
lizard after green lizard emptying
out of the forebay. I send a snapshot
to a friend who says, Yes, that’s a thick
snake. I want to see more. The world
isn’t miserably sad here. I expand
and live in the warm days. All April,
little sucking marks on blackberries,
popped seeds and filament in the shape
of a tiny mouth. Osmanthus flowers
kneeled into the oak hammock patrolled
by one worried cardinal. There is only
one egg in the bush. I think this is my fault.
I set an appointment for the first of May,
which is the earliest I can schedule
a subdermal birth control implant,
then ask everyone to visit me in June,
before Florida’s most recent
legislative agenda takes effect.

‍

Note: “At the Ecologically Engineered Stormwater Retention Basin” first appeared in print in the Kundiman South Zine.