Three Poems

To Treasure Island for a wardrobe fitting before the funeral cortège in Season 4 of Man in the High Castle

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—with a line by Philip K. Dick

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     I had no lines, but got along 
with the costume designer who dressed
me as an officer’s wife and decided 
I should wear the vintage black tulle
and satin whimsy hat perhaps to make
up for the black pumps that were not
designed for comfort, and since I was
a background actor in an alternate 
history, what was the harm in unlearning
who won which war as long as 
my grandmother didn’t turn in her grave
because I don’t think she ever got over
what she had to do in the years before
liberation. Looking in the mirror
         

     in a retro skirt suit, I thought I saw
a ghost. But it is 2018 
in the real world, and Treasure Island
is a boneyard, a place for old longings
where the only ghosts are long-gone lady 
beetles and irradiated moths. Steel 
shipping containers sit atop the bones 
of a walled city, and there’s a white 
retriever with a six-pound lump 
on his belly and the sight of him,
I know, will forever haunt me. 
Here we are where the World’s Fair was,
and I wonder what we were before 
we were this, quarried rock that bloomed 

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     into something more radioactive.
Before we could walk towards something 
terrible or divine (in the last
hour before sunset and after
many resets)—pretend mourners 
behind the opulent palanquin 
in our retro modern black skirt suits 
and veiled black hats and the almost 
unbearable classic black shoes— 

we had a wardrobe fitting, took off 
our clothes and looked in the mirror,
saw an island rising, or a murmuration, 
starlings gathering into something 
terrible, or something divine.

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​An American in Paris
 

—with lines by Marguerite Yourcenar and Emma Lazarus
 

There’s a hidden courtyard just past
Rue des Arquebusiers in the Marais,
 

a tiny square big enough to take 
it all in—field maples, old garden 
 

roses still blossoming in September,
my unfading American dream—
 

where I first heard of la rentrée, 
a fresh start, even as soldiers 
 

in full fatigues patrolled the streets, 
the city on high alert 
 

with l'opération sentinelle 
still in place. I came to say goodbye 
 

to someone dear—you know what they say 
about good Americans and Paris—
 

she loved it here where they did not bother
with the color of her skin. French, she said, 
 

is unstressed: Le véritable lieu 
de naissance est celui où l’on a porté 
 

pour la première fois un coup d’œil 
intelligent sur soi-même.  
 

There’s a hidden island along the Seine, 
the Île aux Cygnes, that is home
 

to a replica of the Statue 
of Liberty. She is facing west, 
 

toward New York City in truth facing

herself. She must have known I came to say 

goodbye, though my syllables were all stressed,

tempest-tossed, just yearning to breathe free.

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What I Know About Jawns I Learned

From Allen Iverson
 

That crossover is a lot like a turn 
you never see coming, be unguardable
 

like everything is poetry,
like the time Live 8 came to my city

(and I say my city though I was 
practically FOB and knew

little of the jawns of a new country,
but Philly in July was a glory 
 

of flowers, summersweet and spicy,
walked me through the biggest human heart
 

as though my own were not yet rivered
and wrung), threw a block party
 

outside my place on the Parkway
where Destiny’s Child—my stars—and Black Ice
 

took me to church though I was a straight up 
churchgoer (walked a mile every Sunday 
 

to 17th & Chestnut, but not before 
grabbing my coffee at Wawa’s,
 

and just because I could, I would walk past
18th & Walnut where the American 
 

Poetry Review was, not that I ever
sent them my work), tell me again how to
 

walk through a human heart without
wearing it down, steal away to church
 

boots on the ground, watch that split second
where Iverson takes pen and paper, 
 

draws you, straight up buries you, Blood, 
he says, throw up a prayer, or walk.