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1 One man held the huge pig down and the other stuck an ice pick into the jugular, which is when we started to pay attention. The blood rose ten feet with force while the sow swam on its back as if to cut its own neck. Its fatty back smacked the slippery cement while the assassins shuffled to keep their balance, and the bloody fountain rose and fell back and rose less and less high, until the red plume reentered the pig at the neck, and the belly collapsed and the pig face went dull. 2 I knew the pig was the butcher’s, whose game lived mainly behind our garage. Sometimes turkeys, always roosters and sheep. Once the windmill turned two days without stopping. The butcher would walk in his apron straight for the victim. The others would scratch and babble and get in the way. Then the butcher would lead the animal to the back door of his shop, stopping to kill it on a stump. It was always evening, after closing. The sea breeze would be rising, cloaking the hour in brine. 3 The pig we saw slaughtered was more than twice anything shut up in the patch we trespassed to make havoc. Since the butcher was Italian, not Jewish, that would be his pig. Like the barber who carried a cigar box of bets to the stationery store, like the Greek who made sweets and hid Greek illegals, immigrant “submarines,” the butcher had a business, his business, by which he took from our hands the cleaver and serrated knife for the guts, and gave us back in butcher paper and outer layers of brown wrapping our lives for their cries. 4 Hung up to drain, the great pig, hacked into portions, looked like a puzzle we could put together in the freezer to make a picture of a pig of course, a map, clothes or other things when we looked.

We have not long to love. Light does not stay. The tender things are those we fold away. Coarse fabrics are the ones for common wear. In silence I have watched you comb your hair. Intimate the silence, dim and warm. I could but did not, reach to touch your arm. I could, but do not, break that which is still. (Almost the faintest whisper would be shrill.) So moments pass as though they wished to stay. We have not long to love. A night. A day....

By the sparklet of certain ciliates cesium practices its cricket song. Am I supposed to be impressed? My smoothie comes with gps . Take a left at that crustacean. You—yes, you, with the crisis Isis eyes. By Odin’s beard, this is snowier than usual. We can always burn the first folio. Go bug a dandelion. You’ll have the elephant of surprise.

After Krista Franklin's definition of funk House, as in abode, as in dwelling, as in crib, as in where your inhibitions go to rest. as in jack, loft, footwork. as in sweating out that press and curl. as in yo momma steppin out tonight. as in yo daddy put on his good shoes. as in this movement gradually getting Bigger Thomas. as in Pump Up the Volume. House as in bull pen. as in Detroit stay trying to claim our shit. as in we pledge allegiance to House Nation. as in The Warehouse. as in Professor Funk in full regalia. as in Chris Underwood on the 1s and 2s. as in The Chosen Few. as in Jackson Park. as in Black kids reading poems at The HotHouse. as in Hands Off Assata. as in shutdown. as in too many educated Black people downtown. as in “shiiid, we still got The Silver Room.” as in the Godfather himself teaching you how to pray with a beat. as in Rest in Rhythm Frankie Knuckles. as in a sea of Black bodies. as in Black bodies draped across poplar trees. as in Black boys crumbling beneath white hands. as in we’ll never forget you Eugene Williams. as in a city of Fire. again. as in “Can You Feel It.” as in Stockyards. as in Hog Butcher of the World. as in butchered Black boys. as in Mamie Till calling for an open casket. House as in a Harold Washington. as in finally for the people. as in “ha y’all niggas thought you had something.” as in our skin is not for mourning. as in drum beats. as in we still don’t need to know the same language to speak. House as in fusion. as in niggas spent they whole time in this country making the best outta scraps. as in Shack comma Harold’s Chicken. as in free breakfast. as in Black Panther. as in lit candles and airbrushed RIP T-shirts for that kid down the way. and that other kid. and that other kid. as in yo grandma’s cooking on a Sunday after church. as in every week you live Black you’re served a last supper. as in yo cousin doing hair in the kitchen. as in a fan in the window cause “you bet not turn that AC on.” as in Your Love. as in Chicago is my kind of town, unless I can see the niggas. as in white flight. as in redlining. as in naming the train that separates us the Red Line. as in “y’all ain’t even trying to hide that shit no mo.” as in we ain’t going no where. as in we gone dance anyway. as in home is where the House plays.

