“Who would believe that you loved me? / Who would believe that you kept my name? ”

“Even forest fires have a season.”

A desire to combat systemic oppression is a non-negotiable value

“Melting ice cream tubs, an empty carton of milk, candy wrappers and torn packets of snacks scattered like confetti”

“If the Black world is lost, if our love world ain’t love,
if the unheard, unshaken Black word is freedom,
where is the world you knead off our skulls?”

“Engage in mutual aid. Educate each other. Challenge the greedy.”

“my younger brother gets hold of a gun for the first time / he begins to wish for a duel with a seven-eyed ghost”

“Imagine taking the strongest edible ever and floating in a warm pool of oblivion”

“You were thinking egg the cop shop. I was thinking you slide over my belly, you slide onto my hand, take your sharp little breaths from my lips.”

“I wonder if the bursting of oneself into flames hurts just as much as being burned by someone else’s fire”

“…the cowboy looking down at his feet, lifting one boot at a time as if he can't believe he put the useless things on…”

“the legacy of trauma can be something other than shatter or silence”

“alive & determined to live, all the way to the unfathomable depths”

“hazy memories of the funeral, the burial, and the aftermath”

“Men got the credit, but I continue to spin.”

“o, my silent complicity,
o, your silent complicity.

o, our villainy in loving
what chooses to do ill”

a poetry reading on the porch

“I know when I say I’m nonbinary
the first thing people do
is look at my beard”

“Writing is the first way I learned how to be brave”

“Tis the season to be
proud, to trade our silent nights
for this holy loud.”