On the back of an old bodega receipt
I keep a running list of all the books I would buy you as gifts
if you were still my friend.

You'd definitely read them --
I'm not good at many things but giving is one of them --
and you'd tell me if they were worth borrowing,
but you'd of course know that I didn't just buy them
for the chance to borrow them from you.

I don't need to do that (I'm a librarian for fuck's sake)
and besides that's not what gifts are about.

It wouldn't work the same if I read them anyway.
Your eyes and the words react like vinegar and baking soda;
I'm just a kid with a chemistry set.

So I never read the books,
but I keep the list
in the zippered coin compartment in my wallet
with other useless things like nickels.

And just like ridiculous nickels,
too big for their worth,
I hang onto the titles
because they might come in handy someday.

4,645 dead
give or take a thousand
in Puerto Rico
​

*then you have already mastered the simple practice of benefiting from the work of terrible men without condoning their terrible actions. It is possible to hold that a creation is good and the creator is partly or entirely bad at the same time. These concepts do not contradict one another.
So why
do we denounce
the art of artists
who do bad things?

What is the word for
the lone woman in
a group of men, the one who
does not receive a handshake ​and who
is not asked the questions?

I don't know but
in the language of the island where
​my foremothers lived:
​
in a room of a thousand women
one man
​makes the group masculine.

mommy
why aren't the flags
up all the way?

she considers responding with the truth

to honor the woman
who birthed the man
who sent your father
to meet his death

but she like the dead woman is a mother,
a gentle liar:
hers is a world of fairies and phantasms
crafted to keep the peace

what do you think baby?

could it ever be for
the thousands dead in syria
or 40 dead in gaza
or 17 dead in a florida school
or seven dead in a south carolina prison
​or four dead in a waffle house
come to think of it why are the flags ever allowed to fly at
a height that hints at freedom

but she like the dead woman is a mother,
a gentle liar:
she is smiling down the sun behind her
no shadows from the flagpoles
​is stating with quiet confidence that

the men who raise the flags
​called out sick today