Every branch big with it,
                    Bent every twig with it;
            Every fork like a white web-foot;
            Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
        The palings are glued together like a wall,
        And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

            A sparrow enters the tree,
            Whereon immediately
        A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
        Descends on him and showers his head and eye
                    And overturns him,
                    And near inurns him,
        And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

            The steps are a blanched slope,
            Up which, with feeble hope,
        A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
                    And we take him in.

The old cat was dying in the bushes.
Its breaths came slow, slow, 
                                          and still
it looked out over the sweetness of the back lawn,
the swaying of tall grass in the hot wind,
the way sunlight warmed the garbage can's 
sparkling lid.  
                   It closed its hot eyes, 
then struggled them open again.

+

In unison, the dogs explained themselves
to the passing freight train.

+

I don't know where it's gone, 
her husband said without looking up from his paper

while she stood on the back porch shaking the food bowl,
calling one of its names.   

+

All this the dying old cat observed 
from beneath the bushes, its head
sideways in the grass, its fur wet where the dog
had caught it in its teeth.

+

And now there's another train, 
and the dogs are explaining themselves again.  

+

The food makes that sparkling sound in the metal bowl 
and the cat tries to lift its body from the grass

but it's feeling hollowed out, empty and strange
as though it's floating just above the tips of grass, 
as if its paws barely touch the blades' rich points.

+

Sometimes, the dogs explain themselves to each other, 
or to passing cars, but mostly they address the trains.
We are powerful dogs, they say,
                                            but we are also good,
while the children on bikes, while the joggers, 
while the vast, mysterious trains 
                                              pass them by.

+

The cat is still drifting above the grass tips,
and the sun is so bright the yard sparkles,

and wouldn't it be nice to rest there on the garbage can's hot lid, 
there by the potted plant, there on the car's hood?

But it wants the food glittering in the metal bowl,
the food that, also, drifts above the grass tips.

+

And then the cat floats down the tracks, 
the train's long call a whistling in its head.

+

And the dogs explain themselves to it,
we are good dogs, good dogs, 
                                        as the cat grows
impossibly far away, we are good dogs, 
as the cat is almost a memory, 
   
is barely a taste in the mouth 
of one of the chorus.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to 
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just 
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I 
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Whenever I spend the day crying, 
my friends tell me I look high. Good grief,  

they finally understand me.  
Even when the arena is empty, I thank god  

for the shots I miss. If you ever catch me  
only thanking god for the shots I make,  

remind me I’m not thanking god. Remind me  
all my prayers were answered  

the moment I started praying  
for what I already have.  

Jenny says when people ask if she’s out of the woods,  
she tells them she’ll never be out of the woods,  

says there is something lovely about the woods.  
I know how to build a survival shelter  

from fallen tree branches, packed mud,  
and pulled moss. I could survive forever  

on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me  
to stop measuring my lifespan by length,

but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things  
can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up

a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it? 
I’m infinite, I know, but I still have a measly wrinkle

collection compared to my end goal. I would love  
to be a before picture, I think, as I look in the mirror

and mistake my head for the moon. My dark  
thoughts are almost always 238,856 miles away 

from me believing them. I love this life, 
I whisper into my doctor’s stethoscope

so she can hear my heart. My heart, an heirloom
I didn’t inherit until I thought I could die.

Why did I go so long believing I owed the world
my disappointment? Why did I want to take

the world by storm when I could have taken it
by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers

on the side of the road where I broke down?
I’m not about to waste more time

spinning stories about how much time
I’m owed, but there is a man

who is usually here, who isn’t today.  
I don’t know if he’s still alive. I just know

his wife was made of so much hope  
she looked like a firework above his chair.

Will the afterlife be harder if I remember
the people I love, or forget them?

Either way, please let me remember.

One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.
Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,
I was abducted, but it sounds
wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.
Then she says, I was not abducted.
Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted
to escape my body. Even, sometimes,
I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance
wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—
she says them in rotation.
Death, husband, god, stranger.
Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.
I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can't remember herself as that person
but she keeps thinking the pool will remember
and explain to her the meaning of her prayer
so she can understand
whether it was answered or not.

