“oh antic Godreturn to memy mother in her thirties leaned across the front porch the huge pillow of her breasts pressing against the railsummoning me in for bed.I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.I can barely recall her songthe scent of her handsthough her wild hair scratches my dreams at night. return to me, oh Lord of then and now, my mother’s calling,her young voice humming my name.”

“was my first landscape, red brown as the clay of her georgia.”

“and at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me.”

“her dangling braids the color of rain.”

“I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.”

“the lost womenI need to know their namesthose women I would have walked with,jauntily the way men go in groupsswinging their arms, and the onesthose sweating women whom I would have joinedAfter a hard game to chew the fatwhat would we have called each other laughingjoking into our beer? where are my gangs,my teams, my mislaid sisters?all the women who could have known me,where in the world are their names?”

“dreaming your x-ray vision could see the beauty in me.”