How to Love a Mango Girl

Crack open her chestwall
with surgical loveliness,
remove the slippery, heaving
Thing inside, and let her see
what spurts out.

She’ll tell you the Thing is gorgeous,
or something as perfect as a pit
in the center of a shining mango
or a freshly picked peach.
Something sweat-wet
and flavored pink-sweet.

You’ll tell her, No, girl, you must see
what’s inside of you, all your bruises,
but she’ll just say that what’s inside
that chestwall—that pulpy, bloody heart
is a mango, sugar-rich and Caribbean,
is delicious and thrilling, something
to remind you what will always fall
from your tree.

When you love her, tell her
that you understand her
rounded strivings, that you
get why she would sprint
away from your sly teeth.

When you try to love a mango girl,
tell her, tell her she is a balm,
a lift, a cut, a mission,
a suture, a cold thing, a furnace,
a hand, clutching,
reaching,
reaching,
for something higher
than Normal Love.

Gods

I asked Yemayá about God yesterday,
then found some pennies for Eleguá.

Then They both brought me to Their faces
and fate
and your face, your face, your face, too,

and the face of Saints whose names
I don’t remember clearly, only in pieces,
in segundo nombres,
and shocks of sentences; these quilt-pieces
fabric of memory flapping
on a tendedero in the wind.

I raised my hands to the Christ-dark sky
and cried about the stun of its color.

I shook down Jericho’s walls
and clutched the seedlings of my faith
to my breast as if they might save me
from something doomed
to always fail.

I asked God and Yemayá yesterday about forgiveness,
the thing they’re always saying you propose.

I don’t know how to talk about it properly
and I think some good gods can be angry,
sipping on red seas to escape those who gorged
our continents; perhaps they were rageful
rightly and loved lovers wrong
and maybe they were
so very, very human
and glorious.

I asked God and Yemayá about forgiveness;
if I were small or big enough to love you
and you poked me in the cheek
and simply laughed, and I was
surprised, simply by the laughing,

by the joy I forgot you
always possessed so richly,
like all of my favorite gods,
queens, and spirits.

After It’s Done

Blame it on the cut
of old shadows,
or never having a sister
to braid my hair right
and protect me from plunging stars
or maybe it’s about how I fell
in love with the underbelly
of a shining beat and now
all I do is listen to his song
all day long, pacing
in circles, pacing.

Or blame it on me—
he’s gone, like a snapping
flash, and there is nowhere
to go but to the floor,
kneebent and tired as so many
women who have performed this formula
of knee to floor for Some Man,
not to give up
or to even praise
but to show God or ourselves—
hey, I’ll still be here for Someone.

The Reason Why I Sing

Kirk Franklin tells me “God’s the reason why I sing”
but tonight, his voice is glazing the last part of the song
with old blood and my singing wants to wrench out
and wild, but it won’t. I won’t let it.
Not until you bless me.

Sometimes, Life is cold as hell. Clichéd, true.
It knows whom I love and snatch and kill.
It knows whom I fear and they come to find me.

Poison splashes below my feet,
raises high-level to my shins.

If I taste it, I’m afraid it will bloom into ocean
and I’ll never see those I love again.

Still, check it.
I’m a vampire, and church destroys me,
as does a simple cross swinging on my mother’s neck,
but better than that, you find me
in the natural spin of birch tree
when the branch snaps off, falls to the ground
like a cloven thing
and all you can hear of it is
a long howl of new wind.