The sun was shining on the sea,
   Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
   The billows smooth and bright—
And this was odd, because it was
   The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
   Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
   After the day was done—
"It's very rude of him," she said,
   "To come and spoil the fun!"

The sea was wet as wet could be,
   The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud because
   No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead—
   There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
   Were walking close at hand:
They wept like anything to see
   Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
   They said, "it would be grand!"

"If seven maids with seven mops
   Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
   "That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
   And shed a bitter tear.

"0 Oysters, come and walk with us!"
   The Walrus did beseech.
"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
   Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
   To give a hand to each."

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
   But never a word he said;
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
   And shook his heavy head—
Meaning to say he did not choose
   To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
   All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
   Their shoes were clean and neat—
And this was odd, because, you know,
   They hadn't any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
   And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
   And more and more and more—
All hopping through the frothy waves,
   And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
   Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
   Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
   And waited in a row.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
   "To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
   Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
   And whether pigs have wings."

"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
   "Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
   And all of us are fat!"
"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
   They thanked him much for that.

"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
   "Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
   Are very good indeed—
Now, if you're ready, Oysters dear,
   We can begin to feed."

"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
   Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
   A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said,
   "Do you admire the view?

"It was so kind of you to come!
   And you are very nice!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
   "Cut us another slice.
I wish you were not quite so deaf—
   I've had to ask you twice!"

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
   "To play them such a trick.
After we've brought them out so far,
   And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
   "The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
   "I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
   Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
   Before his streaming eyes.

"0 Oysters," said the Carpenter,
   "You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?"
   But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd, because
   They'd eaten every one.

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you
             Ef you
                Don’t
                   Watch
                      Out!

Onc’t they was a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,—
So when he went to bed at night, away up stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wasn’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found was thist his pants an' roundabout--
An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you
             Ef you
                Don’t
                   Watch
                      Out!

An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin,
An’ make fun of ever’one, an’ all her blood an’ kin;
An’ onc’t, when they was “company,” an’ ole folks was there,
She mocked ‘em an’ shocked ‘em, an’ said she didn’t care!
An’ thist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide,
They was two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side,
An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowed what she’s about!
An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you
             Ef you
                Don’t
                   Watch
                      Out!

An’ little Orphant Annie says when the blaze is blue,
An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo!
An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray,
An’ the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away,--
You better mind yer parents, an’ yer teachers fond an’ dear,
An’ churish them ‘at loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,
An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you
             Ef you
                Don’t
                   Watch
                      Out!

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER’S ICE CREAM STORE,
there are flavors in my freezer
you have never seen before,
twenty-eight divine creations
too delicious to resist,
why not do yourself a favor,
try the flavors on my list:

COCOA MOCHA MACARONI
TAPIOCA SMOKED BALONEY
CHECKERBERRY CHEDDAR CHEW
CHICKEN CHERRY HONEYDEW
TUTTI-FRUTTI STEWED TOMATO
TUNA TACO BAKED POTATO
LOBSTER LITCHI LIMA BEAN
MOZZARELLA MANGOSTEEN
ALMOND HAM MERINGUE SALAMI
YAM ANCHOVY PRUNE PASTRAMI
SASSAFRAS SOUVLAKI HASH
SUKIYAKI SUCCOTASH
BUTTER BRICKLE PEPPER PICKLE
POMEGRANATE PUMPERNICKEL
PEACH PIMENTO PIZZA PLUM
PEANUT PUMPKIN BUBBLEGUM
BROCCOLI BANANA BLUSTER
CHOCOLATE CHOP SUEY CLUSTER
AVOCADO BRUSSELS SPROUT
PERIWINKLE SAUERKRAUT
COTTON CANDY CARROT CUSTARD
CAULIFLOWER COLA MUSTARD
ONION DUMPLING DOUBLE DIP
TURNIP TRUFFLE TRIPLE FLIP
GARLIC GUMBO GRAVY GUAVA
LENTIL LEMON LIVER LAVA
ORANGE OLIVE BAGEL BEET
WATERMELON WAFFLE WHEAT

I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER’S ICE CREAM STORE,
taste a flavor from my freezer,
you will surely ask for more.

