No one gives a damn about a poem until they need a poem — Omotara James. No one writes a poem because they want ...Read more

Great fortune will follow you. You will eat the heart of a horse in winter. You won’t have to pray twice. Every mountain will unclench its jaw...Read more

All night my mother speaks to me in my dream. She remembers my name. I tremble with a light that only a few fortunate people get to experienc...Read more

Briefly, briefly, Does the candle burn. But the light— O, the light!

How am I this reckless in the kitchen light eating a mango, the size of joy, so sweet I forgive the day’s dull hours and emptiness...Read more

I've thought about it, this insistent body of sound, so sharp the way its light enters the cement of the night like a nail, Here I am in a field o...Read more

If I were a leaf, O what would I do? But wouldn't that make me wish I was a tree? And if I were a tree, would I be happy, what kind of tree would I be...Read more

Shine on me, silver, with your little fangs bared, Shine on me, beloved, awake as I am, In the dark, all beauty is true, and brief.

Which is to say my love is as thick as the neck on a giraffe. It is sabre toothed like a foul–mooded cat, I will eagle your name on the throat of ...Read more

We are truthfully, all birds. The sky lives in us.

Bring me all your dreams the dull ones, the happy ones, the wishy ones, the ones as bright as an orange. Bring me all your dreams and lay them on my...Read more

I wish to live as if a flower surprised by the splendor of my own blooming

Don't worry. No one has figured it out yet. No one quite knows how to live. Our houses flood. Dreams buckle to the floor. Again and again, we confus...Read more

Tired of watching the sun, a bird shoots up the sky.

I still have everything you gave me and it sits in the dark like a glitter of black coal waiting waiting ...Read more

Just before my grandmother's passing, my aunts took turns bathing her. Fingers that unthreaded the hair, that untied the knots and washed it down ...Read more

10:53 P.M Dear Mother, I am looking at the same stars we used to look at together from the chinks of our roof. You used to tell me that if I looked...Read more

All the beautiful things are dying and I am sad. All the beautiful things I know rhyme with death and I am sad. The sun is only a sun because it is ...Read more

When the heart stops being a heart, when it just wouldn't, because it happens sometimes and there's no actual diagnosis even though the doctors tried...Read more

I married the earth, Now life is simple. Now the clocks sleep face down. Letters catch fire in the mailbox. I moss and earthworm, The wind braids my h...Read more