Ama Codjoe
I am watching the future of your body
molder. Gristle, wild boar, mole’s fur, apple
core, mulberry, wind-downed leaf.

By now your cells are forest black earth
or the moist dirt in a flower pot.

Father, I’ve waded this far in order
to speak to your smallest ear.
I’ve come to ask some speechless thing.

Time has passed, there are no longer
seasons, and I barely recall the name

for water—often when I say blood I mean
water. Maybe I’ve come to ask forgiveness,
to properly grieve your fatherlessness . . .

It’s hard to tell. My eyes have been
shut for some time. Pieces of me keep

breaking off, shifting, even the you
in me has changed. While you cooked
oxtail soup, I set the table. You sat

at the head, sucked the marrow, twirled,
licked, and chewed the bone. Father,

you left nothing in the bowl because
when there was food you ate the food
and brought the bowl like a cup to your lips.

And I love like that. I call you father
because my arm is finally long enough to reach

across earlier oceans. Farther, you say,
and losing my tongue I stretch far
until I am sky. Father, I whisper, searching

for my teeth. Doves, you say. Mourning,
I repeat. Let the doves do the calling for me.
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Photographic portrait of Benson James, Jake Skeets' uncle
An Avedon Portrait of His Uncle Inspires Poet Jake Skeets

"Diné men are often drifters drifting home from a long binge in Gallup, drifting through the whiteness taped up by white men, drifting through hours on the job, or drifting to or from backrooms. I became enamored with the image....I became obsessed with the stories brown skin tell. I became obsessed with the scars, the small variations of brown, the stains, the feel of skin, and the taste of it."

via LITHUB
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Cover of Bei Dao's book, Endure
"[O]nce a poem is out in the world, there’s no way to predict the different uses, appropriations, misappropriations, readings and anti-readings to which it might be put, nor the places and times where it might emerge, uncanny, as if with fresh meaning.  Bei Dao’s 'The Reply' ('Huídá,' sometimes also translated as 'Answer') is one such poem, with an intense career all its own.”
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