I don’t know what carried me here 
to Monterchi, perched above mountain bulges 
shaped like the side-bellies of well-fed sheep. 
Or why, when taken in 
to view Piero’s fresco of the Madonna del Parto,
I feel like an intruder
walking in on a girl—tangled in teenhood—
loosening the buttons of her faded lapis robe. 
Flanked by two boy-angels, she is heavy 
with child, anchored in a tent of light-grey fur, 
drapes the color of dried blood. 
Her oval eyes, downcast, direct my gaze 
to her right hand, hanging above a slit 
of white cloth that covers from breast-bone
to navel. Her fingers are soft but gnarled, 
perhaps from twisting and untwisting her hair 
late at night. Does she believe no one 
will notice the crooked fingers of her left hand 
curled into hip, as if trying to hide 
the fingernails’ insatiable need to fidget, pick? 
Her hands pull me back to the pouty nineteen year-old
I once was: dressed in baggy denim cut-offs, 
cream-colored peasant blouse, my fingers tapped 
uncontrollably on invisible piano keys
lining my outer thighs. Walking home
I was petrified my mother—who knew I was too young 
to be a mother—would notice my skin-glow, 
feigned half-smile. Now, fifty years later, facing 
the Madonna, I wonder how Piero knew  
to mute most of the fear on her face 
with shades of pearl. She looks serene
yet distracted—like when something 
has already happened without announcing itself.
Like the low, faint hum of a hymn 
that stays long after an angel leaves. Like the newfound
power she did not choose, but one that will be 
hers forever after she is drained dry.

They shut the road through the woods

      Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again,

      And now you would never know

There was once a road through the woods

      Before they planted the trees.

It is underneath the coppice and heath,

      And the thin anemones.

      Only the keeper sees

That, where the ring-dove broods,

      And the badgers roll at ease,

There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods

      Of a summer evening late,

When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools

      Where the otter whistles his mate,

(They fear not men in the woods,

      Because they see so few.)

You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,

      And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

      Steadily cantering through

The misty solitudes,

      As though they perfectly knew

      The old lost road through the woods.

But there is no road through the woods.

                   THE POOL PLAYERS. 
                   SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw—

For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.

He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair:

For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!



Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,

He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.

His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,

And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!

You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air—

But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!



Macavity’s a ginger cat, he’s very tall and thin;

You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.

His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;

His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.

He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake;

And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s always wide awake.



Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,

For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.

You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square—

But when a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there!



He’s outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)

And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard’s.

And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,

Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled,

Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair—

Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there!



And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty’s gone astray,

Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,

There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair—

But it’s useless to investigate—Macavity’s not there!

And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:

‘It must have been Macavity!’—but he’s a mile away.

You’ll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs;

Or engaged in doing complicated long division sums.



Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,

There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.

He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:

At whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!

And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known

(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)

Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time

Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

The instructor said,

    Go home and write
    a page tonight.
    And let that page come out of you—
    Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you're older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

The moon still sends its mellow light
Through the purple blackness of the night; 
The morning star is palely bright
                    Before the dawn. 

The sun still shines just as before; 
The rose still grows beside my door, 
                    But you have gone. 

The sky is blue and the robin sings; 
The butterflies dance on rainbow wings
                   Though I am sad. 

In all the earth no joy can be; 
Happiness comes no more to me, 
                   For you are dead. 

Somewhere beyond a mountain lies 
A lake the color of your eyes—
And I am mirrored like a flight 
Of swallows in that evening-light.

       Lovers eternal, side by side, 
       Closed in the elemental tide, 
       Nurture the root of every land—
       So is my hand within your hand.

Somewhere beyond an island ships 
Bear on their sails, as on your lips 
You bear and tend it from the sun,
The blossom of oblivion.

       Eternal lovers, in whom death 
       And reaching rains have mingled breath, 
       Are drawn by the same draught apart—
       So is my heart upon your heart.

Somewhere beyond a desert rolls
An ocean that is both our souls—
Where we shall come, whatever be, 
I unto you, you unto me.

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against 
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud 
rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.

I can’t see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,

including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child’s feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.

