Explore Poems: Class

I’m here
             to tell you 
                             an old story. 
                             This
Appears to be
                 my work.
                                I live
                                in the world,
Walk
         the streets…

The rich report greater levels of happiness,
                                          & the study goes on to demonstrate
how we humans use money to save...

Marita, don’t tell me to pick one.
           I am either barefoot or wearing six-inch Pleasers—
my gender is dirty-soled and naked or
       ...

I come from the kidnapped,
                                    the assaulted—
my country’tis of reparations as in-store credit
                     ...

In springtime, chief of all seasons,
        in May when new joys rise and flourish,
                the sun is lord and messenger at once and sends down to us
        to rouse our bodies and be merry:
humankind to...

Oh give me a home
with a big landscaped lawn
four cars, a boat and a kitty.
For my heart yearns to be
any place that is free
of the urban decay of this city.
I’ll do my shopping at Gucci’s and Sak’s,
spend all of my...

In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.

Before I became one of those fathers
obsessed with memorizing his lines,
making peace with the Big Director
in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs,
before all that, I was the star
of my own...

Delirium in the downtown mall today:
      Burt Reynolds! All the henna-haired girls
            sneer, while their mothers, enthralled, say,

“I saw you in this, I saw you in that–
      you were marvelous, simply...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Because I should’ve wrote this years ago, I’m crying. So what my slow failure pass the years
      Make me be crying. So what in Bethlehem I tried to push so much against it, where the Wall is checkpoint...

you know I ain’t mess w/you ’cause of yo’ friends
wouldn’t have you caught slummin’
know you hood 'cause you said

I look the same
and I said
you look the same

and I said “it don’t crack, doit?
and you said “Uh, OKAY?”

that’s that thing right...

Mama birthed me, Papa sold me in the land of weeping willows
Traces of sin trail miles across skin, I go by Never Forget
My body’s evidence of daddy’s pestilence spread across the land

His sin traces my skin, a path never forgotten
Nameless,...

Nine women at brunch all order eggs
benedict. I laugh at how boring my fury.

This ambition to feel myself closer to an art:
what distinguishes me from the people

who order their ribeyes well done.
I want to tell the rich girls I once...

melting glaciers      
                       frighten me when      
appearing on      
my street as      
downpours      
a feeling I send      
                     ...

Growing up in a rural factory town I watched my creative family extend the grind oft monotonous jobs outside the factory walls and into their lives until they were no longer capable of accessing their artistic abilities. The factory essentially...

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,
almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost forgot Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost
forgot the sculpture...

I feel middle class when I'm in love.
I think it's all the poached eggs on bird-seed bread,
staying up all night on Zoopla—imagine
waking under cottage beams,
the laughter in a garden. Kids.
A little boy with gold hair
keeps standing in my dreams.

I read...

We were so poor.
The air was a quiver
of thoughts we drew from

to poise, unsaid
in the ineffable
world we lived in.

Sun, scarcely a penny
in that dreary setting,
every night gave up

to a smog-strewn avalanche
of searchlights, crossing
the heavens, a bicker

to buy a new used...

The Devil made a meal of me and all
the Sundays I was sleeping.
To think of all the hours,
what I might've offered to the Book or of the Book
to needful ears grown up like burdock in our hag-rid
thorn-bit flock of town.

Sunday...

Notice the theme of floating, our volunteer guide says, pointing to the light gray exterior walls. We take out our phones to capture the weeping European beech—the first of its kind I’ve seen—dangling dark papery leaves in cascading caves to...