The Heart Needs No Roof
Because the house where
your dreams became real
had stone walls and no roof
to block its view of the volcano
even now there come nights
Category / Poetry
Multiple Choice(s)
You can find the Vietnamese cafe
kitty-corner from Swedish Hospital
or get fish and chips or burgers
along the water. You can kiss
a man or a woman, or a man
On Politeness
Mothers run towards the trucks
and the soldiers, barrels-up
to sunlight, ride in the back.
They have never been so
hungry—
The Fourth Wall
I can recall when the first wall
came down
it was unexpected
how the sunlight barged in
from where it was not
A Basin
The bees are washing themselves in honey
All night I listened through a cloth sack
A song of sour bread dunked into wine
Dark handful of grapes heavy a breast sweeter
Than ripe carried like a black sugar to the mouth
Mugabe Rejects Charges that Detainees Are Tortured
The government thought we were terrorists
because we looked at a house. White people
would never live in such a house, they thought.
My parents were held for hours, questions,
questions, questions.
Gift Day
I made it to work
But my car did not.
Yet I only had to walk
half a block
in the below zero air
RICKY T, 1960 – 1986
Prince of Darkness never shook hands,
flossed his teeth religiously, never sweated,
didn’t like heat, kept his windows open year round.
Computer whiz, master mindpicker,
keeper of serious secrets, cruelly conceived,
Culls
If there were a range to wander
on the back of a semi-broke horse
I suppose I would be happier.
Instead I sit cross-legged
on a brown leather couch
Lost
In June fog, I am an empty boat,
weathered, one oar lost,
at the center of a fathomless lake.
On a warm July morning,
I am a blue canoe far from the sea—