^{Dedicated to the missing children of war, 911, United Nations Day, 2002. The word majnun means mad or crazy in many languages.}

I am almost majnun—majnun
searching for you in the cinders of cement
in the limp of wounded pigeon.

Rat fowl of urban rot
Have you seen my daughter?
Are you pecking her remains from hardened asphalt?
I am lost without her.
Her lungs were my lungs were my throat in my eye.
Have you seen my daughter?
She disintegrated into a sky burial of trade.

I am almost majnun—majnun
detonated propellers spiral into my cabin
exhaust roars raining flesh
gray human paste covers Manhattan.
This puddle is my husband.
He was renamed the falling man.
He has joined the blood river of twisted carcass.
I am almost majnun—majnun

Have you seen my sister?
She was tortured by a regime that looks like you
Lacerated in the spin of piano wire,
she is bleeding oil
a lily pad sinking in the Mediterranean.

Have you seen him?
You did see him, your brother.
You swallowed him in the gasp of television.
He is branded to the inside of your eyelids.
Descending in the blink of horror, he lives in you.
He is a tear gland squatter
a perpetual spiral down a landscape of eye.

The Fallen Man is
falling through the broken smoke of a fireman’s net
falling down the chimney of swine and coriander
falling up my nostrils into the mushroom stench of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
falling across consciousness spinning
toward the grinding mouth of denial
falling beneath the choke hold of profiling snipers
falling over hallucinations of them falling
over hallucinations of me falling
beyond the debris of ethnic sterilization
I am skinless and blue—almost majnun.

Have you seen my daughter?
I am lost without her.
Her picture hangs from my neck like a stethoscope.
Her eyes are of Christ, jeweled mocha orbs.
I am looking for her in the dusk flake of air,
in the incidental pauses between words.
A morphine drip pats time silent.

I am looking for her in the dehydration of African bush
in the diarrhea of Zanzibar
in a vial of Pedialyte.
She died the death of a sanctioned Iraqi girl
no boundaries in sand dug outs
no penicillin on Acacia trees
no united way for a sickled tarnished penny.
She has joined the blood river of twisted carcass.

My eyelids are screens to
the backdrop of his tumbling tomb.
The fallen man is falling.
Some anonymous cadaver is falling.
He is the rain of descending graves
prostituted bird droppings
falling vertical assembly line
stock falling into a Korean labor of child heap
falling into the noise of majnun
crowd space crashing skulls of shattered mosaics
into the open cave of zero
falling down into the urban scrotum of Harlem
into the closed palate of chocolate slavery
into decapitated Taser breath
into forgotten blankets of small pox
you know those forgotten blankets of small pox
Trail of Tears—Trail of Tears
heart falling heat fixed into the stain of microbes
into an anthrax wail of crows
falling up the vertebrae of post-modernist architecture

Have you seen Mary, Maryam, Malaika, Marta?
Ah, Marta

Her hair is rain forests, each strand a disciple of its own.
She is almost majnun.
The plague of chemical lake pumps her veins.
Her nipples are a leaky dioxin faucet.
Her baby is a dowry traded to the North Star.
It is a unicorn born deformed in the raw sewage
of Guatemala.
I am almost majnun.
a displaced monsoon/scarf poetry blowing in soot
Have you seen?

a student announces—proclaims—
on a February Tuesday, leading to
a week-long deep dive

of researching you, Narwhal,
horned and mystical depth dweller
I haven’t thought much about

until now. One-toothed wonder,
you whirl open to devour prey whole.
I would expect nothing less.

On the Internet, you have a cult
following, unicorn of the sea—
crocheted into one-horned beanies,

printed on T-shirts and mugs
and phone cases, tattooed across backs.
There’s a plushie of you with a mustache

and a monocle, a beanbag chair,
an enamel pin, night slippers, and meme
after meme after meme. Your eyes

are always wide and kind. A blogger
I stumbled upon has I’m obsessed
with narwhals! as the first line

of her bio. And how couldn’t we be?
In this month of love, I’ll call this
a valentine, Narwhal. In Inuktitut

your name means “the one point
to the sky.” This month we launched
the heaviest rocket into outer space.

