Everything i am right now everything I'll ever be is all ill need to deal with whatever or whoever the world throws at me. Someday everything will make perfect sense BUT, for now i don't get to know the plan so ill laugh through the confusion ,I'll smile through the tears, and keep reminding myself that I'm here for a reason im not a mistake or a accident .i might not have been planned but here i am standing tall as the smart ,funny ,kind, amazing sexy beautiful black queen that i.am.I am only human thus its ok to have a meltdown but its not ok to unpack and live in that space.

in days of old
sufferers of grave maladies
would have been locked away
and never seen
in polite society
but today the infirmed
are allowed to mingle
face to face
with the rest of the world
unashamed.

I hurt! Not in pain like a toothache
Not a rose thorn in my finger
My pain is for the calamity in our precious Universe
Pain for the starving child, the cancer-ridden elder

The incarcerated, the deranged
The deformed, the sick baby

Come on, you who are alive
Life is beautiful, sensuous, loving
Life is your heartbeat for every tomorrow
Life is the Godliness, the passion and pain within

Life is a gift to nourish and bloom
Life is the joy of smelling nature’s roses
Life is the very you, in all manifestations

The Cult Follower

And you said May God Bless You
wherein I thought you were a cult
follower, attacking my age
forty seven, still on a dating site.
But you kept repeating
Psalms like fronds
fanning a hot Lenten season
but you summoned memories
of your father’s death
from a heart attack,
I began to believe in Jesus.
I can hear you now
at twenty one, working and studying in high school
desperate for his father
to come back, trying
to wean him back
from heaven’s grip. Instead
you believed you can save

(Inspired by Jan Vermeer's The Astronomer)

You sit in a kimono-like silk robe,

observe the Dragon, Hercules, the Bear

and Lyra on your multicolored globe,

and eavesdrop as they speak of an elsewhere

beyond your ken. A manual on the table

is open to the saying, “inspiration

from God,” a practicable guide to enable

a man to learn the stars and navigation.

How dare you go against the sacred scheme,

commit attempts to learn about the earth,

the nature of the suns and worlds that beam

their facts to prying scientists? A dearth

clouds curtain the sun
and spring peepers fall silent
when rain drums softly
on a fish pond stocked with dreams
cattails droop and drift toward sleep

~Marietta, Georgia

First published in Halcyon Days, no. 5 (2017): 5. 

May I Have This?



When Saturn comes back around

you'll be almost 30 years older

and all will be forgiven,

the razor's shining edge

dancing rings of ice:

resplendent, fractal, chaotic.


When he returns,

the holly may have slipped

over a regal eye or two,

burst limits may have yielded

a bright dispersal,

and pale rings may shiver ghosts

into a spangled night.


But the archetype of glory

is on every dance card,

two times on some,

with those tiny pencils on

It’s not easy threading the eye of the muse
with #6 black cotton
when the deck is pitching
and the back of the night grows fatter.

Give me a saner birth
with walls leaning inward, pyramid-like,
so that I might be preserved
from mediocrity and style.

Give me a little silk thread
and safe passage round the Horn.
But don't forget to make the seas flame.
And leave a daylight moon upon the sky.

Appeared in Empire SF

barefoot, down by the river,
hauling water, rinsing clothes,
she's kissed a thousand frogs

moist, faintly slimy,
their eyes bulging at her
as she lifts them

but not one prince among them,
and why hope for a prince
in the first place?

to live among foreigners
and have someone else
wash her clothes for her?

only there is something
she wants, something that
swells in her like sadness

when she sees her mother,
red-handed, wrinkled,
still kissing frogs.


(First published in Star*Line)