When I woke up, I did not listen to what the poem told me to write down

after Nicole Sealey

o bitch. my good bitch. bitch my heart.

Everything is red. The trees look like they’re bending over. The lorry is approaching the village. Nurpur. Don’t tell anyone it was Nurpur. Just say it was any old village.

the ladder keeps going. The black dust

that peels the paint off your car

a mythology begins with a question like who are we, where are we, what is red, why paint, why me, lord, why? a person who knows all the answers can only borrow a mythology like i’m king midas or i’m god. 

an erasure of “The Letter” by “Currer Bell”

but which verbs do you employ when it’s clear that you are trying 
to side-eye murder your mother, when you are the chilling moral
of every blazing honor thy Sunday sermon, when you are nothing 

an erasure of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The Old King’s New Jester”

Scores
               of scorpions
                                 honey-bright

Your country’s memory is short. But know this:
We live, have been living, with this threat
staining the earth we still call home