Lord, let my ears go secret agent, each

a microphone so hot it picks up things

silent, reverbing even the hum of stone

close to its eager, silver grill. Let my ears forget

years trained to human chatter

wired into every room, even those empty

except of me, each broadcast and jingle

tricking me into being less

lonely than I am. Let my ears forget

the clack and rumble, our tambourining and fireworking

distractions, our roar of applause. Let my hands quit

their clapping and rest in a new kind of prayer, one

that doesn’t ask but listens, palms up in my lap.

Like an owl, let me triangulate icy shuffling under snow as

vole, let me not just name the name

when I spot a soundtrack of birdsong

but understand the notes through each syrinx

as a singular missive—begging, flirting, fussing, each

companion call and alarm as sharp with desire and fear

as my own. Prick my ears, Lord. Make them hungry

satellites, have your way with their tiny bones,

teach the drum within that dark to drum

again. Because within the hammering of woodpecker

is a long tongue unwinding like a tape measure from inside

his pileated head, darting dinner from the pine’s soft bark.

And somewhere I know is a spider who births

a filament of silk and flies it to the next branch; somewhere,

a fiddlehead unstrings its violin into the miracle of

fern. And somewhere, a mink not made into a coat

cracks open a mussel’s shell, and with her mouth full

of that gray meat, yawns. Those are your sounds, are they not?

Do not deny it, Lord, do not deny

me. I do not know those songs. Nor do I know the hush

a dandelion’s face makes when it closes, surrenders, then goes

to seed. No, I only know the sound my own breath makes

as I wish and blow that perfect globe away;

I only know the small, satisfactory

popping of roots when I call it weed and yank it

from the yard. There is a language of all

you’ve created. Hear me, please. I just want to be

still enough to hear. Right here, Lord:

I want to be. 

More than anything, I need this boy

so close to my ears, his questions

electric as honeybees in an acreage

of goldenrod and aster. And time where

we are, slow sugar in the veins

of white pine, rubbery mushrooms

cloistered at their feet. His tawny

listening at the water’s edge, shy

antlers in pooling green light, while

we consider fox prints etched in clay.

I need little black boys to be able to be

little black boys, whole salt water galaxies

in cotton and loudness—not fixed

in stunned suspension, episodes on hot

asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence

of apology. I need this kid to stay mighty

and coltish, thundering alongside

other black kids, their wrestle and whoop,

the brightness of it—I need for the world

to bear it. And until it will, may the trees

kneel closer, while we sit in mineral hush,

together. May the boy whose dark eyes

are an echo of my father’s dark eyes,

and his father’s dark eyes, reach

with cupped hands into the braided

current. The boy, restless and lanky, the boy

for whom each moment endlessly opens,

for the attention he invests in the beetle’s

lacquered armor, each furrowed seed

or heartbeat, the boy who once told me

the world gives you second chances, the boy

tugging my arm, saying look, saying now.

Spring in Hell and everything’s blooming.

I dreamt the worst was over but it wasn’t.

Suppose my punishment was fields of lilies sharper than razors, cutting up fields of lies.

Suppose my punishment was purity, mined and blanched.

They shunned me only because I knew I was stunning.

Then the white plague came, and their pleas were like a river.

Summer was orgiastic healing, snails snaking around wrists.

In heat, garbage festooned the sidewalks.

Old men leered at bodies they couldn’t touch

until they did. I shouldn’t have laughed but I laughed

at their flesh dozing into their spines, their bones crunching like snow.

Once I was swollen and snowblind with grief, left for dead

at the castle door. Then I robbed the castle and kissed my captor,

my sadness, learned she was not a villain. To wake up in this verdant field,

to watch the lilies flay the lambs. To enter paradise,

a woman drinks a vial of amnesia. Found in only the palest

flowers, the ones that smell like rotten meat. To summon the stinky

flower and access its truest aroma, you have to let its stigma show.

