"Donika Questions the Oracle."
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, I really like my name.
I like it so much.
I've been reading all of these male poets,
and they kept putting their names and things.
And I was like, I'm going to put my name in something.
So there's just the delight of reading the title of this one.
"Donika Questions the Oracle."
"Who hid my dad in the mountain impoverished
where he would remain invisible and rationed, not
on milk and honey, but on baloney and saltines
until he grew strong enough to kill the father?
Which father?
Do I mean his daddy, exiled for the rest of his diabetic days
to a closet in a house with no power, no water,
where my dad, his sisters, and his brothers caught for a time
by the crack rock and the pipe lighting up in the dark lived?
Surely not as Daddy Oracle.
Surely not.
How long was he the youngest?
How long was he a child?
What God swallowed him whole?
The God perhaps who split his mother in two
or took his brother with a bullet from another father's
gun in the sunlight in the afternoon.
Did he really hold his dying brother's hand, Oracle,
the brother who wanted only an apology on my dad's behalf?
Who held him when his mother died?
Who told him of a heaven where dead mothers and brothers go?
Oh, the pigeons.
What of the pigeons, Oracle, did he
tend them, watch them rise from the roof
of the house with no power or water,
but a daddy in a closet, his sisters, and brothers
flaring in the rock light?
Did he delight in their return?
The pigeons, I mean.
Did he ever delight, Oracle, in anything a child might?
Did he look for his name in the sky?
Did he ride a bike made from junk parts in the South Central
LA sun fast as a boy might?
Surely, he did that, Oracle.
Surely that.
And when he rose like an improbable
stone from the father's gut, whichever father I mean here,
whichever father makes sense, the siblings, the pigeons,
his daddy in exile, his name in the sky,
when he rose with the stone of himself
in his hand covered in bile and mucus, free now of someone
more powerful than the child he surely once
was, did he know the terrible thing he would become?"