1.
I smell the cloying stink of a particular religion etching
its gospel on the scrubbed, unworried side of the rolling
shutters. It’s the funk of the preach that draws me here,
the side-eye that renders me bent double, twinging, my
thick mouth willing to swap language for flame. I admit
out loud to being Jesus’ damned near, the almost
of the Holy Ghost, the mistake that won’t quit even if
it could see how. I’m out here in the wind with the rest
of the no-shame-in-our-game disciples, heads bowed,
eyes leaking the last of last night. We are obedient
in the way the just-waking boulevard says we must be—
reverent, slow-stomping our dirt-tired hymns. Looks like
we’re waiting for another sloppy resurrection. But not
me, Lawd, not this fool. I’m next in line for the cross.
2.
Checking my phone, and here come that text message over
and over: Where you at? Last time I looked, I’m still grown,
still walking any street that’ll hold on to me. I’m still grown,
rising from my own damned bed just in time, scrubbing
the sweat from my ass, getting to where I need to be, right
on the clock. I’m where I’m gon’ be at, I say with my thumbs,
then I shut the damn thing off ’cause I can’t stand the way
those green numbers keep yelling Not yet. I need these folks
to roll that cranky old steel on up, let me run straight to my
sip of beautiful, my sip of slow drag, my sip of the way
I need my man to rock me. Until then, I’ll disappear inside
my own thirsty shadow, trying not to lock pinkish eye with
the only other sister here. Why they keep locking up our
beautiful, locking down the only way we know to sing?
3.