Vocal Coach

That time I saw my father stealing chickens from the heads of goats and turning them into resilient tropes for how to say I love you to a white woman until she turns you yellow and all will and owl. He was a genius.  I'm his citrine proof, the softest nose on the hill and the truest eyes, wrists the size of the word copper inside of cool velvet. If I have to, I fight my way into beautiful songs but mostly there are no rivals for a whole double album about his blunt reappraisal of birds he sat behind recording glass pressing his throat against the nappy southern silence until they felt their names were whole enough to make time become, fractured enough to be suture and ax in the same jumping stillness, black enough to call the sun blue as he disappears into the sound. Between you and me, I think every man is impersonating his mother, from the first time he saw her get free on a drug or a duty, to the time he saw her get new on time, he sings to her in his second mind: wait for me, wait for me. Some of them are just better at it. The tyrants and infants and their happy daughters. Don't be so miscellaneous, give your note a name, he said, palms covered in feathers, radio speakers on his shoulder, Sam Cooke blowing through them, and then a commercial for Ambien