My thought is a mandala, a mantra. A round thing turning over and over in my mind. A focus for my eyes and my breath. It’s as close as I come to prayer.

All of this a lie, because you can’t remember the apple tree,
so it was never there, and I was never there, and
and I am just like my father, a liar who remembers things
that never happened, never were, in those spans of years

“There will be people who’ll cross the street to avoid you because you’re black,” my mother would tell me when I was younger, in every conversation or argument about race we ever had.

Slowly
a pile of red skin grows on the table,
like snow or eyelashes unattached
to a wish.

The island was ours; each kissing gate and the kisses inside of them, each water trough, every animal call, root, rock, dock leaf and bunker. Even the moon.

“I believe if you read a lot, your mind learns the ability to play different games or see different options in every situation that non-readers might not see.”

The birds (of paradise) are chittering
which seems insufficient
for a poem, because it does not match
the intensity—or is it pain?—

“Telling one’s own story is as important to a certain kind of survival as food and shelter.”

This week I learned that every other year the Holy Ghost plants a baby seed in a married mom’s tummy. Nine months later a slit opens up underneath across the bottom and the baby slides out.

Perhaps the only way kaleidoscopes can forever renew themselves is by not asking you to look into them, but by asking you to look out from them. Why not?