Misery where joy once lived,
The fun of friendship gone wrong,
A life of worship turned hollow,
The spark of work now fading.

I don’t remember the first body. I remember the first time I stopped noticing them. That’s what stayed with me. Not shock — the absence of it.

They don’t talk much.
They sit with newspapers they don’t read, chairs they don’t leave, clocks they don’t reset.
The rooms are quiet.
Even the floorboards know to keep their voices down.

Three hundred years ago
on the island of Martha’s Vineyard
everyone knew sign language
because the mainland was far away
and there was a lot of inbreeding—
cousins marrying cousins—
and a recessive genetic quirk

Sixteen miles to Choctaw
The noose around my neck
Another night comes undone
With ways I can’t forget

for Dr. Sheldon Bernarr Korones (1924-2013)

Smaller than most, not yet baptized,
they reached out to him
with tiny fingers as wrinkly as his own,
as if to bless this short
New Yorker-turned-Southerner—
coated white
like a creator—grateful to his aging hands
for saving their little lives.

For the victims of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on March 25, 1911, who in a scant 15 minutes died of asphyxiation, burns, and blunt-force trauma.

They’d locked all the doors—
To make sure there were no thefts.
To make sure no one left their work.
To make sure the union stayed out.
To make sure they made the most money:

My voice will weigh on you.
Those were the last words my mother said to me before I left the city.
She didn’t say anything else and she hasn’t spoken to me since.
Not even after my father kept calling to tell me that this dream of acting is insane.
Not even when I got my first TV role.

I was born with a brick tied to my ankle
No one knew about the brick
No one could see the brick, it was just there

travel one hundred miles, calling
the 99th, half way
understand one thing:
I am no longer
misinformed

Franco came to power through a coup, to
prevent leftist reforms from trickling through
the government. He came from the same town as
my great-grandfather, Ito, though the area has
since exiled Franco’s remains. His body was taken
from the Valley of the Fallen and forsaken
to a small plot of land near Madrid. They tried
to erase his memory after half a million died
in the civil war—including three of my great
uncles, who fought to prevent a fascist state.

Last night I had a dream

that Finch came back as a crow,

blackened wings folded like maps

he never got to read.

Last night I dreamed

I was back in that house on Larkin Street—

the one with the red door,

the broken lock,