See the ink below your knee. There your veins were mapped and quarried. The line your groin defines remains intact, smooth like timber, the timber of a ship, a…

  ate the still-beating heart, folded when the gods came calling. son of a sewn thigh, son of a mortal. she bathed in the river, lost to lightning. lover crashed…

  You tell me this: the inlet was not carved from this spit of land by glaciations, frozen inching of big water. Not the insistences, waves, the riving wind-limned eye…

  And then an old man and I looked through the scrap pile in the back, sifting through lonesome reams of brake pads and spools of cable housing, orphan top…

  There: at mile twelve we stopped at the chattering of some small trees, distant against the low sky doubling itself across the shallow waters of the swamp. What kind…

  It’s the boat I choose for transport into the new year I lie down in its hammered gold, my right shoulder against its curve From this posture, I will…

  I'm the object I am and at times I'm another and am far sitting in water and sand in an echo of burning tongues And dream, yes, I dream the colossal adventure of the…

  Some regrets take the air, almost visibly, bright against the mind’s wide sky. The child you never had, for some reason red-haired. The way you said goodbye to your…

  Dec. 18, 2013, Akure. At night, inside the reflection of a halogen lamp, I told my younger siblings A story about our dead mother. I told the story, my…

  Now day turns ever November as the schoolyard iron and plastic of slides, rings, ladders, and bars stab into the backfat of a grey sky and the children dropping…

  There were enough leaves around my feet to bury a child.   A second moon had been predicted,   but looking up through branches, I saw only bones  …

  drifted to the broken sidewalk— you know the place: past First Ward school (where AA meets now) but before the crest of the hill, before the road narrows so…