you and that yawns into a bomb

Everything I do I do with a grace

which has only ever been described

as bestial     A gazelle or a swan

I’m a precise kind of fugitive

When I was born     history stuttered

I lacquer my palms with the silence

I think it’s impossible not to miss it

Despite everything I give white people hope

Nothing will ever demand me to be

this merciless        again

OBAMA SPEAKS OF RIVERS BUT WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ON DIFFERENT SHORES

If it is true that a people can be a river then me and my

father wore the good shoes   just to stand at the bank    Soul

music washed up from the speakers in Springfield  Obama has

gathered us here    fulfilling a promise     three years grown

I’m in 8th grade     it is 2007    I’m a little country in a little country deep

in the midst of wars   as in plural  as in the skies here are blue like

they cannot be wherever men drop bombs to get rich    The

speech is about to start    folk have come from all over like rivers

We rode the bus up from Chicago in February at 5 in the morning

in dress clothes as if he would be able to see us amid all that hope

We rode the bus full of folk who looked nothing like us to go cheer

a man     who looked like us    though the resemblance stopped

at a mutual inability to burn under the weightless pressure of a gaze

We are in the crowd     at the radius of visible    and I know his arrival

only by the holler of taller people    I can’t see anything that isn’t above me

t-shirts banged loose from the cannon     fast clouds punctuating the sky

It’s cold enough that I forget the speech worrying at my numbing toes

even if I were tall    I will never be close enough    to see the breath escape him

in little pearl colored gusts    beneath my feet not a stage but cobblestones

some still full with little muddy rivers of snow    yes      I’ve known rivers

I have stood abreast of them leaning against my father’s good coat

Kid leather full to the brim with what makes a goose eligible to float

against the heady sky      This coat he used to carry me inside as a baby

this womb he was given by my mother    this thing he shed as a gift to me

later that same year    This little bet he made      with himself that I would

Grow into it     that he loved my mother who stayed in Omaha

selling the last great thing we owned so she could come home

that his feet must have been cold too that day    We had even worn dress socks

thin fabric to a party we not even on the waiting list to the waiting list for