Your grief is so heavy,
when we lowered the coffin,
all the pallbearers fell in too.

Your grief is so heavy,
when you cried your last good-bye, the end
of the world said “nigga, get off me!”

You love your mama so much,
Freud came back from the dead
just to study your sorry ass.

You love your mama so much,
when she died, our mamas died too
Some of our favorite aunties caught strays.

I miss you so much,
I don’t even use the word “hello” anymore.
Now, I greet everyone with “good-bye.”

I miss you so much,
sometimes I go to strangers’ funerals
and eulogize your ghost.

Your ghost cries so loud
our ancestors keep haunting me
to complain about the noise.

Your ghost cries so loud
I took my Black ass to a Klan rally
for some candle-lit peace and quiet.

Saeed Jones

And then, night neons itself inside me and I begin missing you in loud new ways:

The sky burns itself bright then bruises black. Things fall from the sky and those things might be water but could just as well be boys or bombs or billionaires or birds. Honestly, between your death and me, it doesn’t matter or I don’t know or I wasn’t looking or I couldn’t see because I’ve made a home out of how much I miss you and there’s no one here to tell me I should leave.

Alone and night-neoned, I write read drink drug grieve and all America keeps teaching me is that there are so many ways to die in America which, frankly, is qwhite confusing because this country killed you a decade ago and I’m still writing reading drinking drugging grieving binging binging blacking out in the cozy, claustrophobic home I’ve made out of how very, very much I miss you and the sky keeps throwing down consequences and corrections and histories and nations, I mean, come on, who can blame me for not wanting to go back outside? You? A whole decade ghosted, grounded and ground down into unreliable memories, dollar-word metaphors? No, not you, mother as mortar and pestle, mother as son mangling meaning out of his mother’s misfortune, mother as second draft: sorry, but it’s awfully true: you are prelude, and your progeny, loud and unrelenting in your epilogue, somehow has to live on as your last sentence, uncompleted.

Saeed Jones

Tôi đang lừa dối em
Mà sao em không biết
Những lời nói tình duyên
Với tôi không cần thiết
Chớ nên thề thốt chi
Ðùa vui thôi đấy nhé
Say đắm và si mê
Sẵn sàng đang nhạt nhoè.

Tội nghiệp quá, xây những lâu đài cát mơ
Biển vắng trong chiều sắp mưa
Tình cũng như là đám mây mịt mù
Tình là nhớ, xin nhớ không lừa dối ai
Ðừng nói câu chuyện lứa đôi
Tình cũng như dòng nước trôi.

Khi tôi tìm đến em
Là tìm vui trong chốc lát
Ðến một lúc rồi quên
Nhớ nhung không cần thiết
Khi em hiểu rõ tôi
Yêu nghĩa là phai phôi
Nghĩa là mang hận hoài.

Phạm Duy

We work too hard.
We’re too tired
To fall in love.
Therefore we must
Overthrow the government.

We work too hard.
We’re too tired
To overthrow the government.
Therefore we must
Fall in love.

Rod Smith

Because I am their daughter my body is not mine.
I was raised like fruit, unpeeled & then peeled. Raised
to bleed in some man’s bed. I was given my name
& with it my instructions. Pure. Pure.

& is it wasted on me? Every moment I do not touch
myself, every moment I leave my body on its back
to be a wife while I go somewhere above the room.

I return to the soil & search. I know it’s there. Buried
shallow, wrapped in rags dark with old & forgotten rust,
their discarded part.
Buried without ceremony,
buried like fallen seeds.

I wonder about the trees: Date palms veined
through the fruit with the copper taste of cutting.
Guavas that, when slit, purple dark as raw meat.

I have to wonder, of course, about the blood orange, about the pomegranate, splayed open, like something that once was alive & remains.

Safia Elhillo

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

Langston Hughes

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

Dorianne Laux

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.

Ada Limón

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

Langston Hughes

How lucky we are
That you can’t sell
A poem, that it has
No value. Might
As well
Give it away.

That poem you love,
That saved your life,
Wasn’t it given to you?

Gregory Orr