I’m lost and wandering in a forest of blue gum
eucalyptus trees and fog horns in San Francisco
while listening to Baby Keem’s The Sound
of Bad Habit. For fun, I think about
which X-Men character I would be
if I were a Caucasian male. But I’m not, and haven’t
imagined hard enough. Instead, I’ve given myself
permission to name the future ULTRA DARK
GALACTIC WOLF because isn’t naming our days
some type of self-love? I don’t understand
how the world reveals itself to us, how
a damaged moon returns every Wednesday
night, sickled. I hoard fragments
from empty hours like an unsolved litany: Hisoka
in Hunter x Hunter; Kyle’s Army veteran
tattoos; turbulence from Spokane
to Oakland; the smallest creases in the leather
fabric of my Jordan 1s; my wife’s cousin who works
as a prison guard in North Dakota in-between
his college seminars. I look to my left and see crimson. I look
to my right and see vanilla. Funny part is
I’m not a good fighter but often find myself
in good fights. Funny part is we’re all
in this fight now. It’s not that complicated:
I no longer know what’s killing me or what
part of me is turning
neon. I no longer trust
the shadows in our hills.
Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley, a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco, and the co-founding editor of HeadFake, an online NBA zine.