that love situation

It was cold for the city today. Cold like the first time your palm touches a beer from a cooler. Tuesday around Pershing. Kicking around cigarette butts I look around hoping I can figure it out. The sky is gun gray so are the prospects of the tent city by the children swings. One lone chubby security guard swipes at his phone. Oblivious.

     Love is the hardest thing to think about. The thought of it is frightening to me. To them who dwell, and hustle love is crystal clear.

     She is there with a pink metal suitcase. The pink pops betwixt the stains of dried blood, chili, and grime. She wears a broken cowboy hat and underneath a matted polyester wig. I’m not sure what to have called the color. Across bent body a poncho, crispy looking like KFC clotted with dirt and hysterical indifference.

     From the banana plants steps out a man thin with skinny fingers and yellowed fingernails which at a closer look were filled with black dirt underneath. An unholy French manicure. As he reached in to hug her his Jamaican flag colored letterman jacket levitated in the wind. Then the rain came down on his worn Oakland A’s baseball cap. He smiled with a meth mouth grin and crust around the corners of his mouth. She placed her broken left hand on his left shoulder. And with her less broken right hand nursed a blunt as she offered it to the OA man as a new mother nurses her baby.

     I drew closer pretending to look past them and secretly taking them in like a hummingbird delights in nectar. He called her Lucretia, and she laughed a raspy sound. She called him Cesar and thanked him for the three dollars last night. He hoped the cough syrup helped her with her chest cold.

     Sitting down on the steps that stare at the jewelry and finger printing fronts across the street on Olive I caught patches of their conversation. Cesar was from Nicaragua. Years of exposure to the richness that is the immigrant community of Pico Union I learned to decipher at least 9 accents and dialects. The raspy lady was from L.A.

     The blunt was crushed on the tip and tucked in the hole of her chest. They sat down on a cardboard and took a long look at the day around them. I could tell he sighed as his lips pursed like an old Indian chief portrait at the natural history museum. As she stood up again with her less broken hand she slicked her hat off her head and took off her wig.

     “My last daddy hit me with a bat,” was her disclosure as she felt the stitched cut on the left side of her head like braille. Cesar shakes his head and reaches up to hold her hand.

     We turn to the west as a swarm of pigeons flap over the playground. The three of us look at each other and smile.

underground in solitude

mbrazfield (c) 2022

i have no desire to stop and smell flowers or tell my friend about the aroma of bread in the morning breeze i have earned the right to just wander off in these unbelievable streets barefoot to squander the last of my life i have no interest in looking for the art in my face or the strength of my wrists i have a need to talk to myself about the world that scorns me and finally be at peace to embrace the underground in solitude

transference

mbrazfield (c) 2022

she spills her thoughts unto a loose leaf notebook page with an old blue Bic ink pen
her kitchen table strewn with paper scraps cheap chocolates and charity meals from St. Vincent’s
on her bed plastic liners rolling papers and blue aluminum bags tufts of tobacco on her sheet an old exaggerated Brave on the label
arms scarred by a childhood rash disease that taught her plenty about loneliness
now she the matriarch of two generations birthed from her
she wanders down the halls watching the world through an orphaned telescope
i like watching her turn her room apart
to show me husband’s funerary ashes
and dead baby one shot down before his prime
is the conversation everyday
then my turn to drive away
to punch on keys a progress report
about the life of another woman
whose had to pay a staggering price for wanting happiness

coyote bones

the snakes slate in color in and out of my eye sockets i call on to the night she is quiet and upset i have made her head of clouds white with the thunder in my brain thoughts ooze morbid dry like broken coyote bones in the dessert lay waste unlike romantic dreams of peyote glam summoned by spirit animals tis best to let me float or bleach under that hot hot sun stone apart from the many other coyote fallen

