(a satirical elegy for Wanda Coleman)

Didn’t she recognize the ostinato of Wanda’s bony loneliness? / Didn’t she realize when Wanda scarred the schoolyard, her hair’s first draft made black girls titter?

We climb toward the rumored grave / of a Native American healer, the earth / a vertigo of blackness and exposed / root beneath our palms, pressing up / through the waves of molten leaves, /

Airport lights gleam through the humidity like the slicked / teeth of a shelter dog. All of them wait for the war to start again. /

I am ready. / No matter what comes next, / at least I have the clothes on my back. /

3. Transitioning

where does the life-force of breath go after flesh falls away / from bone, does it evoke itself in memory, metaphor, / spirit, until recollection dissolves itself within disposition, / where, perhaps, a tangle of disconnected wires, loose ends / prevail in minds of those living in the fog of alzheimer, amnesia, / the willful erasure of memory thought difficult to digest,/