and oh, it seems I am still riding atop the albatross of loneliness despite

what has been promised by the swaying tessellation of nostalgia pressing

itself into the walls and coating the last black corner in ohio

where the reaper has endless stomachs and will fill himself on a shaking

mother’s first born before passing silent through her living chest

how fitting to remember our dead by what dragged them to the gates

even that which still lives and will hold the face of a child not much

older than the one it fired the gun into without thinking

what must it be like to look into a black child’s face and not see an entire family

I am nothing beyond someone’s hands pulled back from a throat

two hundred years before my birth

know me only by the people who didn’t kill my ancestors

when they could have and surely wanted to

I am trying to tell you that it is going to be dark in my bedroom

and I have no one to hold me tonight

except whatever glow the phone screen can spare

while I watch the video for this song where black people disappear over and over

(& I’M / GONNA MISS / EVERYBODY)

I have a zipper in the center of my back

(& I’M / GONNA MISS / EVERYBODY)

it is there for me to open myself up for the ghosts

(& I’M / GONNA MISS / EVERYBODY)

my arms are too short to reach the zipper without the help of the dead

(& I’M / GONNA MISS / EVERYBODY)

I am trying to tell you that burial is for the rich

for the rest of us, there is only the night

sewing itself shut and silent over our eyes

a ceremony in its own right

in the way anything slow and inevitable

can be made into a celebration