Laughing Barrel Rolling Down a Hill

Nothing is funny. Nothing is funny, but

I’ve spent my life proving I can’t take shit serious.

I come from a people that outlived hounds & heat & hulls.

I believe because when my mother prays, it works.

Proof: I can’t take shit serious. I’ve spent my life

while my granny sits in Oakland, watching Jeopardy.

My mother’s prayers work, but believe me, I’m no saint.

I’ll laugh at the right retweet. I’ll talk bad at a funeral.

While my granny sat, calling the jeopardy man a fool,

a homie of mine was plagued by a biblical kind of irony.

I laughed at the retweet, but would never say at his funeral.

I wanted him to slip unabated into the dark,

my homie, plagued by a biblical kind of irony.

Our postmortem commotion a cardiac percussion

I wanted to slip unabated into the dark.

I needed convincing even our dead could laugh.

In our communion lives a cardinal procession,

a people that outlived hounds & hulls & hell,

our dead, laughing, even when convinced

nothing was funny. Nothing was funny.

Mitrice Richardson

In consideration of Noah Davis’ eponymous painting & related disappearance case

There is a city

that lost me

and won’t admit it.

The night wears

my mother’s lonely.

The palm trees bear

her grief. Her quietness

has an ocean in it, a beach

with disappearing coastline.

My name is all coral

now, a seashell a child

is trying to make speak

back. I’m trying. I promise. Look

for me in the morning’s soft

onyx and I am still finding

my way. There’s just so much

noise to cut through.

Neighborhood Beautification Program

And it’s on a day like today —

when the sun has reached its apex,

& the East Bay’s cold has dissipated

as popsicles do in mid-Spring heat,

& the already-too-narrow

street has emptied of its regulars—

that my grandmother might rise,

slowly, from her porch-stoop chair,

a barbershop stool my grandfather

or uncle finessed from some unwitting

street corner, to take up a broom, illustrious

in its utility, & venture beyond her iron brick

fence — now overgrown with flower-dappled

hedges — to sweep this sidewalk

she’s looked upon since my father’s youth,

clearing it of its carnage of Dorito bags

& burger wrappers & discarded face masks

with a particular flourish, & after so long

she may pause and strain to see, over the hedges,

my sister and I eating ice cream, and very likely

she will open her mouth to speak, saying:

“I just don’t understand how folks can stand

to see the street so dirty, just cause its the ghetto

don’t mean it gotta look that way,” at which

we very likely will mm hm, as we do every time

she says this, and she, very likely —

being satisfied with our responses

& being satisfied with the small plot

of land she has stewarded — will return

to her spot on the porch, return

the broom to its corner, & take-up

her cordless landline to phone

her sister a state over to tell her

how nice the weather is today,

how quiet the street has been, how beautiful

the neighborhood is looking

after all