I love summer darkness: its chewiness and burnish, how fireflies in the yard
and headlights in the McDonald’s drive-through seem
to be the same swarm.
I like to step out into it
with a good liquor sweat going,
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
rattling around my cheap speakers,
diminuendo, fuzz pedal,
like I’m an instrument
and someone’s got their hands around my neck
returning me to the black velvet
lining of my case.
It’s ok, America. We mix the violence with the sweet
like a gun-shaped sugar bowl.
Trace odors of a neighbor’s barbeque, trace memories that don’t cohere;
if time is an illusion

this is
the drummer
staring

a hole right through the back of the front man’s head,
and I’m both of them,
which is to say the moon.

What do memories do
anyway besides argue what is behind you
is in front of you?
Future says: Percocet, Molly Percocet. Can’t argue with that.
Besides, sometimes the moon
is too much, overripe
like someone tried to fill it with all the tacky light of the world.
If happiness were longer, or if it could be touched, who would
trust it? I think we would
just pull it apart.
from the journal POETRY NORTHWEST
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Still from Kenneth Branagh's film of Much Ado About Nothing
"On the Movement for Color-Blind Casting"

"I cannot recall when I last saw an all‑white Shakespeare performance in this country....In the past few years I have found myself working on American productions that have starred a black Hamlet, a transgender Maria in Twelfth Night, and a black woman as Prospero, and richly diverse productions of a dozen or so other comedies and tragedies, many directed, designed, and choreographed by nonwhite artists."

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Title page to the King James Bible, published in 1611
What Sparks Poetry:
Martha Collins on Psalm 19

"One night when I was nine years old, when the stars and moon were shining brightly, my mother took me to the window and read the first verses of the 19th Psalm to me. That was a long time ago, so the version I heard was the King James, which is still....the translation I like to read. I was, as we would say now, blown away. I had heard and loved music all my short life, but I had never heard anything as beautiful as that Psalm."
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