Quintin Collins

after Enzo Silon Surin Some mother said to always wear a clean pair of underwear in case of emergencies in which EMTs need cut off your pants, and some other mother said dress like every outfit is your last as if the funeral walks in lockstep. I iron wrinkles from my jeans, shirts, and chinos.

To measure humanity’s purpose in hunger and funerals, count divots in the bark of an oak tree. The voids collect raindrops, nestle the beetle and the worm. In the hollows that litter our peripheral vision, measure humanity as the depth of a stomach or the depth of a grave. I want to believe everything tossed

I try to reinvent you. A white gravestone in a field of white gravestones: I conjure this image instead of you. When you died, I was asked to write an elegy for the funeral. I didn’t know how to make you from the blank page, another cavity for the body you inhabited to fill. Even

after Airea D. Matthews   because my parents liked a filmmaker or so I’m told pulp fiction means blood splatter spells marvin’s brain on the rear windshield  means quentin tarantino my parents would spell Q-U-I-N-T-I-N their own magic  transformation but still fits in mouths when teachers roll call or for job interviews  but still quentins

Toine has a new stereo. Mystikal grumbles “Shake ya ass, but watch yo self. Shake ya ass” into the street. A squirrel crushed by a car, baking on the pavement— you have a stick in hand to prod the roadkill, but Chris passes grayscale porn printouts, hot sauce stained. You can’t see much because of