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Breathing Room 

There are lives twice as long as others; 

they might look back on those 

behind them like runners nearing 

the finish line relieved 

not to have been out of it so early. 

We wake one day to an understanding 

about our diminishment yet 

by evening, we’ve turned that corner— 

the present is everything; its tedium 

flaring in the window’s reflection. 

You get tired of being this way. 

Plans go awry & other plans 

get made elsewhere, somewhere 

elaborately empty. Still, we believe

ourselves slightly beautiful as we check 

the door then fill the bedside glass, 

means of accumulation mastered, 

our complaint well turned. 

Unheard behind that window, the night sky— 

boundless—still roars.

Daddy was often eager to play catch, since he felt society expected this from a loving, caring father. A confidence that soared and a glovehand that fell, still there was no baseball near either. Duplicity has killed more black men than gin. In a southpaw, what they appreciate most is this sort of "live arm." From his mouth words rushed like richly fed rapids, leaving him ever vulnerable to ascription.

“You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”

“You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”

“Come on and try.”

“You’re so full of it.”

Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.

For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says.

We unyoke owl pellets from marrow

in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,

a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy

dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark

beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist

with my hand.

And the body is beautifully there, like hoarfrost.

Tears on its face now glimmering like dimes

falling from a slot machine, or a stream, thought lost,

that breaks through fresh snow at wintertime.

From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press