As I watched the slow burn
of the descending boosters, I thought
of you, Narwhal. How your horn

is a needle on a record, skipping
heartbeats. How your pulse plummets
as you swirl into the arctic dark.

NARVALES EXISTEN

un estudiante anuncia —proclama—
un martes en febrero, mandándome
en una semana entera de inmersión

en investigación de tí, Narval, cornudo
y místico habitante de la profundidad
sobre el cuál hasta ahora no he pensado mucho.

Fenómeno monodentado
te devanas para devorar a tu presa entera.
Espero nada menos de ti.

En el Internet, tienes un seguimiento
de culto, unicornio del mar
—tejido en una gorra con cuerno

imprimido en camisetas, tazas
y estuches de teléfono, tatuado en espaldas.
Hay un peluche de tí con un bigote

y monóculo, una silla saco de semillas,
un alfiler de esmalte, zapatillas de noche y meme
después de meme después de meme de tí. Tus ojos

son siempre grandes y generosos. Una bloguera
que encontré tiene ¡estoy obsesionada
con narvales! como la primera frase

de su bio. ¿Y cómo no estarlo?
En este mes del amor, voy a llamar este poema
un valentine, Narval. En Inuktitut

tu nombre significa el punto
al cielo. Este mes lanzamos
la nave más pesada al espacio exterior.

Mientras veía el lento arder
de los impulsores descendiendo, pensé en ti,
Narval. Cómo tu cuerno es una aguja

en un disco, saltando latidos del corazón.
Cómo se desploma tu pulso
mientras arremolinas en el oscuro ártico.

The black Mercedes
with the Ayn Rand 
vanity plate
crashed through 
the glass bus stop
and came to rest 
among a bakery’s 
upturned tables.
In the stunned silence,  
fat pigeons descended 
to the wreckage
and pecked at 
the scattered
bread and cake.
The driver slept,
head to the wheel.
The pigeons grew
rich with crumbs.
The broken glass winked.
God grinned.

I’m afraid I was wrong about the world ending.
The man sitting on the bench—is simply a man on fire.
His fingers; reaching for solitude, something 
brief. The day becomes a sigh of pigeons digging 
For stones. I stand near the station
Too sick to notice the bench—or the man—or fire
Or whether I’ve been spared from grief.
Even the roadkill, coveting concrete, stands 
And walks. Where are those left behind? 
I thought I knew something 
About Armageddon. I apologize, 
But when the world pauses, I will sing naked 
In the heat and grow a forest of sycamores. 
Who can survive an apocalypse 
And live? I made the roadkill a god 
But I’m not allowed to speak for god 
So I wait.

^{translated from the Sioux by Frances Densmore}

When I was but a child
I dreamed a wondrous dream.
I went upon a mountain;
There I fell asleep.
I heard a voice say,
“Now will I appear to you.”
A buffalo said this to me, dreaming.
When I was but a child
I dreamed this wondrous dream.

There are human beings who seem to regard the place as craftily 
    as we do—who seem to feel that it is a good place to come 
    home to. On what a river; wide—twinkling like a chopped sea under some 
          of the finest shipping in the

world: the square-rigged four-master, the liner, the battleship, like the two- 
    thirds submerged section of an iceberg; the tug—strong moving thing, 
    dipping and pushing, the bell striking as it comes; the steam yacht, lying 
          like a new made arrow on the

stream; the ferry-boat—a head assigned, one to each compartment, making 
    a row of chessmen set for play. When the wind is from the east, 
    the smell is of apples; of hay, the aroma increased and decreased 
         suddenly as the wind changes;

of rope; of mountain leaves for florists. When it is from the west, it is 
    an elixir. There is occasionally a parrakeet 
    arrived from Brazil, clasping and clawing; or a monkey—tail and feet 
         in readiness for an over-

ture. All palms and tail; how delightful! There is the sea, moving the bulk- 
    head with its horse strength; and the multiplicity of rudders 
    and propellers; the signals, shrill, questioning, peremptory, diverse; 
         the wharf cats and the barge dogs—it

is easy to overestimate the value of such things. One does 
    not live in such a place from motives of expediency 
    but because to one who has been accustomed to it, shipping is the 
         most congenial thing in the world. 

