I am coming to you live from

a Negro spiritual born with dust in its veins

and little else         Melody of heat lightning

threading the space between desert and stars

Let’s say what’s real       I’m a sad nigga

come from a long line of sad niggas

I am coming to you live from a generation

of thirst     Everyone I know is trying to fit their callouses

around the throat of grief       It seems like it has come to this

it seems like it has only ever been this

What is abandoned in trying to leave sadness

as if it is the lonely opera of a day lit storm?        My family

I am coming to you live from straddling a noteless tragedy

I am wandering through a harmony built from bloodlines

and humidity and the tenderness only fugitives can claim

It took a precise sequence of sins to make me

and I am giving none of them back

Only a mouth can cure a mouth       A man is singing

in the distance       and he too is a sad nigga come from

a lineage of the unforgiven       I want to find him

I want to manifest destiny my own sadness

Thirst to shining thirst         shame to shining shame

If I find him     we will hum as if we are bullets

discovering the labor of bullets       heat lightning

unspooling amethyst              until death do I part

from the life I have tarnished with my living

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Versions of these poems appeared in the following publications:

Acentos Review, Adroit Journal, Anomaly Magazine, Bird’s Thumb, Big Lucks, BOAAT, Callaloo, Emerge Literary Journal, HEArt Journal, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, Indiana Review, The Journal, Kweli, Michigan Quarterly Review, Misrepresented Peoples Anthology, Nashville Review, New York Times Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Queen’s Mob Teahouse, Rattle, The Rumpus, Shade Journal, Sixth Finch, Sundog Lit, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Word Riot, and Wusgood Black

I find myself with the impossible task of expressing my gratitude to everyone who has made this book possible. Above all others I have to thank my parents, my ever present champions who never wavered in teaching me that I could do anything; my mother who taught me how to be a friend and my father who taught me how to read and in so doing taught me to fly. I want to thank my Sister for being a constant friend and showing me how to hold myself with pride wherever I went, my nephew Dominic for teaching me from the moment of his birth how to fight and how to love as well.