These days I wake in the used light of someone’s spent life.
     I am often a stranger to myself;
       I have no place of origin, no home.

for Harry Mphanza

We have changed a great many of our colonial place names since independence, but we have kept the name of Livingstone out of a deep respect. —Siloka Mukuni, chief of the Leya People

  At the onset of my ingenious plan, the sun barely shone
            through the mist.
      I struggled with a name to identify the rushes
            of water pouring beside me.

an excert from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

Imagine you at the beginning of the
longest walk of your life, no thought given to
shoes, socks, toothpaste, hats, and the other
rip-rap, nothing of watches or water, sleeping

Guy walks up to me in the park and says, “My girlfriend killed
    James Brown,” and I start to say, “Do I know you?” but
I don’t want to miss out on the story, so I say, “No lie!” and he says,
    “Yeah, I got bumped up to first class, and when I saw who
my seatmate was, I went back to economy and told my girlfriend,
    and even though she had the flu, we switch places, and three

My mother’s been dead for three months.
I don’t know where she is now or how she got there.
I’ve heard all kinds of conjecture, and some
I believe. But firsthand experience comes last.

I understand—the NO ONE CARES billboard
looms over the exit ramp; Nancy has lost her place
in her novel for the umpteenth time; the Lab
has dysplasia.

It’s time to leave again. She unplugs the fridge
and watches until the orange coils on its back
have faded down to gray. She turns off the gas.
She papers the windows in layers from the outside,
because if she doesn’t, the moon will reflect in the panes
like a lamp in every room. And then the house will still
seem lived in. And then how to move on?
The last thing she does, always, is go with them
one by one into their rooms and hold them up
to pluck the glow-in-the-dark stars from the ceiling.

They broke into houses,
my sisters. The empty ones,
just built, where nobody had yet
tried to sleep. Little mounds
of sawdust still in the corners,
no floorboards loose.

Susannah Harrison, “Songs in the
Night; By a Young Woman, Under Heavy
Afflictions,” didn’t touch him, but Morrison
Heady traveled by stage from Louisville
to touch Laura Bridgman, who
demanded that Helen Keller wash her hands. Helen
would later touch many of us but wouldn’t let us
touch her back.