I’m not stating explicitly that I am Latino, / because I am not exactly Latino. Instead I’ll say / meeting my father awoke a nation inside me / and my tongue began forming his Spanish. I’ll say / making patacones is a spiritual experience— / a prayer. And the browning sizzling disks— / an answer. 

(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. /