O how I won this ocean-lake abyss to be mine. Some days she hold her own words,
other days everyone else got her heart and tongue. O how I won it to be mine.
These the days. These the hours for my change. O how I want and how I won. To
tell the story of how he got her back is to tell the story of how she pulled him out
the Earth. O how I won. O how I won through my surrender. These hours. These
riverbeds turned ravines. A version of him could be told in the burying. He dig himself
a hole beneath the ground. He lines it with worn out baseballs and places palm oil
in he hair. He lay he tired head down and try to get use to warmth. He feel so good
when the soil say we like it when this skin is warm. He feel like he never heard that before,
even though he had. He had heard it before—but it matters that he didn’t feel that: it
was discard he felt. All the plastic yokes for them six-packs of soda. He knew what
it was like to feel like that. But there be other versions of him too. Ones where
he prays to the good lines, to the good boundaries, to the good sun. He worships the
word no.  He think not of the prison plenum that last forever but is just a matter of today. 
There be other versions of him too. Ones where he worry he making all the waters
respond to him. Ones where he think she—wetness, sunlight, a voice—could not. Ones
where the specific occasion, a peculiar denial, the only embodied he, he knows, wrestles
with sin.









✦ The penultimate line borrows language from Hortense Spiller’s 1987 essay
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”