on why Miles Davis quit playing ballads by Anthony Thomas Lombardi

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You know why I quit playing ballads?

Because I love playing ballads.

Miles Davis

once, a woman who claimed

she loved me carried me

down half a Brooklyn block

on the hood of her car

then spat me onto blacktop

like she’d forgotten

her manners. in her rearview

mirror my eye’s corner

caught a cold reflection

her palms splayed & skin

rippling like a dried fig.

i watched her manage

a muffled curse, skid a puff

of smoke, but not bother

to glimpse how much of me

she’d left behind. don’t look

at me like that. i was there

hapless as flesh crumpled

in a canon. consider the shape

i take when i hover, all right

angles, hands loosening like tea

leaves. now consider a woman

in Coney Island, a makeshift

orchestra’s pit on a bench nearby

bending her limbs into halos

a minuet she’s learned to dance

alone, marking time & loss

on swollen wood. the tune lilts

as her head swivels, curls cloaked

in a leopard’s splotched print

the lonely predator

stalking prey in solitude

as the sky’s glare softens

to a glow. i turn my attention

to the laughing gulls gliding

over tenements where mud

-caked boots grace every

welcome mat & children shot

-gun clouds with tongues rolled

like holy scripts. listen carefully.

the dancer’s cackle cracks

like kindling & somewhere

closeby figs snap the wings off

wasps & swallow them whole.

she leaves a box near brimming

to rot but on return will find them

merely ripened. i don’t know

how else to tell you this

but no one is coming to save you.

the buck moon is full & wild

-fire red at our windows

smoke crawling from rubble

across the barren heart

-land to creep into our bedrooms

trailing blood. instead of crying

wolf, i went looking for them

scurrying after paw prints

the shape of plums, plumes

dancing around their jaws.

in this way, my body becomes

communion. in this way

i am not eaten but savored.

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Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a Pushcart-nominated poet, editor, organizer, and educator. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered reading series partnered with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that raises funds for transnational relief efforts, bail funds, and mutual aid organizations, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. He has taught for Borough of Manhattan Community College, Brooklyn Poets, Polyphony Lit’s Summer Editorial Apprenticeship Program, and community programming throughout New York City. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, his work has appeared or will soon in the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.

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12 September 2022