The centaur,
fully aware of his 
fictional status, 
nevertheless
did not hesitate to enter
the food court at
the mall to stand before
the rotating trays of
desiccated cheese slices
and turn singing to the crowd
with arms upraised
while clopping a martial rhythm;

said crowd whispering
their delight (mixed with 
a little fear of this thing
which they’d only heard of
in story prior to this moment)

turned then to each other
and saying, he fills a hole
we hate among us, he tells us
the hole can only be filled
by him and so we should
ignore the steam rising 
from the piles all around him
and elect him, acclaim him,
by God let’s bring him to life.

Hearing that another Black boy’s
been killed by police fire — 

seeing pictures of police taken from a distance,
body cameras having failed to fire

in this never ending death season where crowds of people stare flames
into a kneeling quarterback who somehow is not yet on fire

despite the wash of kerosene poured upon him
for daring to suggest that police need not always fire,

while elsewhere dogs on the Great Plains
lunge from brutal hands, their kill-trained eyes on fire

for the ancient taste of Native flesh again — ooh, 
it’s been too long — someone give the Guard the order to fire

and bleach the earth free of this human tide
hugging the millions of acres yet to set on fire — 

and if you think this one is not the same as the others
look at the match that starts the fire,

see who holds the unburnt end
after the passing of the fire,

check your hands
to see if they stink of fire.

If you remain on the edge
of the point overlooking 
the vast space filled with
what you don’t know and

remain unable to bring yourself
to look down and perhaps
lessen your ignorance 

if only by straining to find
a tiny break in the clouds below you
so that you might possibly
catch a glimpse 
of the bottom of what
seemed at first glance to be
a bottomless pit, how

are we supposed to believe
anything you claim for your own
growth and maturity?
You should just 

admit your complete lack
of interest in, or your own 
paralyzing fear of, the 

unknown in you, even the unknown
that has in fact been revealed to you
by others so often, the unknown
you refuse to know for whatever
reason you may provide, real or
imagined, falsified or true;
then step off 

and let the space have you, let yourself
vanish into it 
like a ball

maybe to land and then
bounce out and be saved
if you’re lucky or blessed;

to be honest, though,
we won’t be looking for you;

self-care being what it is in these times,
we have our own cliffs to conquer,
our own fatal falls to avoid,

our own clouds to pierce.

Splintery enough 
for ya? Tension —
can’t live with it, can’t
drink enough to kill it.
It’s like walking through
blood soup lately. I’ve got
wet legs and famished
eyes. Did you hear the 
forecast? They say it’s 
all over the whole damn
country and getting worse,
every city’s a flood plain,
every town a fire zone,
every road a rain of bullets,
every kid’s a potential orphan
and every parent’s got a wound 
open for grieving. There’s bound
to come a moment soon
where we stop calling it
bad weather and call it climate change,
stop calling it protesting and call it
uprising, stop calling it a great country
and just call it a country bearing up
against splintering, stop pretending
it wasn’t built on cracks to begin with,
stop pretending it’s not inevitable.

Spell it with two guns
and a coat of whitewash.

Spell it with three picket fences
and a wolverine trapped
under a left thumbnail.
Spell it with seven dirty words
and rigor mortis laid thick
between bricks.

Spell it with fifty-seven apologies
flavored with forgetting,
sixty-three apologies
blind to remorse,
one hundred and eleven apologies
offered on a dagger’s tip.  

Spell it original thirteen,
broken five hundred.  Spell it
three-fifths, spell it six-nineteen.  
Spell it nine-eleven; spell it with
a cloud over it, a strained 
flag, a lowered boom.

Spell it with two more guns
and a Nagasaki blister.  Spell it
with moon rocks and cratered
cities, dead kids, dead eyes
dotted with good flowers. 

Spell it with a burr. Spell it
with flanks quivering.  Spell it 
with pink dawn over gray streets
and a boat swift-rocking 
down a snow fed river. 

How to spell American:

with a cauldron. A melting pot
if you prefer. A bullet mold,
a fireproof suffrage, a vote
for steam over simmer, 
a last summer of drowsing bees.

Spell it,
respell it,
spell it,
respell it;

it’s not like anyone knows
the correct way to pronounce it.

They did not imagine
back when they began
that we would still be here
this deep into the future.

It was a failure of imagination by those
who have always exaggerated 
how much imagination
they actually have.

They always believed
that the future was theirs
to corral and segregate,
that they would own the walls

and floors and doors
and locks and bars
forever. They built that way,
they taught that way,

they thought that way
was the only way. Their way
was the highway.  They thought
we would always be

like pavement: underfoot,
smooth, forgettable
as any other necessity
someone stole long ago.

Now that their pavement is
breaking, now that
the roots they thought
they had killed

are pushing hard new life
through it toward the light,
they dare to ask:
who are you to break

so much, block the journey,
question the wholeness
of us?  We respond:
use your imagination,

what did you think would happen?
And when they say nothing to that
and bring out the stale old weapons
and the antique crushing weights

and we rise in spite
of all that and they
are astonished, saddened, cooing
and cajoling and saying there, there,

calm down,
don’t be like that, we say:
use your imagination.
What do you think is going to happen

now? And when they stand there
on their broken ground amid 
their shattered walls and locks
and doors burst open and held open

by the swift and violent greening
of our resurgence, when they say
what now, we will not speak. We will shrug
and turn our imaginations elsewhere.