Dear Otelia

The cousins are somebody’s pops now, somebody's mama,
and all the babies just missed you.
Said the teachings would live within us but we knock,
and no one’s home.

Split and sprawled out across the map,
all these bank jobs and corrections, all mothering
and divorced, all checks, unbalanced, gas tanks on empty,
and no way back to one another.

Sam don’t rock the Cadillac with the Locke license plate
no more. Grew out of living in the streets,
sleeps in the Dakotas now, where the hills wind on forever
and the Missouri River runs deep.

Deep like our roots, roots like oral histories
and grief caught in locs, like collard stalks
and ancestral beans, like cast iron and steel
wool rubbing your wrists raw.

I forced the flowers into the glove box;
peonies, lilies, foxglove, rosed and heavy
after the funeral, now moth-bitten and aged,
the matriarch has moved on.

My face wet and headlights, radio static,
and a deep musk fills my lungs,
Say my prayers but sit in silence, ear bowed to the glove
box, waiting for the flowers to talk back.

​

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Solar Return Sestina

I turned 25 yesterday and remembered
almost everything. Like how I got the scar
on my knee and the time the dog bit my cheek
so I bit it back or how I laid on my back
praying for an end while hoping to begin
again. Even now nothing’s changed the way I beg.

Last year I lost my taste for cake and begged
for meaning in the sunset. I remember
staying in, waiting for a new beginning,
for something like a salve, for the scar
or a sign, like a signal to turn back.
Something like a rouge for my cheeks

or a birthday kiss, all tongue in cheek
and hips and head and begging
for me fight. Took it lying on my back.
It was impossible to remember
how exactly I even got this scar
on my knee or was it my chin, so it begins

again. They tell me to start from the beginning.
I tongued the cake against my cheek
to swallow and stomached all my scars,
my memory, my dreams, my pride, and begged
myself to recall, to remember
what life had been like since. Back

then I tried to love her, tried to have her back,
ended up hating every version beginning
with the one where I can’t remember,
the one where I bit my tongue and cheeks,
where I chewed up and spit out a girl begging
to let the wound heal, to stop picking at the scar.

Now she dreads the return, like stretching a scar
flex the muscles and bend her back
into a version I’d seen in the mirror once. She begs
to differ, but we have different opinions. She begins
by looking back in the mirror. I hold her cheeks,
apologize for being a day late and she reminds

me what it was like to be nineteen, how we begged for memory like scars
then too. I hoped and prayed I’d remember, thought of every way to get her back.
I lit the candles, wished for a new beginning, and blew the air from my cheeks.