Niki Herd   SONNET: CONRAD MURRAY WATCHES MICHAEL JACKSON PREMIER THE MOONWALK, 1983 He owned America, and each fiber of the camera’d show-stage begged, colonized by a pair: black loafers marked by sequin socks destined to royalty. His lover was not Billie Jean so his crooning urged nor did the crazed fans care, they idolized the man with moves that almost vaporized poverty and war; from my island perch then I was still not an innocent man. I understood hunger, that constant beast wound in the body, always fed, but fright- fully famished. That night of the gloved hand brought night-sky galaxy dreams and the reach of one lone star to be my guiding light.     BASKETBALL BOP FOR KING JAMES UPON LEAVING THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS after my husband & his fist ain’t want me after in Memphis, Tennessee, they shot King after my mama’s lungs filled, released & quit i drove a single road to work where for five days a week, the only geographical marker, was a burnt wooden cross. oh, run run, mourner run .......bright angels above now tonight the news is set upon patrons their bodies outside some bar angled off that same road, which seems from my view to have gotten longer & harder in the ageless open air, some stupefied, some drunk with epithet & anger, others readied with fluid & matchstick to burn the only thing they can—your jersey. oh, run run, mourner run .......bright angels above back in my day, they use to call a TV the idiot box & burning black men was the national pastime. i should switch the station, but i imagine nothing but more of the same, a master quilt of color smell of wood, sound of lament & grieve. oh, run run, mourner run .......bright angels above   COOKIE MONSTER TO FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA BACKSTAGE AFTER A TAPING OF SESAME STREET you a poem manifesting connecting constellations between worlds, scripting soul shifting sacredness lit up like moons you island traveler leaving trails of afro aesthetics you is a righteous sister eyebrows tinge of sepia voice thick as the chords of simone pretty as miss piggy ............is fat and together, we should do some math together, you and me, one plus one we can flee and make cookies cookies cookies gingerbread peanut butter iced lemon sugar oatmeal raisin and double chocolate chip can you tell me .... how to get ..............................how to get to your street because your face within the space of any other is tight, meaning fine as your newly pressed hair you woman brown-skinned woman black girl the alphabet of my religion from the south side of chi-town i am no man, only puppet but i look at you have looked at you, and keep falling into prayer. David Carlson Ambient Chaos 2010, oil and acrylic on canvas 72" x 60" see more work by David Carlson     THE KING Rock and roll was the way it came rounded out of his mouth like his cheek, teeth and tongue made a melody centuries old in America, in Illinois, in Evanston at the concert, so much was in the air wonder there was any room for breathing. F105’s in a place called Vietnam, fists and flags, the shouts of poor white folks searching for something called freedom. Thirty years into the future, bodies would fall from burning buildings, a human confetti no one saw coming in 1971 gravity always on the side of the underdog when his saliva spread like a continent on her foot. When she tells the story to us grandchildren she will say a bee bite ain’t the only thing to sting. That the man with the mouth on stage was named Elvis Aaron Presley that he was already king, and she a woman whose left and right foot met the dance floor like the steady and knowing hands of a whore in the sweated arch of a man’s back whose life, punctuated by the howls of sweet jesus and the holy ghost, born of the twins marvel & misery was changed by the inescapable rhythm of this country as one is when suddenly caught in the path of a bomb, or the wettest falling star.     HE’S GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS Mahalia’s song plays every Sunday morning, her voice reaching out from the wooden stereo credenza as you prepare supper and ready yourself toward tomorrow, the business of cleaning toilets for Eisenberg in the better part of town…he’s got the whole world in his hands…your own hands brown with deep trenches around the knuckles as if each finger has endured its own separate life, muscular, not manly, use to dirt digging and planting mums the color of tangerines. He’s got the whole world…hands no stranger to cast iron skillets, the combing of defiant hair, or a strong drink or two to numb pain that takes root underground like the eldest tree…in his hands…pain that rests beneath skin like meaning lies underneath a word that then becomes gospel sung this morning as you sit wedged between your husband and the child you didn't want, my mother. He’s got the whole world…you call yourself Gladys Love Lewis, as if everything is worthy of your middle name. One day I will be warned against your kind, told there is no room for your poetry, every story a sorry victim riddled with alcohol and illness. But this poem is not about the gin and pills, the cancer or stroke, or the strange sexual appetite of your man and girl child to come. This is about a song etched in memory, and two women…in his hands, Gladys Love and Mahalia, vinyl spinning to the needle’s edge.   Niki Herd is the author of The Language of Shedding Skin (Main Street Rag, 2010). She is the recipient of grants from the Astraea Foundation and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and fellowships from Cave Canem and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Herd grew up in Cleveland and earned degrees from the University of Arizona and Antioch University Los Angeles. She lives in Washington, DC.   Published in Volume 13, Number 2, Spring 2012.