We lived in the long intolerable called God. We seemed happy. I don’t mean content I mean heroin happy, donkey dentures, I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture I mean to be mean. Dear Lord forgive the love I have for you and your fervent servants. I have so long sojourned Lord among the mild ironies and tolerable gods that what comes first to mind when I’m of a mind to witness is muriatic acid eating through the veins of one whose pains were so great she wanted only out, Lord, out. She too worshipped you. She too popped her little pill of soul. Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone is that a prayer that’s every instance answered? I remember one Wednesday witness told of a time his smack-freaked friends lashed him to the back of a Brahman bull that bucked and shook until like great bleeding wings the man’s collarbones exploded out of his skin. Long pause. “It was then,” the man said, “right then…” Yes. And how long before that man- turned-deacon-turned-scourge-of-sin began his ruinous and (one would guess) Holy Spirit-less affair? At what point did this poem abandon even the pretense of prayer? Imagine a man alive in the long intolerable time made of nothing but rut and rot, a wormward gaze even to his days’ sudden heavens. There is the suffering existence answers: it carves from cheeks and choices the faces we in fact are; and there is the suffering of primal silence, which seeps and drifts like a long fog that when it lifts leaves nothing but the same poor sod. Dear God—

He danced with tall grass for a moment, like he was swaying with a woman. Our gun barrels glowed white-hot. When I got to him, a blue halo of flies had already claimed him. I pulled the crumbled photograph from his fingers. There's no other way to say this: I fell in love. The morning cleared again, except for a distant mortar & somewhere choppers taking off. I slid the wallet into his pocket & turned him over, so he wouldn't be kissing the ground.

We old dudes. We White shoes. We Golf ball. We Eat mall. We Soak teeth. We Palm Beach; We Vote red. We Soon dead.

That's why we're here, said Julio Lugo to the Globe. Sox fans booed poor Lugo, booed his at-bat after he dropped the ball in the pivotal fifth. That ball,I got to it,I just couldn't come up with it. Lugo wants you to know he is fast: a slower player wouldn't even get close enough to get booed. Lugo wants you to know he's only human:We're human beings. That's why we're here. If not, I would have wings. I'd be beside God right now. I'd be an angel. But I'm not an angel. I'm a human being that lives right here. Next day, all is forgiven. Lugo's home run, Lugo's sweet comment to the press. I wanted to make a poster like the ones that say It's my birthday! or First Time at Fenway! or, pathetic,ESPN. Posterboard, permanent marker to say Lugo:me,too. I'm a human being that lives right here, decided it's too esoteric, too ephemeral a reference, but it's true: Oh, Lugo, Julio Lugo, I'm here with you.

Now that the theoretical physicist slash cosmologist has explained to me, has laid out in clean even rows of logic how every atom in my body arrived from a star, a star that blasted apart, and the atoms of my left hand originated from a different sun than my right, I can shine. I can go dark recalling how my grandfather made the vertical blinds rattle when he shoved my grandmother into them. Startled in the yard, I turned to that sound, from the flower bed my eyes were held by the swaying blinds. It took a while for each to line up perfectly straight again, to tell myself she slipped. Only then could I return to stalking the butterflies. My right hand was quick: reach and pinch. I had so many soft wings that summer between my thumb and index, so many of them skewered on cactus needles. I was a kid. I was cruel slash gentle. He was cruel slash gentle. He had witnessed my destroying and I saw across his creased face empathy for them. After his scolding I placed one dead one inside the white envelope of a flower. Under the sun it glowed. Under the moon, more glowing.

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.