"Loneliness is a science—/consider the taxidermist's tender hands/trying to keep from losing/skin, the bobcat grin/of the living."
Loneliness and taxidermy are comparable for they encompass loss. Loneliness amounts to the forfeiture of companionship whereas taxidermy epitomizes the forfeiture of life. The grins depicted in the taxidermies are lively. Nevertheless, the taxidermies are unconscious replications.
"If not them, then who/will win heaven?"
This rhetoric question characterizes the speaker’s aunties as magnificent, approved people who would meet the threshold of getting into paradise. Had the aunties been heinous, they would have ended in the abyss.
I got more rocks/than clink-
The speaker contrasts the rocks to clink to stress the extensiveness of bling jewelry in his/her life. The speaker likes aggrandizing his/her looks with ‘bling bling.’ Therefore, the jewelry embodies the speaker's inflated sense of self.
Wake to find everything black/what was white, all the vice/versa—white maids on TV, black/ sitcoms that star white dwarfs/cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents,/Black Houses.
These lines submit the White versus Black binary, whereby Black signifies negativity whereas White characterizes positivity. The speaker is accustomed to black maids, white sitcoms, white presidents and white horses. The omnipresence of black conjectures that the ubiquity of ‘white supremacy’ has been upturned.