Shulamite

There are things in my mind that no one except I can see. Those things, demons, grotesque that taunt me. I hear them coming closer, but I’ll fuck them up. They want to destroy me. I, so ashamed of my age, only a drunk and you there in your profession and you have this tone to your voice. I let you in my home. I am offended. Look at me a Black woman, you must think, reduced to this just a drunk, that’s what I say. I have missed out on so many things. Alcohol is not the problem. I am the problem. I have great grand babies I have not met. And my son who died would have been almost 40, yes. The one who lives doesn’t know how I am here. I had an aunt who raised Pothos plants, and the vines would grow across the top of her windows. Yes, those are it. Look at those leaves, simply beautiful and mottled just like me. I should get one. They are sturdy, they could put up with me. I look down a lot, don’t I? Oh now, I’ve started crying like a fool. I’m old, I weep sporadically. You asked if I had drink today. Can you smell the alcohol? Let me excuse myself, I’ll be right back, have you seen my matches? Why are you here? You’re a lovely little thing and I am little too, but I belong to those who dwell by the back alley. The state grants me this nice room and they’ve not yet plucked the thorns from my soul buried into to me deeply by these streets. Are you the thorn plucker? Be careful how you weed this sickness from me. I might not be able to stop bleeding. I will be fine. Your eyes are a strange color. You wouldn’t be the devil coming to take me? I resent your calm and your character, your understatement, and your concern for me. Do I speak like you thought I would? Are you surprised at my poise? Of course, you’re not. You are one who knows better. Alas, I don’t feel like a statistic with you. Have you guessed that I too have read Baldwin and Joyce? And here we are together with those demons of mine in the corners. I can see through the pieces of my heart at the pit of my belly that your heart is breaking for me. You do not see a Black woman at all do you? You, in your profession and your sterile words and your tone, you see me, don’t you? My daddy used to call me Jasper, his baby girl with ashy feet.

intertwined are we

intertwined are we
today was hard
my black sister
drunken on the
couch where life
grabs hold and
won’t let go
intertwined are we
me in my sea
of clinical tricks
to pluck the
splinter from your
broken shattered heart
intertwined are we
today we sparred
my yellow sister
sad and lost
sick of it
all you cry
within your soul
me with idiot
pen instructing you
to just sign
here and here
intertwined are we
my dear brown
sis your laughter
hides the rage
of voices in
your head tormenting
the peace from
your inner self
i can only
smile and praise
your strength knowing
that tomorrow night
there’s a chance
your spirit dies
intertwined are we
the nights linger
like the cigarette
on your busted
lips quivering from
meth and shame
from the time
of birth til
the time of
death you walk
in the weave
of that shadow
in that valley
the good book
warns us about
i follow your
stride into the
caves of the
damned you hoping
i go away
i knowing that
this was my
launching place before
intertwined are we

trilobite, us redux

hey its me any little girl here in the land of Califa
standing here
watching pixelated faces lecture me
Mrs. K spits
as the psyche creaks
politicos burrow into the livers
the decorated soldier begs in vain
dog puke dog and starves to death
and any one rich man holds the Sun hostage

we’ve arrived as widowed child wives old at 17
mutated as this
guilted to breathe it in
carefully engineered rhetorical prison
abandoned lots with broken earth
and wifi chambers force my heaving love to transfer through a tiny yellow ball
long gone by the days of my defense of common sense our bloods leak out of the pipelines

cut from this a thorny dress for me to wear when i cross the fields of certain death
mouth cannot afford to feed so we label it starvation chic Spring collection 2022
from a city where His houses are closed but the fuck joints spread eagle open
and instead of elevating our children to a sacred garden
your success plan exclusively gives us their early termination option involuntarily of course

beat into this
bleeding and punching at it
punching at it
punching at it for this
self sacrificing to it
choking like it
mutated
berated
humiliated
because of greed
used by it
raped and sodomized by it
sold down the sewer by it
indentured to it
turned stupid through it
sterilized  by it

the soul cauterized
hands plucked off
the tongue
the dust
the micro wave
broken fists bow to the 5G gods and all of the ROC’s men
my rivers polluted
my children can’t swim

somnambulant diagnosis reach for the
SSRI’s
SNRI’s
MAOI’s
IOU’s
IUD’s

we’ve voted into this desperate resignation but somewhere in those pigeon holes i am alive
but we’ll pay into the bottomless recession
that put together with our farthest most ancestors brought back from heaven can’t help us from debt
commandments will be outlawed for AI commanders
turn in thy neighbor will be a passport to breathe one more 8 hour pain filled day
charity will be uselessly lewd
schooling will be punished
the Statue of Liberty shall pawn her torch for three dollars
God particles will slice time wide open
the horned beasts will be the priests
because hell hath no fury like the secretary of state scorned

the new world order hid away Galileo’s brain under the Sepulveda Pass
law will pass
nature will pass
we will pass
men on fire will eat men of eternal flames
those who are spared will be consumed by the madness of the NYSE silent bell who tolls for the all known
space stations will be the new sub stop
packed lemmings with visible dog tags
shooting off operation warp speed go go go to build castles in the clouds for them if there’s a future Florida

lord Silly Con forbids your show of common grace Queen Squad will soon order you off with my head simply because she can but she’s not a she because thee real She is kindness