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LATISHA: The cops ain’t looking for no girl so we don’t get caught. (Pause.) Until now. Now, we kinda worried. Kinda in trouble.

YVONNE: (To Latisha.) Why?

LATISHA: Yo! You can’t tell nobody. And I mean nobody.

YVONNE: (To Latisha.) No, no, I won’t.

LATISHA: I’m telling you I’ll jack you up for real.

YVONNE: (To Latisha.) I won’t tell.

LATISHA: (Pause.) We capped that teacher.

Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day

is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,

panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,

ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red

hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it

before him like judgment, saying to the mist,

then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what

I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.

The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking

brushes the air between us like a wet mark

stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead

twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.

Robyne, who, when someone hurls 

toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.

My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins

I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

The statue’s resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn’t dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn’t shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.

Come the marrow-hours when he couldn’t sleep,

the boy river-brinked and chorded.

Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided.

Sieved our alluvial sounds—