 I want to dedicate this reading to Alton Sterling, Alain Del Castile, and the too many other black people who've been killed by systemic racism and police brutality. The first four poems I'm going to be reading are from my first full-length collection. It's coming out from Nomadic Press. I read this down in 2017 called Cradles. And they're from a section titled Blackfish in that collection, White Whale. We have soft spots for ugly fruit, but the outline in the fruit patch is human-shaped. Boy sleeps lightly powdered, a sweet mouth, ants crawling through his tangled locks. When he awakes, he feels half-drowned, like that osprey in the river, the one that wanted something bright pulled from the back of its throat. A dark intimacy, these bird feathers and blood stains smeared over their bedsheets. These fingers slick with juice. Police said, Boy caught a bullet like he was reaching for it. But these days, Boy rises and Boy rises again, Lazarus turning her hands over in the flower. Her palms are twin doves, unwrung necks. Boy pushes his body through the breadcrumbs, cinnamon salt, pushes one dry, white thumb straight into the middle of his chest until the seed dips into his heart, candied walnut. He licks the wet sugar from his fingers before they dry, fruit peeled by fingernail or by knife, same song in the same skin, asleep in the oven. His mother turns the heat low, scrapes all the ash from the bottom, a pan full of burnt blue moths, a medic. Mother says, having children is like painting in reverse. First, you have all these possibilities. Then you are left where you began. She keeps a small bowl by the bed to catch the blood, paint at the corner of her eyes, white lips. Boy bites into the fruit and tastes the metal. The power going right out of his lungs, dreams where the sailboats are coming back, a gray color exhaling. On the second day, boy closes his eyes. On the third day, boy rises and boy rises again, knots. Call him Ishmael. Tell him a black body is not a white whale, and see if he believes you. You can neglect this one until it grows. Chinese evergreen, pothos on the roof. How the boy spit out all the coins he swallowed, so the boatman wouldn't get them. Tell him it's the bus man here. Tell him your phones won't work this far out into the field. How over there in the burnt succulent patch, a black man sat and drank water until he died. Clawed fingers hooked in his two-pale bird chest. Tell him a black body is not a white whale. Tell him and see if he believes you. It's the next two or newer. But they're also kind of about, I guess, fear in different ways about things I'm afraid of. This one's called Mixed Media 2010. Your lover tells you there is nothing sexy about bones. You know this, but can't help it. Suit your memory. A cut that won't bleed. Skin stitched around impulse. The pills turn your spit blue. One to see the sunrise. One to bask in sunset. One to die. One to be reborn. One to die again. Our mouths hang, watering, addicted. And we are only trying to leave our father's faces out of it, our hands and our skin. Somehow, we never talk about how what's underneath the skin is more skin, how the truth about anything is more of something else. Dear gods on pearl banisters. Dear bodies that only exist in corners. Dear truth, you can't headlight and meet straight on. Since childhood, I've confused having money with being in love. And I've been trying real hard to leave all of my itches alone, my leuson, necromancy. The boy catches a pigeon and pries it open, a stomach full of glitter. The kind that covers lake beds in a certain type of light. These are violences without definitions. Broken mirrors that see 16 ways. When what we eat does not flake or fall out of our mouths or get lost to the insects, blood streaked necks. And we are just trying to make sense of the shapes the liquid leaves. Those hymns we used to hum but never actually sing. The throat, a gown of perfect skin, a corset of veins. Words pushed through the bottle one at a time. The boy's thumb plucks, and now the feathers fold in like red leaves. Proof of injury without puncture. Proof of body still knows how to sing. The sudden poetry of presence, once explaining God, you put a goose neck first into my hands and told me to be careful. Now we know the wonder of rapture, thick as the blush of evening between the trees. Now we know to celebrate sounds of survival and not only sounds of war. I mean, this is what we wish to know. I mean, in this city, we are anonymous, pressing our heads to the glass, watching for the first time, pigeons flying from above, remembering on Hudson Street, the barber shaving us down to our skulls, beanies and burnt mellows on the beach, fire dying, light leaving, but no verbs yet for darkness, how we had prayed and when we prayed, only prayed by accident. So I have one more. It's for my mom. This was kind of somber right now. Sorry. Yeah, so this is dedicated to my mom. It's called kinsijie, scar on the knuckle from a hand caught in a car door, scar on the temple from trying to excise God with a paper clip, scar on the lip from being hit for pretending to stick my hands in the garbage disposal. Look ma, no thumbs. I find a picture of my mother's father sitting and smiling on the motorcycle that killed him. And I want to ask her about her childhood, but I don't. Antiseptic and plastic, skin scrubbed clean, now she is a bird, breakneck, spooned throat, cough syrup burning her lips, suddenly suspicious of everything. I promise and promise until I forget what I am promising. The gospel of roses, gentle allocation of goodness, everything is relative. The butter-colored pills I slip into her tired mouth, the spongy taste and apology leaves, the way she chews, and I touch a throb fading against her throat, soft nut of my knuckle pressed to her cheek, the gentle touch of a person who really doesn't know how, but how I love these two, her long puppy yawns, the way milk dries over her lip.