at random, by opening the recently published Norton Anthology of Modern
and Contemporary Poetry and copying out the beginnings of poems, written
during the 1990s:
On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert ®owers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again.When his Excellency Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey
Invited me to lunch on the battle¤eld
I was glad of my white suit for the ¤rst time that day.
They lived well, the mad Norodoms, they had style.
The brandy and the soda arrived in cratesOn my way to bringing you the leotard
you forgot to include in your overnight bag,
the snow started coming down harder.
I watched each gathering of leafy ®akes
melt round my footfall.Menial twilight sweeps the storefronts along Lexington
as the shadows arrive to take their places
among the scourge of the earth.A young black girl stopped by the woods,
so young she knew only one man: Jim Crow
but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister.
The woods were his and she respected his boundaries
even in the absence of fence.“Look how they love themselves,”
my mother would lecture as we drove through
the ironwoods, the park on one side,
the beach on the other, where sunworshippers,
splayed upon towels, appeared sacri¤cial,
bodies glazed and glistening like raw ¤sh in the market.212 Chapter 11