longingly. As a child, I asked my preschool teacher

why I couldn’t play outside, shirtless like

the boys. It was a hot day. Before she could answer,

I relented, wearing my favorite undershirt—the one

with Archie, Betty, and Veronica—chasing

my sun-kissed brothers across the playground.

Lately, when I glimpse my nakedness in the half

mirror above the bathroom sink, I’m looking

at the photograph of Pauline Lumumba baring

her breasts as a sign of mourning. The widow’s

breasts and mine hang like four weeping eyes,

without titillation, fertility, or innocence.

I wanted to write a poem for Betty Shabazz

because her high cheekbones and luminous

eyes are like a BaKongo mask breathed

into with life. After her husband’s lifeless

body was wrapped in white linen and covered

by the words: what we place in the ground

is no more now a man—but a seed—she took

one last look at him who had smiled at her

and touched, countless times, her unveiled face.

My mother did not wear a veil on her wedding day.

Eighteen years after their divorce, my father

fidgets with the gold band she slid along his finger.

As she made a circle with her thumb and forefinger,

shimmying the ring over my father’s knuckle,

which words did her mind circle over: worse or better

death or death? That night, did my mother bunch

the hotel bedsheet in one hand like a nosegay?

Did she allow it—another white dress—to drag,

crumpled, behind her? The vows we promise

one another are veils through which we envision

the future; we enact our dreams using a vision

clouded by tulle and lace. Grief-stricken, Betty Shabazz

said of her husband’s assassination, Well, it finally

happened. Weeks prior, she had taken to wearing

her husband’s hat for comfort and continued to do so

after he died. I want a desire that could be mistaken

for grief to cloud my face, to make me shudder, to twist

my mouth into a cry. Once, I shared a bed with a man

who, as a boy, heard his parents’ lovemaking. I was

confused, he admitted, it sounded like they were in pain.

Grief is the bride of every good thing, Betty Shabazz

reminds me. I’m wearing a veil the shape of a waterfall,

which is also the shape of my mother’s dress, falling

from her shoulders. Through its fabric, I can see a cloud

turning into a horse and a plane that could be a star—

a star that might be a planet. It’s hard to tell from here,

wrapped in the caul of the present, fixed on this plot

of grass, with so many seeds buried underground,

and winter—forged into a circle—threatening never to end.

At the Fish House

Captiva, Florida

I’m contemplating the diff rence between anger

and resentment, but I’m interrupted each time

a brown pelican crashes into the water, more recklessly,