Stolen LandscapesIt is Vincent van Gogh's 168th birthday. His yellow "Sunflower" painting is part of a collection we saw today at the National Gallery....

Witness Tree Does it hurt standing there unable to do anything but watch? How long does it take for soil to stop tasting like blood? A decade? A century? We all hold...

Reading Mayakovsky in BrooklynIt’s past one at the Bad Luck Bar. On the corner, a couplepressed up against an iron fence. The neon lightof...

Geomancy follow the flow of your foreheadhow it hovers above each eyebrowhow it anchors all that brain line up the line of your nosehow it extends...

Haiku For Ella Ella FitzgeraldWas the truth and the devilIs a boldfaced lie Ode to Bass Take the chords high and lowMake that rhythm flowPush that groove...

Birth of the Blues Was it Miles Davis’ “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you? Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?Scott Joplin and...

The Monuments The monuments are goneGood riddance I sayTalk about losing a battleThey lost an entire war Cold cast iron facesof Lee, Jackson, and Jefferson Davis,Put...

Transformation Everyday, I delivermyself to impossibility.I transform:Today, a bird,my slumberous bodygiving way to lightweight skeleton,sturdy muscles, aero foil wingsthat lift me, flapping or soaringkeeping me...

Interlude Even the Evening Grosbeaks yearn to move on,wandering from there to here to somewhere gone, partying at the feeder for a quarter of an hourthen...

Jeffrey "Big Homey" Banks is a finalist in Day Eight's annual open-to-all poetry competition, the DC Poet Project. Read more about the DC Poet...