Evie Shockley

you put this pen
in my hand and you
take the pen from you put this pen
...

when your mother can rise from her place
on the pew during the early service,

early enough that the sun barely fills the sky
...

i cop a squat on a squared-off log,
to watch you ball on the community center court.
butt numb, i shift my weight
...

i want her tin skin. i want
her militant barbie breast,
resistant, cupped, no, cocked
...

He's as high as a georgia pine, my father'd say, half laughing. southern trees
as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees.
...

My father: younger, handsome, downright square,
eyes like brown buttons fastening his face
over his soul, mouth not too straight to swear,
...

we make midnight a maquette of the year:
frostlight glinting off snow to solemnize
the vows we offer to ourselves in near
...

only 3 of 100 black boys
entering kindergarten will graduate college—
in the night sky, shooting stars
...

All month this country has careened toward cold
and winter's celebrations: what a star
announced—a birth—and then a chance to fold
...

when i was younger, trees
were green, money was green, money
grew on trees, or trees grew up
...

music city u.s.a. it was, nothing doing without a song,
and not just twangy tunes that rhyme southern drawls
...

Arrived in a boat, named
and unnamed, twenty, pirated
...

my sister's visit
to india begins
it. i asked for a sari,
...

Dreaming the lives of the ancestors,
you awake, justly terrified of this world:
you could dance underwater and not get wet,
...

something is always burning, passion,
pride, envy, desire, the internal organs
going chokingly up in smoke, as some-
thing outside the body exerts a pull
...

the screed seen here blesses
the sweet, the meek, the gentle,
the serene. let eyes ensembled
...

Dear Daughter,
Can you be fifty-three this
month? I still look for you to peek around
my door as if you'd discovered a toy
...

wedged in the top branches, rain still sighing
to earth as a dissolute sky dissolves,
a mozambican woman turns mother,
...

at 93, you determined to pick up and go—
and stay gone. the job nkrumah called you to,
to create, at last, your encyclopedia africana
(encompassing a continent chipped
...

self-portrait with cats, with purple, with stacks
of half-read books adorning my desk, with coffee,

with mug, with yesterday's mug. self-portrait
...