Ears are the eyes on the sides of your head. 
Memory lives here, between these apostrophes. 
As if to predict music, the ear contains a drum.

A musical note calling out for the shape of music. 
For the coin in the slot to unlock the gears. 
For the egg with a horse in it.

Some people are born addicted to sense. 
Some are born infected with silence. 
Poetry is an-ant-ant-anti-antibiotic.

“A horse pill.” 
Yes, there is an actual horse in this pill. 
Imagine it like a fetus pressed to the shell.

The reason there are no unicorns is just that. 
This is the egg tooth. 
And you, what did you pay to enter this world?

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.

^{as Emanuel Morgan}

How terrible to entertain a lunatic! 
To keep his earnestness from coming close!

A Madagascar land-crab once 
Lifted blue claws at me 
And rattled long black eyes 
That would have got me 
Had I not been gay.

^{—while being filmed on the North Pond} 

Looking through the lens for a close-up, 
he frames me, pond in the background. 

         I glimpse a red-winged blackbird light 
         above a cattail tuft. The filmmaker 

instructs, “Edge left, inside the shot.” 
How different to be watched (like last night 
  
         across the linen table from you, 
         to be seen, as if for the first time, 

and then to dip into the gleam 
of an ocean, your open gaze). 

         I long, instead, to cup the water 
         music, rising blackbird notes, mid-air. 

“Camera rolling,” he says. Lake-gusts 
sweep hair strands across my face. 

         “Please read your poem,  Ho’-e-ga/ 
         Snare, where you walk into the water.” 

Behind our shoot, a bus brakes, whooshes. 
A loud announcement. Filming’s cut. 

         I catch, between the reeds, the white-ringed 
         eye of the wood duck. Fledglings scoot. 

Further down the path, on rocks, a man proposes. 
While she accepts, a photographer snaps. 

In the grocery store parking lot I found 
the first orange, thrashed flat by wheel after wheel
of the regional bus that ran from there to the men’s shelter
outside the city limits. I had two red mesh sacks
of oranges dangling securely from my hand.
The fruit’s mealy organ, smeared from portico
to speed bump, was not mine, I knew it was not mine,
but somehow I needed to convince myself
that I had not thrown it on the ground. 
The next was thumb-gouged on the floor 
of a rest stop bathroom. The next, on a curb,
untouched. Its bureaucratic interior, its secret hallways. 
Halved in the dry leaves beside the bike path. 
Floating on the river. In the ATM vestibule, boldly mimicking 
the CCTV’s blank ball. I thought about my complicity 
all the time or not at all. My role in America’s joyless abundance. 
When the death toll was 15,000, in December, a woman set herself on fire
outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. More than 120 people
have self-immolated in the last 20 years. For the rights of fathers,
for the climate, for veterans, for the memories of comfort women,
Abdullah Öcalan, the Udmurt language, water and electricity, Tibet. 
Because I did not know what to do with my true responsibility 
I found it senseless, everywhere. Beneath the stone lions 
flanking the Language Arts building, like a dank egg. 
Perfuming blackly on my classroom’s windowsill. 
Blazing, shattered, sweet. As soon as I started to look for them
the oranges disappeared. 

Coda

As soon as the poem was finished, Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire.  
How did I know the poem was finished? 
I did not, as other poets often claim, put my head down 
on the table and weep. He shouted “Free Palestine”  
until fire ate all the air. The poem was finished because the world  
which had given birth to the poem had ended. 

Before breakfast, we drive into town  
to buy a  Star Tribune  for my father,  
who usually rides along, but today sleeps late.  
From the passenger seat, you stuff 
my mouth with a saucer peach.  For energy, 

you say, my fog before food well-known.  
The beige flesh tastes like jasmine.  
Honey. A Persian fairy tale.  
In his La-Z-Boy near the big window,  
my father will read a section, nod off, 

wake, read another, all afternoon.  
You and I no longer bother—every day  
the same: people killing, being killed.  
Instead, we cook, clean. We look  
after my father, keep our kids busy. 

