Quiver

Quiver is a book of reckoning, a book of ghosts, a book of lineal fracture and generational fatherlesness. It’s a visceral guide through boyhood into fatherhood. One that yields witness to trauma, erotic shames, brutalities and toxic masculinity, and in so doing, emerges with a speaker beginning to free himself. Patricia Smith said it best: “Quiver will change the way you see.”

“floodghost”

Mother couldn’t manage

what sated me, so she prayed:

sought in silence

a substance that’d soothe,

something familial with grace.

I groaned. Broke bodies

over blacktop’s pane, a bottom-

less well of blood. At seven

I smothered a frog and fed each leg

to my quivering sister

laughed while she choked out its skin. At twelve,

I pulled a pistol from under

the vacant shed and shoved

its shudder to a schoolboy’s temple, teased 

while he wept in his piss.

And yet all along a Psalm, a satchel

of prayer: song. Mother making

contracts with the sky, while I

tore its pages to light a fire, warm

my hands around it. Radiant blue. Red

from a faraway pine.