they say I'm like you

they say I'm like you
I have your nose, your lost, brown eyes
always hurling themselves into oceans of thought
I wear your melancholy across my shoulders
broad, like the ones stretched across your back,
daddy
they say I'm like you
your fingerprints carefully forming the pride in my spine
we lifted all the heavy furniture
moving it from one side of the house to another
like the chess pieces inside my chest only you can play,
daddy
they say I'm like you
looking at myself, pulling triggers of impatience
fingers to my brain, temples full of disdain
my hopes and opinions sharpen as I train
my wit and will of iron
you set out to raise the kind of woman you expect
but you raised a queen instead
am I too unlike the son you still don't realize you wanted,
daddy
they say I'm like you
the sturdy sapling you watered with your blood and patience,
but placing angry fists
to the parts of me that are an unflattering mirror,
daddy
if I were your son
would you have told me, "you're too opinionated for your age."
if I were your son
would you have meant, "too opinionated for a woman."
if I were your son
would you have told me I would be beautiful if
I could just look more like my mother
whose tiny waist and petite frame have
never borne well the weight of her confidence
if I were your son
would you have equated respect with my acquiescence
daddy
the masterpieces of adoration my imagination painted of you
made a likeness that looked too much like you, like me
for you to accept them, daddy
if I were your son
would you have told me, "I don't care what you think about me.
I don't need your approval."
when you know your very bones draw life from my
powerful affection that you taught me to give,
daddy, I love you, but I'm done apologizing
for being big, for being powerful, for being enough
and I will hide the parts of me I'm proudest of
until you learn to stop apologizing to the world for me
because it says I'm like you,
I like you, daddy
but I must wait till you do

Night Hawk

She came (or didn't) and left in the dark
Taking with her the blood you offered
With greedy hunger

Make my thighs an altar to your hunger
My body, the sacred training-ground of praise
The gods in me rise like the rivers of my desire
And you will learn to weep again, as a man should

To the man who shines shoes near my favorite coffee shop

I want to make his shoe polish into seeds and sow them across our city
I hope the seeds will grow till they've uprooted the stubborn cement, revealing
the earth that is as black as his beautiful skin and as rich as his passion
for polishing shoes and as deep as his knowledge that how people walk matters
more than where they and up

in that soil we could nourish a new order and overturn the tables of the
slave-owners and torturers who do their clinical work with clean lines
in the name of a God they have never known

that quiet, inner-garden place
a niche for shrinking pains and growing worlds
its graveyards host the hosts of murdered hates
bared teeth & burning passions are not welcome
until they are tamed and learn to cry
broken pots leak their nourishing streams
and flowers find their minds and strength

you are just a human

i. you lied

or perhaps your told the truth but changed your mind

what I would find is that you'd planted ghosts in my belly

I tried to leave you behind like an abandoned child

but your lie grew briers in my womb

you wily thief, your serenades burying my tears

in that back seat of your car, now the scent of leather

and your cologne

makes my neck remember bruises from your teeth

and my dreams recall the smoldering rage of months to follow

the thorns grew into muscles atrophied from fear of motion

ii. whenever I tried to speak forgiveness to myself

the words caught in the net of my throat

like the wriggling trout I was, silver in your arms

I can hold oceans in the cistern of my hands

I can bear the weight of your body on my hips,

my spine, my sternum

but I can no longer carry your silence in my bones

nor your laughter in the hardness of my muscles

I must forgive myself,

wrenching the mountains from my shoulders

I must forgive you,

extinguishing the fires I set to you with my eyes

it's so quiet as the sun rises

scattering honey'd fingerprints

across the landscape of my body

and the tracks of my memories

now, you are just a human

your right measurements again