BLACK FLAMINGO

Learned today that flamingos can live up to seventy years.
I gasped at the fact, thinking about a bird, pink and slender

and older than my parents, out there somewhere preening
its coat of feathers, or sifting through a lake for food,

a flock of them flying southeast, their bodies against the sky
like a postcard.

Meanwhile, several states from here, another Black twenty-something
that could’ve been me, but wasn’t for no reason other than chance,

was killed in his sleep,
his name against the TV like a Wednesday.

What does it mean when I wish us all the lives of birds?
Don’t we deserve a vibrant life? A colorful life?

A life where we can strut into the water
wearing our years like a gown?

THIS POEM IS AFTER EVERYONE

every time you’ve seen me write about the birds,
about the perfect way a gannet folds its body before knifing the ocean
or how a marabou stork, ugliest of them all, still walks with royal poise,
understand that every bird in each of my poems flies after Ada.

in the same way that i am not a gardener,
but wherever you find flowers in my pages,
or a bright fruiting tree shedding its riches,
it’s Ross who planted it there.

when i think there needs to be an entire poem
about the way Bill Withers wields lyricism,
Hanif is the one giving me the language, nodding along.

yesterday, when the clouds were a school of salmon ribboning home,
it was Shira who reminded me to take it in, who taught me to indulge
in the way the phrase salmon ribbon feels in the mouth,
how closely it resembles a psalm risen.

every ode to the unlovable edges of me is Olivia adjusting the mirror.
every ghost poem is Melissa whispering secrets into inanimate objects and sending them in the mail.
every poem about tomorrow and making it there is Sierra & Anis & Tonya showing me the way.

all of this to say, of course there’s a shade, a version, a facsimile of me
in each of my poems, but i am not foolish enough to call it a solo act.
what good is wholeness without acknowledging the sum of my parts?

so yes, this poem is after everyone.
my sobriety, after the company it finds in Kaveh and Toney and Joy,
after Angel and Danez, esteemed tutors of my own Black delight.
after Rachel, and the nail-studded baseball bat she gifted my rage
and the ring of a thousand keys Ocean offered for the door of my grief.

each of them, a rider;
every poem, a horse;
and me, the reins
taut between the two.

WHAT GOOD IS IT TO SAY THE WORLD IS ENDING

After Meg Day

except perhaps as a means of saying, yes,

i know the wind in the west is kicking

the wildfire into a twister out of hell,

i know that only a few hours from here

the floodwater comes up to my lowest rib,

the polar bears have begun growing fins

to survive the new home we’ve made them,

every summer is the hottest summer on record,

and it probably won’t be long before a flock

of meteors come to give us a taste of our nation’s

medicine, and yet, despite these daily doomsdays,

i have a crush on you, a phrase both childish & appropriate,

the way you and the world flatten me into a skipping stone,

a phrase that, if aged up, would sound something like:

The world is ending. Kiss me.

Double Yolk extends gratitude to The Atlantic for first publishing “Black Flamingo”.