In a nearly empty off-season cafe, just across
From the row of grand Saratoga hotels, I lost faith
In the elegance of the facades fronting Congress Park,

after Nicole Sealey

o bitch. my good bitch. bitch my heart.

Sometimes love’s vagrancy (whatever you call it) 
overwhelms all but the most robust subscribers, 
and, dishonest as it may sound, the whole cramped enterprise 

I came to Alabama for the dreams

   of Sun Ra, who said he was born on another

impossible, uninhabitable bottom land and unreconstructed

It began with the deer, dead in the water 
Just off my parents’ dock, 
And then there was a procession of horses,

As in the plays, the body was decor,
Fit embellishment to a scene
Where chance's misrule seemed to have gone as planned:

Yes, I want someone to know me well,
better than the foreman at Ford Electra
knows the chips

Up the hill the motorcycle climbs, its sound
near now, entering the dream
and the girl’s hair flares

Estas brutal, someone says about the heat or the boricua 
walking down the street with a dulce de leche. My sister shivers. 
I paraphrase a fever when I mount the stairs to the roof to swelter

On the pale morning I left town
I was thinking about women,
and later, in the Rockies where work was scarce,