Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y’all have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe;
I was not offended.
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit.
George Clinton, “Maggot Brain,” 1971
It’s hard to say whether this kind of thing—making a case for a dead writer, I mean—was easier in the past than it is now. My guess is that it was. Easier, that is. It’s not so much that the critics of the past had more on …

I smell the page, and I see
broken pieces of crayons
the wings of paper cranes
sealed by your lips once
wet, in a strand of cotton candy
and I remember
you write in pencil
you leave silhouettes
before you lose a page.
the drops you shed
they’re all dry, wrinkles
I trace on my mother’s face
and your small shoes
hold sahara’s sand warm
on the empty stage, where
marionettes in faded colors
grazed by your hands, dark
from broken tips of chocolate,
lie silenced with severed strings,
inflections of your voice
in every fall
and I lose a page.
your words, unfinished
draw on the pages you left
branches of a winter …