At the One-Stop, I take a copy 
off the dwindling stack, set my father’s exact  
change into the cashier’s tattooed hand—  
my daily deadline met. Heading home,  
you spot it first, uphill, in a birch, 

glowing, a blue pilot light. A flaming  
blue arrow shooting toward us. I can’t  
stop, can’t swerve, it strikes our windshield.  
I see it in the rearview mirror glance  
onto the shoulder.  Maybe it’s still alive, 

you pray.  Maybe we can put it in a box  
until it’s well. So I reverse, hope it flies away.  
Could I mercy-kill it under a wheel? 
Standing by, we watch a wing flail once,  
an eye shut, the end. Even a little death 

sucks out our air. Where it hit gravel,  
one feather sticks up. Such color!  
Lapis-and-turquoise filigree.  
We kick a shallow grave with our heels,  
and deliver my father the news.

Quiet is not silence. Silence is absolute like never and forever. Quiet invites attention to cicadas, the warbling vireo on the wire, the cardinal’s whistle as it wings its brightness over the horizon of the Blue Ridge Mountains, then disappears amid the crape myrtles’ baroque blossoms.

It almost speaks to me. / Then as Horizons step, I take a photograph of artists chatting on the gravel path that opens to the studio barn silos.

The rabbit lets me come close—It waits upon the lawn / It shows the furthest tree—before it leaps into tall grasses, shelter for fireflies.

The limestone statue of the cherubic naked boy smiles down at butterflies and bees feeding on zinnia pollen. Good are those who plant flowers to save our pollinators.

Yet I mourn. The air conditioning kicks in. I examine the light on the drainage bed of small stone—a narrow beach outside my glass door—and listen to the distance, the highway sounds rising and falling like wind in spring.

A quality of loss / Affecting our content, Emily Dickinson wrote.

Before bed, sitting beneath the gazebo’s white dome where there’s cell reception, I talk to my love. We’re interrupted by the long train passing by. Is it nostalgia to love the sound of trains? Is it forward-thinking looking back?

A fascist is president: infection in the sentence breeds. We can’t help talking about him.

The comedian says people can’t think when they’re afraid. Satire makes them laugh, forget their fear, 
so they can think, a little newer for the term / upon enchanted ground.

Every day more evil against the Earth, the hate cult shouting epithets, hoarding their guns. As Trade had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament.

When the artists gather for meals, they ask “How was your day?” which means, “Did you travel in your studio?” which translates into resistance beyond the borders of this quiet estate.

We roam but see nothing of the moss-colored divine 
while noon throws a redwood shadow on the plaza.  
On the screen: two sallow-skinned children embrace. 
Their bodies say, fight; their bodies say, hide. 

While noon throws a redwood shadow on the plaza; 
summer flecks by, and you are almost gone.   
Your body says, fight; your body says, hide.  
You speak to a girl in the wind-swept garden.

Summer flecks by, and you are almost gone. 
You donate your secret to June’s long days. 
You speak to a girl in the wind-swept garden. 
The color of my suffering is green unaware.

You donate your secret to June’s long days. 
I retrieve my guilt and confess it to the sky.  
The color of my suffering is green. Unaware,  
you touch me like sunset on granite.

I retrieve my guilt & confess it to the sky.  
This solstice may be the end of me, I say. 
You touch me like sunset on granite. 
Sometimes, I giggle at the drama of our age.

This solstice may be the end of me, I say. 
Your eyes turn Maine Coon, choked, lionlike. 
Sometimes, I giggle at the drama of our age.  
Whose unmooring prowls in us now?

Your eyes turn Maine Coon, choked, lionlike. 
Why do we short the long of desire? 
Whose unmooring prowls in us now? 
We roam but see nothing of the moss-colored divine.  

know when they’re going to die. It’s why  
she leaves the flock, lays beneath  

the magnolia bush while her sisters clamber  
into the coop, presenting herself only to us 

the next morning. Sure, I’m projecting—   
a human trait. But imagine walking  

into your own brutal death   
in the processing plant.

