Plan

Cast out she makes a plan
Taking form in the mouth like voice
Outruns our mouths therefore thou
Art vocoded, transliterated
Across the ocean, across
Another threshold the dead only know
The baby never not in your arms
The sweet never not in her mouth
Of the bees and their forgiveness
Of this intentional critique, motherfucker
She makes a plan and carries out this plan
To become a real girl
She makes a plan
All one can do is plan and study
But anger burns beneath the things we do
Beneath the prayer of routine.

Class

No one talks about class in poetry
But tonight I am thinking about these sisters
How they invented a language when they were abandoned by the world
No one talks about class in poetry
Because it is not convenient to talk about class in poetry
How fucking sad it was when we learned the sisters were separated so that they would learn English more easily
Two years ago it was reported that they were working at McDonalds, still 'developmentally disabled'
But we all know that disability is social and so why shouldn't we consider being poor a disability, perhaps the first form of disability?
These girls seem so bright and animated in your film
We want them to live like this together forever
What languages are destroyed in us before we can be fully born, my sister?
What beautiful things will our education destroy?
Poets can't talk about class
Poets won't talk about class
Sometimes they will talk about gender and sometimes race but almost never class
They will talk about how poetry is political or ethical but they won't talk about class
It is impolite to talk about class
It is ungainly to put class issues in a poem
I am thinking my sister of those realities we created when we seemed most impoverished
Walking among the other animals in the San Diego Zoo
Talking just to have a world at all
They dismiss the ones the inconvenient ones but first there is education, the first dismissal
"I wanted to get to them before they forgot their language and became English majors"
Priced out in the immaculate California sun
Shut-out, shut-down, in the sun
Sister, no one listens to poems about class
What would it mean to talk about class in poetry?
I have always been amused by how quickly people who have attended Harvard are able to convey this information in a conversation
It is often through a recollection
The sun does not make them unintelligible
Their faces are intelligent they say what words we can't
It says so many things without a future
Like why are you crying?
No one talks about class
Yet everywhere there is class in poetry, there are classes of poets
In homemade dresses made by their grandmother the girls cling to each other like animals
Little animals, they need to feel the interaction of things
Books are more important for their weight than any words they contain
Who is not speaking like we were in a permanent sun
Permanent like the sun in California
When we were young and not yet separable
Innocent for the questions you asked
For the way you held a comb.

True Black II (@ Fanzine)

Many thanks to Cassandra Troyan, summer poetry editor at Fanzine, for posting "True Black II," which will be featured in a new book of poems later this fall, Withdrawn.

I'm thrilled to be among a series that includes Anna Vitale, Anne Boyer, and more to come!