Quiver Poems

<I>Quiver</I> 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: “<I>Quiver</I> will change the way you see.”<BR/> “floodghost”<BR/> Mother couldn’t manage<BR/> what sated me, so she prayed:<BR/> sought in silence<BR/> a substance that’d soothe,<BR/> something familial with grace.<BR/> I groaned. Broke bodies<BR/> over blacktop’s pane, a bottom-<BR/> less well of blood. At seven<BR/> I smothered a frog and fed each leg<BR/> to my quivering sister<BR/> laughed while she choked out its skin. At twelve,<BR/> I pulled a pistol from under<BR/> the vacant shed and shoved<BR/> its shudder to a schoolboy’s temple, teased <BR/> while he wept in his piss.<BR/> And yet all along a Psalm, a satchel<BR/> of prayer: song. Mother making<BR/> contracts with the sky, while I<BR/> tore its pages to light a fire, warm<BR/> my hands around it. Radiant blue. Red<BR/> from a faraway pine.