while you marvel at it imma run to the store.

my blood brings me closer to death

talking about it has bought me new boots

a summer’s worth of car notes, organic everything.

gay cancer

Melvin, Assanto, Essex, my Saint

Laurent, Xtravaganza   House of

sissy & boosted silk     dirt throned

with your too soon it grew

in me too    blood’s gossip

cum cussed        gifted to us

from us    yes    it grows by the day

still    i’m sorry   we are still in the midst

of ourselves  here   a pill for your grave

a door to our later years

you deserved   o mother    o sweet unc

who we miss & never knew

is that you?

my wrist to my ear

you’re here

happy hour

grandma say she going to the funeral to see who all there

like i say i’m ’bout to grab a drink. the woman, not someone

she knew too well, but someone of a similar age & blackness

southern daughter spun north out of promise or terror-

toned night, who fled into winter to escape the pale rope-

skinned good ole boys just being boys, but that’s not on her

mind right now, just help me get this necklace on she say

& i latch the gold around her, my grandma a night

sky of moles on her face, dark stars glowing in the honey

a mole per friend, per friend of friend who now feeds the worms

& speaks to her thru the swell of tomatoes, the exact yellow

of the tulips in the garden, each bloom a gonelove saying hello

just stopping by for a summer & then, again, come winter, they go

to the funeral early & count the living, grandma & her girl Mary

headed to gather a body like i sometimes call my play-kin

to pass a bottle of hen—Mary, whose blacker hair my grandma

has surely held back on a sour friday, who she calls

sometimes with nothing to say, just to sit on the phone

& be alive together for a while, now in the diamond years

of friendship, after the children have been born & born their own

& some of them have died & the husbands have gone first

& another friend & another friend & an old love & a last

as the world throttles into what was once imaginary

waiting for a God they’ve believed in for decades to show

her face, surely their own faces & hopefully before they find themselves

raising a glass in a room of empty glasses, sipping whiskey

no, not whiskey, a glass wet with browner ghost.

drink your dead. get throwed oft their leaving. the duty of the last.

waiting on you to die so i can be myself

a thousand years of daughters, then me.

what else could i have learned to be?

girl after girl after giving herself to herself

one long ring-shout name, monarchy of copper

& coal shoulders. the body too is a garment.

i learn this best from the snake angulating