We look at the map. When we arrive in France from King’s Cross the fields are striated with barbed wire and it is raining.

After I make my home dark
I wander through the few
quiet rooms and let
the bright blinking eyes
of the continuing electricity

Once I walked
through a forest.
It was high
in the mountains.
The air was clear and thin.
The stars shone brightly,
the outline of the forest canopy in sharp relief
like the background
to a stop-motion silhouette fairy tale.

Now is my turn to speak, if I
can claim it, tipping myself forward,
letting my tongue fall with a soft,
an inward, an almost inaudible click.

It is desirable that as little happen as possible.
An aristocrat said this, knowing (I hope) it was hopeless.
Inevitably,
sporadically (like clockwork,
unlike clockwork), something
goes thlunk into the pond of you,
and the normal expires.

    These days I wake in the used light of someone’s spent life.
     I am often a stranger to myself;
       I have no place of origin, no home.

for Harry Mphanza

We have changed a great many of our colonial place names since independence, but we have kept the name of Livingstone out of a deep respect. —Siloka Mukuni, chief of the Leya People

  At the onset of my ingenious plan, the sun barely shone
            through the mist.
      I struggled with a name to identify the rushes
            of water pouring beside me.

an excert from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

Imagine you at the beginning of the
longest walk of your life, no thought given to
shoes, socks, toothpaste, hats, and the other
rip-rap, nothing of watches or water, sleeping

Guy walks up to me in the park and says, “My girlfriend killed
    James Brown,” and I start to say, “Do I know you?” but
I don’t want to miss out on the story, so I say, “No lie!” and he says,
    “Yeah, I got bumped up to first class, and when I saw who
my seatmate was, I went back to economy and told my girlfriend,
    and even though she had the flu, we switch places, and three