Explore Poems: Crime & Punishment

The only antidote I may have to Trump’s election
is in a small ferry to Robben Island
one that shuttles…

I know it won't be received
Or sent. The page will be
In shreds as soon as I have scribbled it.
Later. …

What was I thinking about
on my way here? passing
the small kenkey with rabbit stew joint, passing
Elmina…

Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What's…

This animal calls itself police.
Whistling plantigrade.
Varieties: the English, Sherlock. (Pipe.)
Carter…

Este animal se llama policía.
Plantígrado soplador.
Variedades: la inglesa, sherlock. (Pipa).
Carter, la…

Lynch from Alabama.
Tailpiece in the form of a whip
and three-pointed hooves.
Tends to appear
with a great…

Lynch de Alabama.
Rabo en forma de látigo
y pezuñas terciarias.
Suele manifestarse
con una gran cruz…

The vulnerability of the figurehead is at the center of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting of Charles I:…

If I were an early person
I'd look for the limits of human wisdom
by going to sacred oak trees
or the local…

I want to begin this poem with two stories:
1. In 1984, my mother was pulled over for speeding in a rural, still unnamed village in Taishan. The cop was a forty-year-old man who let her go because of her age...

He was jailed for cruelty to insects, and his agent wasn’t answering the phone, so he stayed awake in the cell all night, pictures jumping around his head of the cops and the blowdryer they took as evidence. He used...

Six times every day we stand at the thresholds
of our cells to be counted, to be matched against
the roster of mugs the guards clutch and riffle
like assembly instructions as they tramp the ranges,
always in twos, keys piggy-bank chanking,
at night waggling...

Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,

How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,

But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.

The brutality of those two men
                                                 who broke into her apartment
and murdered her boyfriend,
       ...

Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s
bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,
and science has proven what it had to prove:
every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.
Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,
where prayer...

I come from the kidnapped,
                                    the assaulted—
my country’tis of reparations as in-store credit
                     ...

O transient voyager of heaven!
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ O silent sign of winter skies!
What adverse wind thy sail has driven
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ To dungeons where a prisoner lies?

Methinks the hands that shut the sun
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠So sternly from this morning's brow
Might still their rebel task have done
⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠ And checked a thing...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,