And That Fast, You’re Thinking About Their Bodies

At a rooftop party, you dance near every edge.
Someone drops a ring in glass, in your head
the clink of a used bullet, still hot, and that fast
the rooftop is covered with wires, riflemen,
and you’re thinking about mutiny, MK-47s,
two cities clawing at each other’s bruised
throats while boys try to hold your hips,
keep dancing. The war is on your hips.
Your hands. You wear it all over. You wrap
your hair in it. Pluck it from your eyebrows.
The rooftop is wide and caring, too rained
or sometimes incensed, and you never once
think to be afraid of what could arrow a cloud
and kill it. You eat volcano rolls, pink pepper
goat cheese, and the war enters you. You stare
at Still Life with Flowers and Fruit
and the glade of roses scream
war. Here with a doctor and your pregnant
aunt who hasn’t yet learned English, only speaks
in war. Friends in Greensboro get picked up
by bored police, get beat up for no reason,
and those fists carry war. At a job interview,
you carve yourself into a white-known shape
and that renaming is a kind of war.
You take a passport photo, told to smile
without teeth, the flash a bright war.
You’re on the other side of mercy
with your meadows and fluffed spillage,
where nights are creamed with saviors.
Here everyone rests on roofs graduated
and sung, gazing at a sky that won’t
bleed them. At the beach, you’re buried
to the neck, practicing dead, snug in your
chosen tomb, gulls flittering on all sides,
waves fleshing closer, and that fast you’re thinking
of a grubby desert girl who placed small stones
in her scarf, shook it back and forth,
said, This is what the sea must sound like.