after June Jordan
gunshots for all the batty boys
sings the man with dreads who was
smiling just a second ago, a wide, unlonely
smile as he approached me—giddy,
i'd call it from my distance, because
my dreads are lush and on point today,
and threaded with jewels that make me
think of my mother, and two pendants
that came from two separate women
i once called lovers, and i'm wearing pants
as pink and as soft as the final flourish
of a sunset, and so i reason the man
must have been giddy because he felt
whatever warmth supposedly pulls up
from the lower parts of the body
and blots out some of the loneliness
in a man's brain whenever he sees
an attractive woman who looks,
from afar, like a moon in the daytime
after a too-long and moonless night.
but then he got close enough to see
the beard, see my weary eyes, the
clumsiness, the sharp corners of my body
that our minds have come to understand
as mannish, and he must have thought
this was a bait and switch, a trick i played
on him; or else—to pull myself into a world
where i am not in danger—i told myself
maybe he could see, closer up, that
my face looks like the face of an old,
abusive lover, or a person he wishes
he could still share a meal with but,
because of the world, he can never again,
or maybe my face looks too much like
his own, and he's not yet reconciled
with his own sadness, with what people
who were supposed to love him
have allowed him to become, and so
now he is in a kind of grief. i tell myself
this is why he frowned. i tell myself
this version to eclipse the other version
so that the poison pouring through
my capillaries, the clouds pouring into
my synapses, the panic, the reaper of
my imagination would be soothed,
would be disarmed. but the man is
unconfused now and has begun singing
about his new need for revenge, gunshots
for all the batty boys, and he's circling
me now, a bleached white hawk, wings
wide open, watching me and waiting,
i think, waiting for an opening, and so
the poison seeps deeper and takes hold
across time. i feel it later on a crowded B48
when the man in a sleeveless shirt
has no option but to sit next to me,
but first looks me down length wise,
and his eyebrow raising sounds like
of a gun's hammer gathering its energy.
i feel the poison pulse and burst while
a cousin and i have an impossible
debate about the rights of queer people
and before i tell him that the wind
between my legs in a dress reminds me
of when we chased one another
through our backyards, he blurts in rage that
men in dresses should be shot in the head.
the man is still circling and singing
a song that he knows is a pill of cyanide
and i listen without making it seem
like i am listening, i watch him circle
without looking at him—for my safety, yes,
and also because there is a robin
circling, too, bouncing, twisting its head
and listening with its feet, looking for
a worm, a meal in the fine details
of the soil beneath the grass, which,
i haven't been able to mention it till now,
is green as all fuck, the field so thick
and wide and green that, looking
at the robin trotting through it,
the man and the gun and the poison
dissapear, and i begin to imagine
what if what we called the sea was not
water but thick, many-feet-tall grass
with breezes threaded through it? i imagined
what if robins were to flutter through?
flutter through the green green sea?
what would that do to our forms?
what would that do to our metaphors?