What gift is found in your suffering?

What light is it you’re offering?

What is lost is gone from your sight,

But welcomed still on the other side

Adversity has no welcome here

Take deep breaths to dry your tears

Let go! Let go! It is in your power

though the grief taste thick and sour

Sorrow never really goes away

it merely transforms you every day.

I have lived among the sinners

I have loved among the saints

I have stood my ground for justice

I have been someone I ain’t.

I have dreamed of life’s Utopia

I have painted with the paints

I have danced upon the shores

I have exulted with my haints.

I have embraced my demons

I have laughed without constraint

I have juggled every season’s wheel

I have made joy and love acquaint

Shotgun wed to my lineage

water, blood, bone, and dust.

My ancestors still gather

in my hands so like my

Grandmother’s mother’s trust

Affording my ample body rest

to settle in to what is mine

to settle into the skin

that’s offered me so blessed

I thought I was a sparrow

insignificant, common, abnormal,

I saw others the same way

insignificant, common, abnormal

But my vision shifted slightly askew

insignificant, common, normal

I accept that I am the sparrow

but I am anything but

insignificant, common, abnormal

I am proud to be a sparrow

significant, rare, and surprisingly normal.

slow suicides

next to the broken

bits of bones

felled out of “the” closet

a they/them

confession

She commonly licks her lips, clisp

She says, “So…and…clisp, but, clisp…whatever, clisp breathes

You know, so, clisp, we were going to use the taxes for a television.

uh…uh… clisp

necessity, oh shit! clisp…anyway, yeah-uh

clisp, I love you too, clisp, so anyway.

She giggles and sings “I do it my way!”

I have to take my pills

and set the coffee pot. clisp

Oh crap! My mind is going.”

She genuinely chuckles, clisp

Buh-bye Dear.

(I hear the capital letter of the Dear)

Relentlessly the clouds abide

A breeze chill with arctic airs

put on like a fancy ladies bride

a book of songbirds prayers

a saint’s knees are beatified

A bless-ed state of affairs

He intonates the neighborhood’s

cacophony

choruses multitudes in imitation

the lightest of sainthoods

Everything good and harmless in the world

sits in the Mimosa tree

singing “Nobody knows I love you.”

Her crown now of silvery floss amass

Reciting rainbows like holy stained glass.

Her bones cast spells with a dip of her hips

Her confidence emblazoned on her lips

The joy of becoming the remembrance of whom

the stars chorus the beat of her womb

I suspected her dead

the juvenile red bird

like points on a compass

flat lined in every direction

She blinked, turned her head,

last of her lines blurred

She allowed me pass

Hastening me to genuflection

placing her gently abed

My love for her undeterred

It is her path from us

Her death in retrospection.