Dirt road, snake grass. Willows fanning
the ash pile like an angel’s afterthought.
We had to move our holy tremors into tents.
Ask anyone. Ask their mother. Rogue verses
still roam these mangroves.
After the steeple buckled into charred planks,
the swamp sprang through the floorboards
within months, and pews grew ragged
with switchgrass. Moth wings hold the place
in our psalters where our last chants stopped.
There are forces of night at work
the smoke and skyline of industrial lights
can’t wholly hide. An owl perches
on roof beams through which the moon reaches
to wash our hymns off the sanctuary walls.
We still hear the candles, the ecstatic tantrums
of our skin that licked our murals
to cinder. When our water pails welled
with every prayer ash answered,
you could’ve filled silos with our silence.

I am back in my desert after many years.
The Mohave.
This desert was once an ocean—
maybe this is why I feel myself drowning most places—
now it’s the driest desert on our continent.

Bone dry, we say. Even though one-third of the weight
of a living bone is water. We know nothing
about ourselves.

I have my passport with me these days, too, like you and Manuel.
Not because of ICE raids, but because I know
what it’s like to want to leave my country. My country—
to say it is half begging, half joke.

Lately, I settle for an hour instead of a country.
What joy might be in this hour? I ask myself.

And there is much—

Two nights ago I watched bedside lamplight pour
to the inside of my lover’s elbow, and fall long,
across the soft underside of her forearm,
disappear into the dip of her palm,
like her hand drank the light, which surged
again and brilliant over each of her fingers—

a wave of moonlight riding the dusked rails of her arms.
I was tied there—to the moon, those tracks.
Fasteners, sleepers, and spikes. Bound in light.
Unbolted from my sadness by the fast engine of joy.

The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway runs our desert—
its trains thrall in star-thick nights,
splitting desert darkness and heat with their own.

In Needles, California, Mojave women sold beads and pottery
to white women at the old El Garces Hotel, a Harvey House
built for the train stop. And Houdini’s wife died on our line, too,
on an eastbound train from Los Angeles to New York.
Her body was removed at the Needles stop.

I’m eastbound myself, soon. For a reading at the Whitney.
For love or art. For the grime of New York,
and the grime I might make of my body in that splendid city.

It began like this: a radio
midday, heat—remember?—a shriek

on the highway, and in the yard
Steller’s jays chafing over haggle, nag, their claims

a lyric tableau—pretty for the eye—how
sun for months stuck aureoles

of chrome around everything, even
your poems, omens

so no other disaster would happen.
But that there was dust—

it had not been so before in June,
grass dead at edges

where a dirt spread had begun, feral
cats interring piss into nasturtiums.

His death had become
the dropped side of a song, melody

undone by damage
exactly the feel of teeth entering

an apple’s bruise. The trellis kept
the jasmine rapt

as it collapsed in its own odor; so ardor also
trained the spine

of your weeping into a mind,
confluence of fumes and confusion. Over sills,

jambs, silt sent collusion: thistle, burr, mouse
turds, urine’s lingering funk in rooms

where to write was a widow
alone with the last broom she’d bought. Heat,

with its missing finger
and nine filed nails, tuned all afternoon

its blue note: horizon a slack string tautening
against asphalt, whose sound

was drought, marsh departed
before August began, black-outs rolled

house to house, how perfect the fraud and emergencies.
So there were two songs

sung in counterpoint
to jays, argument about belonging to

a place,—remember—
prey and prayer, one struck

the other beneath the lyric image, playing flint
to tinder until on the radio

eastern hills caught fire: extremis,
excelsis, that is

how summer, all veils
and exhalations, courted the hills. How

already the church was burning
when your soul went out to meet him, to marry

his new weather—

They ask what I believe in—
Sour milk: the curdle & butter of it
Baby’s breath ragged with phlegm
The green sheen clinging to her skin like algae
The bone & teeth of us mossy and alive with DNA

But what’s your religion, they’re after—
What gods do you pray to?
The frilly curtains of her laughter
remodeling alla my pain
Oh, how she adorns this house of mine

So god’s a woman? (hands on they hips)
How water ain’t a woman
the way she make your thirst
her temperamental breasts
& everywhere everything everyone everywhichway—water

Well, who your altars honor?
The ghosts that inhabit us
& all the evidence of them:
double vision—floaters flecking
our periphery when we look away

from the light—all the mouths
at the bottom of our stomach—
Ever wonder why we eat two plates
& still hungry? Or how our anger
multiplies in seconds like a kitchen

of negro roaches? Yes, even the roaches
have melanin black/brown with the spirits
of wayward witches I burn candles
& pour brown liquor out for my bitches
& they glorious golden auras

To what churches do you tithe?
Our Lady of Ladled Magnificence
God of Ghetto Grace Incorporated
Our Mother Who Art in Harlem
House of Regurgitated Resurrections

Have you ever been possessed?
We ain’t never not been owned
not with all that restless bone
sediment at the bottom of the Atlantic
wonder why we frantic with personalities

How we sing with three throats
bending notes weeping willow
What are trees if not spirits
weeping & dancing simultaneous?
How we dipped our nooses in gold

& hung crosses from them
& wore them like shiny portable altars
How is there not a church in our chests?
How our breasts leak gospel truth
How our teeth ache with the blood of Jesus

Who, then, is your muse?
(pointing) ain’t she a muse amusing
a maze amazing amazon
of our dreams prisms that fracture
into auras & auras that fragment dimensions

Isn’t mourning a religion, then?
Like how all these feelings grow
muscles & flex & jerk inside of me
Like how they can’t kill us even when
they hands scream bloody murder

Like how we show up wearing white
just to spite them—spit at the pulpit
of bullshit & Babylon How we eat
bibles for breakfast Leviticus & grits
Our souls sizzling in the skillet like gizzards

What is the geography of your grief?
Everywhere they are & ain’t
painting the block milk white & sickly
a tricky bluish tint (think: veins under skin)
a sticky blues a blush blood—bluing the block black

I half-wake in sudor, queer vernacular forgotten in the sinew of sleep.
Wetted by a man whose saunter turns
my breed diaphanous,
I fasten myself to his shared anatomies while he ascribes me
to the shades of children we’d make.
Sex, my choice

harness for affection, I falter before unreining curiosity.
Trans time and space,
I follow the russet roads inside

myself, Accra lanced into my neural system still. My intra-continent sweats
through shirts, and drinks stout,
though it tastes of displacement.

I still have a penchant for what misconstrued me, to live among kin in exclusion.
Awake, I don’t conflate touch with knowledge,
so my projected selves approach

the helm as nimbus parts me. Their mission is simple.
I buck their tether
They tighten its hold.