Whatever Extra Food or Scheme, Whatever Sudden Circumstance in Colored Glass Redeem

He seems crusty, conservative, smoked-out.
He also loved the newfound that arrived.

A lawyer in Depression meant his people—
mine as well—he was my Grandpapa, we called him

“Papa,” and he gave away whatever extra food
his money and his servants could prepare when

people came around and knocked. When a man
who had no cash to pay my Papa’s legal fees?

and gave instead a deeply colored wild ornate,
an antique gleaming paperweight, my grandpa began to

ramble toward the deep artistic wild. A quest
perhaps for notions, the calm of outer porchlight space.

He loved past love the outdoor circus, took me there.
He bought me cotton candy and a skinny blue-dressed doll.

He watched as though he’d not before, and somehow
saw my purple eyes. He asked me

what I wanted, what I thought he might
right then, right there, just give to me.

Though he was crusty, burnt out, old,
as though he sensed my dancer’s dreams, he said perhaps

a trampoline, a swimming pool
might do.

Golden Feather Once Forlorn, Unborn, Adrift, Arrives, Decided How Fate Can There within the Purple Pawn Shop Ponder Night, Abide


What is there, Shareina asked, to trade.
The men arrive still disarranged

and someone in the rear believes
they stole my topaz from my

dense and unrepentant grandmama plying
notions, nether notes and then again

I like the thought of chords’ reply,
the ways the colors slither when relieved

so where are we and why, I ask,
so purple. Why a chandelier aloft,

what kind of breeze becomes a lady
and a topaz. Do we think enough

within the lives of gems whose being
brightens sense, repentance, that again.

My pawn shop lives because the men
reply by night they bring about

a golden feathered dawn, the
feathers wild, retired, aspiring

wings, the wind itself a hint to just
engage a way to splay the stay

a while and frolic in this store
where I adore the men

arrive and then again begin to farm
the food out back, the winged feast,

the slipper peas and okra.

From the Boyfriend Trove a Kind of Color

Ramon arrived and asked me when I’d
sing the light, the sapphire

on my wrist, he said, it claimed a kind
of brightness as he tore my clothes,

my wile away the morning in a plight
and then the blues themselves as though

a scene as though a purpose for a
frontal feast reminding me my songs

belonged to color, calm, the songs themselves
a flight adrift until Ramon, Ramon

Ramon remembered circumstance:
the time, the chime I gave away the mornings’ moments

when calm itself, the blues now ripe and tearing up,
such wherewithal within

my store began again to roar, deplore
just any instants lacking tones of touch when

random worry came around, unbound, reborn and worn until
I sang the bluest

aqua lights anew, the pain in startled
flight, adrift.

Replete with Seers Singing Scheme, the Sapphire Light Itself Prepared a Theme, a Way to Wonder, Blunder, Ponder Flight As Generous as Porch Light When It Comes Around, Illuminates the Skies of Peace and Wild Prosperities Again, and Once Again, Again

My cousin Trixie and I possessed the Purple
Unknown, a store where we continued there
to strip to inner notion of the dreams we read, the schemes we bred,
the wilderness of cruelties we trained the broken men, the women full
of fears to flee: we owned a song, a throng replenished all
the sapphires we had claimed each time we simply sighed and
beckoned, reckoned depth within the pawn we gave away the
extra fried and okra we prepared to share, repair, maintain as we were
chefs as well as Jewish merchants there in Macon in the morning.

Word of Dawn’s Provisions Came Around

The fruit itself, the wayward plums believed
their gifts adrift through dawn’s experience until
my great aunt played her violin and summoned
unsung notes askew, the naked notes themselves

believed they still conceived, ensured the violin
of dawn among the plums, the cantaloupe, the wild
experience of color, calm adrift, proclaimed the fruit
itself, those onetime plums believed, ensured their

colors shaped the open dawn, the porch itself
asunder when we women of the Downtown Purple
Pawn arrived with hammers’ ripe experience.
The light itself, its dawn belonged to us as we

began the song of plums asunder, plundered, too, but
we, we women held the hammer fast, reprieved, restored
the wilderness of naked notes, of genuine and true belief
in wild astray, the sudden pie, the open kinds of food,

of treat the dawn’s experiences, that naked need for
touch, for taste asunder that the plums themselves had
hoped that early dawn, that evening too, to ponder.