For Bob Kaufman and

For Bob Kaufman and: Sudan Jonathan Moody (bio) For Bob Kaufman Armchair throne. A crownOf electrodes attached To your cranial guitar.Bohemian brain waves Cooked crisp. You, swiftPhoenix, rose anew & Jump-ropedJail-time. After readingMichael S. Harper’s Vintage Anthology,I traced your footsteps Hoodooing the hoodooMan from misty Bayous to sourdoughStreets. I offered Your tongueGator-sausage Links, bread pudding,Vodka & orange juice, But it switchedInto a cloud & Floated aboveGolden Gate Bridge. Sudan Sunlight won’t splitthe man on horseback in half, or carry you &your grasshopper ration across the Chadian border, ’cause outside of a vacuumlight can’t travel faster. Black woman, you haveno God, he says before your eyes sink backinto the skull. Your stiff [End Page 149] body, now, matchingthe temperature of his disgust. All you wanted wasokra & grain, not to find your mother’s bodydumped in a ditch. What adjective is strongenough to fill in the hole where her jaw should be? The cultures of her cervix,a shade of blue seen most often in dreams. [End Page 150] Jonathan Moody Jonathan Moody received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is a Cave Canem alumnus. His poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gathering Ground, Xavier Review, among other publications. His work is forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Common, and Tidal Basin Review. He is the author of The Doomy Poems (Six Gallery, 2012) and lives in Fresno, Texas with his wife and baby boy. Copyright © 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University

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