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Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.

Snake dreams uncoil,

                        burrow into the spine of books.

Night spills from cracked eggs.

Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.

We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.

Go Ju go Ju go.

Lightskinned Rainbow

eclipsed Tick Tock,

his chocolate walk-partner.

Incestuous Pootchie and Tan.

Both Frogs. Squirrel. Crazy ass Sponge.

Bama Duke’s lopsided,

sticky daughter, Peaches.

Out b-shaped barber,

Blinky. We miss you,

Missy, rest in peace.

John Rocks-on-Rocks.

The Young Dillingers.

Freckles versus Baby Tim.

Cabalou stuttering,

i-m-m-mi-t-ta-ting Johnny Lips.

Hillbilly, Lefty, Itchy and Skip.

Dootie Bug’s first

baby’s mama, leaving.

Tootie had Fin.

I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome. 

A bobwhite sounds through larks

and jays, the wringing-wet shade,

as in the first world, before Adam

understood their sharp iambs,

when the refrain could’ve been

anything’s: plant or animal, or light

so pure it sang. Even now

how absolute, how wondrously

primitive the singularity rings –

shouting its name, its name,

its name… till from elsewhere

an echo swells through April-thick wings

as if addressing some question

on the presence of parallels.

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…

Breaker, trick rider, picador, and the heavyweight ring’s fastest jockey, Ali has made ring time canter and canter, bow, leap over giant bushes, and move so much in his own terms that time became mutual with his grace, Truly the Professor of Boxing, he elasticized his profession, made daring and cunning and mystery part of the craft. Did we ever wonder as much during anybody else’s fights what the champ was thinking?