You have to let the pollen sting your eyes until you close them.

We did not say much to each other but

we grinned,

            because this love was so good you sucked the

rib bones

and I licked my fingers like a cat.

Now I’m

            omniscient. I’m going to skip past

the hard

parts that go on for a very long time. Here’s the

future:

            I laugh, because the pleasure was earned

yet vouchsafed,

and I made room for what was dead past and what

yet didn’t

            exist. I was not always kind, but I

was clear.

I cannot consider scent without you, I cannot

think that color so gay, so Japanese, so vernal 

without you; not assassination or any death in any spring. I think of you

and I am man-and-woman, flawed as a Lincoln,

welcoming as a window-box, and so tenderly alliterative as to draw one near—

at times, perhaps, to withdraw from all—yes,

without you I am without pulse in that dooryard, that blooming unfurling

so tell me finally, is last as in the last time or to make something last

—to hold, to hold you, to memorize fast—

When my daughter whines I tell her to say what you want in a nice voice.

My nice voice is reserved for meetings with a view, my palm outstretched saying here. Are our problems. Legacies rolling out like multicolored marbles. Don’t focus so much on the ‘doom and gloom’ they keep saying. We don’t want to depress. Everyone. This is only our survival. We rely heavily on foreign aid I am instructed to say. I am instructed to point out the need for funds to build islands, move families from weto after weto, my mouth a shovel to spade the concrete with but I am just pointing out neediness. So needy. These small. Underdeveloped countries. I feel myself shrinking in the back of the taxi when a diplomat compliments me. How brave for admitting it so openly. The allure of global negotiations dulls. Like the back of a worn spoon.

I lose myself easily in a kemem. Kemem defined as feast. As celebration. A baby’s breath endures their first year so we pack hundreds of close bodies under tents, lined up for plates I pass to my cousin, assembly line style. Our gloved hands pluck out barbeque chicken, fried fish, scoop potato salad, dew-like droplets of bōb and mā. Someone yells for another container of jajimi. The speaker warbles a keyboarded song. A child inevitably cries. Mine dances in the middle of the party. A pair elbow each other to rip hanging beach balls from their strings. The MC shouts Boke ajiri ne nejim jen maan. The children are obstructing our view. Someone wheels a grandma onto the dance floor. The dances begin here

is a nice

celebration

of survival.

When my daughter whines I tell her to say what you want in a nice voice.

My nice voice is reserved for meetings with a view, my palm outstretched saying here. Are our problems. Legacies rolling out like multicolored marbles. Don’t focus so much on the ‘doom and gloom’ they keep saying. We don’t want to depress. Everyone. This is only our survival. We rely heavily on foreign aid I am instructed to say. I am instructed to point out the need for funds to build islands, move families from weto after weto, my mouth a shovel to spade the concrete with but I am just pointing out neediness. So needy. These small. Underdeveloped countries. I feel myself shrinking in the back of the taxi when a diplomat compliments me. How brave for admitting it so openly. The allure of global negotiations dulls. Like the back of a worn spoon.

I lose myself easily in a kemem. Kemem defined as feast. As celebration. A baby’s breath endures their first year so we pack hundreds of close bodies under tents, lined up for plates I pass to my cousin, assembly line style. Our gloved hands pluck out barbeque chicken, fried fish, scoop potato salad, dew-like droplets of bōb and mā. Someone yells for another container of jajimi. The speaker warbles a keyboarded song. A child inevitably cries. Mine dances in the middle of the party. A pair elbow each other to rip hanging beach balls from their strings. The MC shouts Boke ajiri ne nejim jen maan. The children are obstructing our view. Someone wheels a grandma onto the dance floor. The dances begin here

is a nice

celebration

of survival.

Childless, I am in a house on the ocean-edge

of a national park. Nights, I consider broadcast horrors. This is not

my house. I am a stranger, a newcomer. So often, too,

is the horror. Passes time. Passes time. Past time lights

up my liturgical tendencies, illumines past time, my lovelies.

Here, in this room, in this house, the light is sometimey as always.

Clouds. Wind and all. Pronounced through windows onto woods, onto lawns.

Say “Light casts its tender hieroglyphs on the mundane

and cataclysmic equally,” and fancify a nothing, go straight

for an inaccuracy that distracts and passes time.

And light comes before the hieroglyph, and (as marker)

these hieroglyphs give meager insight into the “nature” of light beyond

some minor perceptions. And what? Shall I ride the alliterative waves

of articulation and silence that fog my mouth and mind? Or just let

the words like particles roll? See where and what this accrual of syllables gets us?

It’s midday, and you are both years before the you to whom this poem

whispers, before the women with whom these syllables conspire. Lullaby, loves,

this ain’t. I have become a woman who screams softly. Maybe an over-abundance

of caution? Of caustic care? Well, I’ve seen the clips and memes, heard the murmurs

and corporate decisions meant to mark-up and mock the nature of you that’s well beyond

easy perception. In past times,

I’ve been medicated out of my self, locked under

an atmospheric feeling, the condition of which would not relent, which could will “will not”

to relent. Wheels of wheeling won’t re-

lent. Absolve your self sunken between

Breath breath breathe                and the toxic dirt.

A prison is the only place that’s a prison.
Maybe your brain is a beehive—or, better:
an ants nest? A spin class?
The sand stuck in an hourglass? Your brain is like
stop it. So you practice driving with your knees,
you get all the way out to the complex of Little League fields,
you get chicken fingers with four kinds of mustard—
spicy, whole grain, Dijon, yellow—
you walk from field to field, you watch yourself
play every position, you circle each identical game,
each predictable outcome. On one field you catch.
On one field you pitch. You are center field. You are left.
Sometimes you have steady hands and French braids.
Sometimes you slide too hard into second on purpose.
It feels as good to get the bloody knee as it does to kick yourself in the shin.
You wait for the bottom of the ninth to lay your blanket out in the sun.
Admit it, Sasha, the sun helps. Today,
the red team hits the home run. Red floods every field.
A wasp lands on your thigh. You know this feeling.

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

^{for Dominique}

I know this

from looking

                          into store fronts

                          taste buds voguing

alight from the way

treasure glows

                          when I imagine

 

                          pressing its opulence

into your hand

I want to buy you

                          a cobalt velvet couch

                          all your haters’ teeth

strung up like pearls

a cannabis vineyard

                          and plane tickets

                          to every island

on earth

but my pockets

                          are filled with

                          lint and love alone

touch these inanimate gods

to my eyelids

                          when you kiss me

                          linen leather

gator skin silk

satin lace onyx

                          marble gold ferns

                          leopard crystal

sandalwood mink

pearl stiletto

                          matte nails and plush

                          lips glossed

in my 90s baby saliva

pour the glitter

                          over my bare skin

                          I want a lavish life

us in the crook

of a hammock

                          incensed by romance

                          the bowerbird will

forgo rest and meals

so he may prim

                          and anticipate amenity

                          for his singing lover

call me a gaunt bird

a keeper of altars

                          shrines to the tactile

                          how they shine for you

fold your wings

around my shoulders

                          promise me that

                          should I drown

in want-made waste

the dress I sink in

                          will be exquisite

I beg for invisible fire.

Every night I pray to love,
please invent yourself.

I imagine a place after this place
and I laugh quietly to no one
as the hair on my chin
weeds through old makeup.

When I go to sleep
I am vinegar inside clouded glass.
The world comes to an end
when I wake up and wonder
who will be next to me.

Police sirens and coyote howls
blend together in morning’s net.
Once, I walked out past the cars
and stood on a natural rock formation
that seemed placed there to be stood on.
I felt something like kinship.
It was the first time.

Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,

when really,

she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking