Great Oracle, why are you staring at me,
do I baffle you, do I make you despair?
I, Americus, the American,
wrought from the dark in my mother long ago,
from the dark of ancient Europa—
Why are you staring at me now
in the dusk of our civilization—
Why are you staring at me
as if I were America itself
the new Empire
vaster than any in ancient days
with its electronic highways
carrying its corporate monoculture
around the world
And English the Latin of our days—

Great Oracle, sleeping through the centuries, 
Awaken now at last
And tell us how to save us from ourselves
and how to survive our own rulers 
who would make a plutocracy of our democracy 
in the Great Divide
between the rich and the poor
in whom Walt Whitman heard America singing

O long-silent Sybil, 
you of the winged dreams, 
Speak out from your temple of light 
as the serious constellations 
with Greek names
still stare down on us 
as a lighthouse moves its megaphone 
over the sea
Speak out and shine upon us 
the sea-light of Greece 
the diamond light of Greece

Far-seeing Sybil, forever hidden, 
Come out of your cave at last 
And speak to us in the poet's voice 
the voice of the fourth person singular 
the voice of the inscrutable future 
the voice of the people mixed
with a wild soft laughter—
And give us new dreams to dream, 
Give us new myths to live by!

Read at Delphi, Greece, on March 21, 2001 at the UNESCO World Poetry Day

California is a desert and I am a woman inside it.
The road ahead bends sideways and I lurch within myself.
I’m full of ugly feelings, awful thoughts, bad dreams
of doom, and so much love left unspoken.

Is mercury in retrograde? someone asks.
Someone answers, No, it’s something else
like that though. Something else like that.
That should be my name.

When you ask me am I really a woman, a human being,
a coherent identity, I’ll say No, I’m something else
like that though.

A true citizen of planet earth closes their eyes
and says what they are before the mirror.
A good person gives and asks for nothing in return.
I give and I ask for only one thing—

Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.
Hear me. Bear the weight of my voice and don’t forget—
things haunt. Things exist long after they are killed.

                                            ^{… dreadful was the din 
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now 
With complicated monsters … —“Paradise Lost,” Book X}

The snow had buried Monument
                                      *
Where the Teslas spun their burnished wheels
                                      *
& the twice-dead Confederates ghost their plots
                                      *
& Lee & Stonewall dismembered still sprawl,
                                      *
Their bubble-wrapped limbs akimbo
                                      *
In their warehouse crates, & they wait to be 
                                      *
ensorcelled back to bespoken life.
                                      *
One hundred miles north the oligarchs clap,
                                      *
All of them turned to hissing serpents
                                      *
Seething & cat-cradling the Rotunda floor,
                                      *
Their darkling Prince droning on & on.
                                      *
They are stench & slither, their cobra-heads rear.
                                      *          
They own us now. They python-swallow 
                                      *
Each & everyone. Swallow us whole.

is from Vietnam. Green card, she says. Many  
people, my uncle the doctor, died in boats after April 30, 1975, she says. She tells me about  
her fiancé. Thirteen years and when I couldn’t get back for my visit  
after September 11, 2001, the new laws, she says, he kicked me out. His mother, she  
says. She went back for a visit in 2007 and he was a doctor, offered 
her an apartment, but she likes 
her own money and she wouldn’t do that 
to his wife, she says. When my friend  
the performance artist, a vamp, shows up to meet me, the woman who cuts and paints  
my toenails tells us about the last guy who asked her out. Got her number from their shared  
bank teller. Drove her around and then brought her back to his house. When she refused  
his advances—Did he even make you dinner? the performance artist asks—he told her she was a  
high-quality woman. I remember dating, all the pop-up ads for instructional guides on  
Becoming a High-Quality Woman. Save your money, she says. The bell on the door  
is a white crystal pocket 

and a college student walks in. Fill? The performance artist and I make plans for sushi  
while my toenails dry. When I am ready to pay, the woman who cut and painted my toenails stops  
as she’s walking to the register and hugs me from behind. So tall! she says, tenderly, petting  
my forearm hair. It is May 18, 2016, and our good president has now been at war longer  
than any other in American history.

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

Here I am sorting old documents after breakfast.  
And here you are—bright as a bee sting!— 
clinging to my daughter’s souvenir birth certificate 
three decades old. How bold you seem, Dead 
Name, anchoring dates. How bold, corroborating  
vitals: 21 inches, 8 pounds 3 ounces, male, etc.  
How bold, floating above her tiny footprints. 

Of course, I love my daughter and her new  
name. But I still have a reluctant soft spot  
for you, splashed with myth as you are, citizen 
of the sea, the green of Wales poking through. 
Now you are cypher and palimpsest, collateral  
damage, slippage of signifier and signified.  
Syllables we’ve scrubbed from our vocabulary.

To show solidarity with her, maybe I should  
bury the birth certificate, along with her old  
report cards, along with you, out back.  
Dead Name, I swear it’s nothing personal.  
Dead Name, we selected you from a cast  
of 1000s. Dead Name, truth is I rarely think  
of you till one of your accidental appearances. 

Like today. Or like last fall, first day of class.  
I found myself reading you, Dead Name,  
from a list of hopefuls wanting to add. I paused.  
Almost couldn’t say you, like I was dropping  
F-bombs to welcome the class. Said you  
anyway. Your wild syllables waiting to home  
to whoever raised their hand and said I’m here.

^{for Nica, Mary, Ryan, et al.}

A friend on a rival team confesses  
they’ve always been into it.  
As a kid, they locked themselves in a closet  
to read Trivial Pursuit cards.  
They wanted to know everything. 

Their team is named Shooting Nudes. 
We are Butch Believers.  
The next category is Famous Dykes.  
The whole bar is packed and smells like  
bike sweat and Cosmo slushies.  

Our best guess is that it was Audre Lorde  
in ’89 advocating for Palestine.  
On the fly, we struggle to spell  
Stormé DeLarverie, but we’re hoping  
bad handwriting hides it, huddling closer 

so no one hears our answers.  
Meanwhile, the National Park Service  
erases the letter T in twenty places  
from the Stonewall Monument website.  
Slime mold? Whiptail lizards? The category is  

Queer Ecology. Now, a federal directive 
threatens to cut gender-affirming  
care for youth in our city.  
The category is Gay for Pay.  
Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank.  

Cleverness I know can feel exclusive  
but here I lean into my friends’ literacies, 
their wisdoms my shelter. 
The forty somethings know the local lore,  
the bygone parties: Donny’s, Pegasus,  

Operation Sappho, while The Gen Z kids ace 
the tech round, scribbling the name of  
a translesbian hacktivist on a canceled sci-fi show.  
It turns out being an autodidact is  
the unspoken prerequisite for being queer in America. 

Will we nerd ourselves into futures  
of intergenerational knowing?  
In our time, the Press 3 option  
of the youth suicide hotline 
was created and deleted.  

In booths with curly fries, 
we turn to each other and say:  
Kiki. Bussy. Bulldagger.  
Kitty Tsui. Vaginal (Crème) Davis.  
Truths our bodies internalized arise  

in quick crescendos like this one: 
Bernard Mayes founded  
the first suicide prevention hotline 
in the country. I know this because  
he was a dean at my college and the first 

audaciously out educator I ever met.  
Monthly he held a donut hour, 
I was closeted then, so I showed up early 
to squeeze onto a cramped couch 
and listen: In 1961, he leafletted streets 

with a phone number safe to dial 
and then waited by a red rotary phone 
certain that many would call.  
The category is Gay Rage.  
Name the band and the song: 

Bikini Kill, “Suck My Left One”  
Bronski Beat, “Why?”  
Princess Nokia, “Tomboy” 
Planningtorock, “Get Your  
Fckin Laws Off My Body”

Standing in her house today all I could think of was whether she took a shit every
   morning

or ever fucked anybody
or ever fucked
herself

God's poet
singing herself to sleep

You want these sorts of things for people

Bodies and
the earth
and

the earth inside

Instead of white
nightgowns and terrifying
letters


*


Here she comes 
her hands out in front of her
like a child flying
above its bed
at night

Her ankles and wrists held tightly between the fingers of some brightly lit parent home
   from a party

Flying

Her spine
spinning

Singing     "Here I come!"

Her legs pumping
her heart 
out


*


Heaven is everywhere
but there's still
the world

The world is made out of cancer, house fires, and Brain Death, here in America

But I love the world

Emily Dickinson
to the rescue

I used to think we were made of bread
gentle work and
water

We're not
but we're still beautiful
killing each other as much as we can
beneath the pines

The pines that are somebody's 
masterpiece

^{—after William Wordsworth}

The world is too much with us. Late and soon
it’s morning, phone in hand, and a screen on my wrist powers
on to report the no rest I had. News, a tragedy—so easily ours—
already breaking as I crack my eggs. Rage and prayers, rage and prayers, a boon
for the tycoon’s fear-campaign, clicks for the zillionaire buying up the moon.
Ad, ad, an AI figment, someone squawking, someone hawking—hours
consumed, of this only life, and who is left in the garden, who is tending the flowers?
I am trying to hear the birdsong through the auto-tune
of all this ubiquitous engineered crooning, but a podcast informs me silence will be
extinct by the weekend, gone like thought and the good kind of alone. Peace is outworn;
it’s chaos that feeds the algorithm, no likes for the actual, the tangible. No lea
without a billboard promising Hell as if it isn’t here. But don’t be forlorn, 
I’m sold—the world is yours! (after this ad) unending and enhanced on a screen. Don’t mind the sea
at the door. Time for a selfie, suggests my phone. A filter. I can add (for free!) horns.

Some nights she comes to act as courier,
midwife to our own skills.
Emily, come like a UFO to implant her genius in us.
Our Queen Mab, condemned to be the only woman mentioned
in the lyric omnibuses of her epoch;
easy scapegoat of men’s centuries,
she stood in for all women.
So now, of course, she comes to blow off steam
in the privacy of the green room.
All those living years she walked from yard to yard,
gardens flourished in opium poppies;
went out at night to see the owls and wed her genius.
She applied her passion like a hot iron sword.
And no one can take off her clothes, ever—she comes
and her language takes them off of us,
not piece by piece, not fumbling buttons,
but all at once in a single shot,
her tiny poems like grenades that fit in the hand.
And we here bask in the debris,
stripped down to our private parts,
the snow white of the bone, the authentic corpse in heat.
The absolute original.

^{for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters}

One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said. She didn’t
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache
Rolled over in my chest,
Like in a room where the drapes
Have been swept back. I love you,
I love you, as she continued
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every
Handclap, every stomp.
I love you in the rusted iron
Chains someone was made
To drag until love let them be
Unclasped and left empty
In the center of the ring.
I love you in the water
Where they pretended to wade,
Singing that old blood-deep song
That dragged us to those banks
And cast us in. I love you,
The angles of it scraping at
Each throat, shouldering past
The swirling dust motes
In those beams of light
That whatever we now knew
We could let ourselves feel, knew
To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—
O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—
O Miraculous Many Gone—
O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—
Is this love the trouble you promised?

with the shock of hospice behind her  
and her ashes scattered on her cherished Pacific.   
She’s flipped the hourglass and stopped it at 29,   
when her hair was still chestnut and waving  
to her waist. And because it’s November and nighttime  
she’s wearing one of those vintage wool coats,  
wide lapels, no buttons or belt, a blue nearly gray  
in the foggy noir light of the streetlamps.   
It’s cold enough she has to hold it tight   
against her body. Too cold for the emerald   
silk teddy, or her long tanned legs in b-ball shorts,  
ready for some serious one-on-one. I’m dying   
to stop my steep climb home, turn around and ask her   
if she’s really here, but Orpheus is in my ear,  
warning me not to make that old mistake.  
It’s about trust, I think. Keep moving  
through the gloom of a spinned myth:  
let those you’ve loved come back   
when they’re ready, when you’re ready,   
as if no one were lost to begin with.

Lately I’ve lain in bed with a disembodied voice, listening
to the ancient Greek myths and their meanings, imagining
Athens and Naxos and Thebes, imagining infants left to die
on hillsides, Oedipus abandoned and then rescued by
a shepherd, no one could avoid their fate, not then, maybe not ever,
if you knew what was coming would you dig a burrow or cower
in the shade of a grass blade as the shadow of the hawk passed over
or would you be like Antigone, defying the king, refusing to dishonor
her slain brother, sentenced to entombment she hung herself—
maybe you know that story, or the one about Nelson Mandela
and his fellow inmates at Robben Island performing the ancient play,
learning it secretly from scraps of paper—or Verlaine’s
“Chanson d’automne” on the BBC, in 1944,  the long sobs of the violins,
just a few words to signal the French Resistance, imagine.

Sand-gray desert siren, a roadrunner  
             froze between creosote, confused 

                          not by prickly pear or pencil cactus,  
                                       but by fumes choking the road’s throat.

A toddler nearby tensed at each  
             tire’s shriek, his hand crushed inside

                          his mother’s as the roadrunner  
                                       swiveled its head as if looking for his

before darting west, then north,  
             then west again, this time    

                          toward a canyon whose creek,   
                                       after a meagre snowmelt, 

was ringed by thin reeds, skeeters  
             careening between them. Don’t, 

                          my mother had warned when I crawled 
                                       from beneath mesquite, 

lizard’s tail dangling from my fist.  
             When she tried to stop    
            
                          bulldozers from collapsing bighorn  
                                       habitat, I ignored her, grabbing

whiptails, dung beetles, centipedes.  
             Now the toddler,

                          eyeing flecks of fool’s gold glowing  
                                       in a chunk of sandstone          

slips free of his mother’s hand 
             to flop in the dirt beside the highway. 

                          Can he feel dunes breathing  
                                       beneath his feet, aquifer dwindling

but still rich as his own blood running?—  
             Or does he hear only the groans

                          of a desert emptying, ravens massed  
                                       in the valley to scavenge. 

Speckled omens leave their fingerprints on their ghostly faces. The fleeting patter of rain slicks the asphalt beneath them. This is how history gets rewritten: in the gaps between their bodies, against the backdrop of early spring. Somewhere in the long middle of the end. He, in military attire, an oak tree with galaxies smeared inside him. She, a forest in a barren world. By now, I know how this story goes. The war will architect their undoing, decades and petty arguments stacked up against a god of futile things. Illness will harvest their lifespans. He will gasp for eight years, bargaining with fate. Her heart will break again and again until it gives out. Between them, a daughter. One day, a mother whose face will mark mine. In that moment, flanked by her parents, she stands infinite as the trees behind her. Hair draping shoulders. Body barely pubescent. Hand over heart. You can tell she still believes the world loves her. Head tilted upwards, she dreams herself in-flight, hedging her bets on the vastness of a borderless sky.

Palestine gave birth
her pavements smiled with groves of olives and roses
her children were shepherds, farmers, jewelers
she became pregnant with hope
          It would be enough for me to die, here, on her soil, 
                    Be buried deep in the earth of my country,
          Only to sprout forth again as a bright bloom, 
          Waved gently by a child who calls this land home.
          It would be enough for me to remain home, 
          Alive, 
          existing as a trace in her fabric … 
So, they targeted her womb
And Death greeted every child she had. 

Nowhere did they charge: Guilty of ____. Me? I’m pacing the living room, full-throated and the men on screen are men. I will not compare a man to a soft-feathered bird, but have you read Eli Cranor’s Broiler? If we can agree that caging a flock without room to stretch their wings is inhumane, are we not obligated to pluck a senator’s phone number from the annals of the internet? I don’t know these men. I don’t know these men, but spittle flies from my lower teeth as I pace and shout. Maybe the beaded black eyes of birds is nothing to no one. Maybe that’s a double negative for a reason. Maybe subject and verb disagree for a reason. Where was I when no one offered due process? Brooding, probably. About money or the broken left-front burner on the stovetop. The worn-through soles of my Chuck Taylors. Nowhere did they chant USA as they bent the men in half. Imagine: being one of these half-bent men. Nowhere did they say, explicitly, run little birds, run. I’m making sense of why, when Kilmar Jr. looks in the mirror, he sees white tube socks scurrying a cement floor. A boy’s hand. Fingers weaving between bars. A whisper: Fly little flightless bird. When they plucked these men, did I—no-one’s mother—wretch? Nowhere is a person free when men cage other men. Nowhere is America. Nowhere. Maybe a gap between a boy’s baby teeth. Maybe a legion of milkless mothers. A lit match. An unbolted cage.