2:00 AM
Your father wears the day / as a shirt with soot-spider
stains on his spine: / sweat-soaked, stuck like plastic wrap
to calloused skin / your ears peering through distilled
quiet / & retinas carving slivers of
Schrödinger’s Hamlet
“Okay,” I said. “It’s time to kill Hamlet.”
A classroom full of AP English students stared up at me, unsure how to take my
somewhat crass proclamation. We were about to finish
Collard Greens
“…the hyssop that springeth out of the wall…”
— I Kings 4:33
The flecks greening skin after cutting collards
Are good as tattoos leafing my blood-tree of veins,
Mapping these hands I got
When a Fool Is More than a Fool
I wish ass were not a four letter word.
I wish I could reapply the cultural context that let C.S. Lewis use the word in
four of the seven Narnia Chronicles books:
