No Place Like

Girl, I envy your every line. Your skirts, how they swish and swallow.
Tulle and tulips and lace. How they hold our eyes and lives
unscripted. On the street

there's a dead pigeon. Its heart got runned over [sic].
You would take a picture and I would hide my eyes
and the neighborhood kids laugh as I take a feather

for a dreamcatcher full of nightmares
that I wouldn't change for nothin
because when I say I hurt, it don't mean I'm unhappy.

She writes me from the next world,
says they got her on robbery charges.
Says home aint changed
and Johnny King's still kickin.
He got caught smokin crack in a chicken coop.
She says can you believe it? I say I can, cause
aint that your dad? She says, nah, we aint sisters.

and we laugh. We are. Alive. We are. Sisters.
Somewhere in the stars we are a constellation
that never got a name, gets no representation:
hard-ass beauties riding death around like an old caddy.
She asks me do I remember the time we

Of course I do.

Then why you talk so fancy.
Why we aint seen you in so long?
Because I'm gone. Smoking the last one
and someone has to have it-

the escape. The fire-escape.
I'm circling it like a widow's walk,
watching for ghosts, wanting that morning
crow to call my name,
just once. I want that hand-planted city gingko
to turn into a catalpa
full of history and indian beans long like snakes
that fall like friends and slither toward water
to show me home

again I'm painting black mermaids. Again. Angry.
That the world can't give me one black mermaid
with dark, dark skin
and a skirt of scales that swallows all
of this appropriation.

Girl, I envy your every line,
but the country kids are laughing
at your skirt that says you never
tasted squirrel.
So put away the banjo and put down the pabst.
There's a lot more to it than that.