Animal Kingdom
for Donald McCaney
let’s destroy the names will-o’-wisp featherback rhinoceros
let us remember prayer is the same as pachyderm cephalopod
we are in breath we are the air we exhale to horse anglerfish escargot
a wolf calls a deer meal a deer calls a wolf brother
these words communicate divine and death in the same sentence
when there is a victory and conquest there is also genocide
if you can see the dark side of a coin as it falls you will understand
your mother’s prayers lynx mountain-goat maiasaura
you will understand blue-throated warbler and tundra fox
like a tumbleweed making its way across gila monster’s spiny back
like a glass of water resting on tortoise’s knobby shell
refined of shape and texture like panther on the tongue like
whippoorwill osprey humpback dingo yellow-bellied marmot
Don, your wife misses you every day.
Clusterfuck
Six crows pick through rat bones clean
the streets of things that move toward
hope? change? abstracts of being
in an America we don’t know anymore
brutal boys we don’t know anymore
who we used to kiss used to touch before
a terrific change in the America we know
led to a clusterfuck in time once a boy
told me I belonged to him but in this
lifetime I’ve been given I decide I belong
to no man when the men in my family
are angry they turn to drink when the women
in my family are sad they turn to drink when
I’m in my family I turn to someone who knows
more than me about transforming into the moon
a terrific change in the America we know
I replace the moon with a coin so we still have
a currency so we have a circular sill
under the weeping window all these cluster-
fucks of boys beating on boys no talismans
between our teeth no marks carved in our skin
to show we can bleed to show we were right
here