It’s no surprise, Lisa says,   
we’re such fearful creatures—  

full on chicken wings and fried chicken  
sandwiches and sesame chicken  

and chicken salad and rotisserie
chicken and BBQ chicken, chicken

fingers, chicken pot pie, chicken parmesan,  
chicken & waffles—we’re always eating  

fear. I swear I’ll stop every time I look  
at our own small flock from our kitchen  

window while preparing Korean fried   
chicken. And why do I need to include  

that extra adjective when I tell you what  
I’m cooking? If I only said fried chicken, 

would you render me whole or only smell   
paper buckets and grease? Watch me lick 

the fat from my fingers over a plate   
of bones? The things I love will kill me 

and kill the ones I love. The chickens   
outside, Lisa and I—full on sweet dark meat.

The family I’m staying with,  
because my father is working,  
have called their dog Darkness,  
and it is a beautiful name.  
I’ve decided to camp.  
And out here in an old tent  
on the edges of their property,  
Darkness encircles me.  
I burrow my back into the field,  
strangely soft with a grass I don’t  
know the name of. I should know  
the names of grasses, and of trees,  
and of so many things.  
                                    Soon, the thick  
wind loosens into coolness and the light  
begins to dim. As I look up into Darkness,  
the underside of her tongue is spotty  
with inky-on-pink constellations.  

Her body makes me think of my own body,  
my fingertips dry as match heads 
that will light this nameless grass if I’m  
not careful. 
                  Darkness is a good teacher,  
and she guides me to be gentle with myself.  
With a nuzzle of her head into my hand,  
she says, in her way, that I am ok.  
I stroke her so long that the heavy night  
settles, and all that is left is the white blaze  
on her chest. 
          Soon, my eyes, and I, will adjust.  
But for now, I’m suspended,  
in this moment that is the sum  
of all moments.  
The grass, it occurs to me,  
is bluestem. The air is amniotic.  
And I cry a good cry as the great dog  
keeps on guarding me. 

^{Alliterate often equals anyone can stutter.
—Louis Zukofsky}

CLASSROOM

Backpack. Back to school. A bookworm. Late nights book-warmed. Tall tales. Tell-Tale Heart. Stone soup. Mike Fink. A pink eraser. Ser & estar. A star atop the page. A typed page. Cut & paste. Sometimes I’m slow paced. Trace a wave. Cursive. Cursor. Sine curve. Frogger goes kerplunk. We speak & spell. Read & write. I do a rewrite. Rhyme by rote. Hey Diddle Diddle. Digits double. In my textbook I doodle. Sketch pad. Scotch tape. Scratch & sniff. Pear-fect. Berry good. Grape going. Study group. I glue some goop. A great big gooey glob. We spin the globe. Hong Kong. Fiji. Cancún. New York, New York. Blue ink. Half inch. Fluid ounce. I ace the exam for once. Pop quiz. Pop fizz. Scissors. Seat sore. Stegosaurus. From my seat paper planes soared. Chalkboard. I’m stark bored. The chalk broke. Pop Rocks. Pop cans. I can’t. You can. Pop-top. Twist the tab & crush. Orange Crush. Secret crush. Love letter. Origami amore. Already going steady. Valentine-vexed. Doodle-doted. Dimple-dappled. You’re dumped. Humpty Dumpty. We play pin the tail on the donkey. Mountain Dew. Scooby Doo. Dewey Decimals. Dutifully I return The Snowy Day by the due date. Dried dates. Damp day. Windowsill. Pencil. Pen swell. Pen pals. Pentagons. Going, gone. The bus is gone. Let go. Lego. Logo turtle. Or. Are. Oreo. Oregon Trail. Homework. Homeward. Sidewalk. The sign says walk. All week.

What’s that? 
An egg? 
By the brother Boot it stinks fresh. 
Give it to Gillot. 

Galileo how are you 
and his consecutive thirds! 
The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler! 
We’re moving he said we’re off—Porca Madonna! 
the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoey charging Pretender 
That’s not moving, that’s moving.

What’s that? 
A little green fry or a mushroomy one? 
Two lashed ovaries with prosciutto? 
How long did she womb it, the feathery one? 
Three days and four nights? 
Give it to Gillot.

Faulhaber, Beeckmann and Peter the Red, 
come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi’s sun-red crystally cloud 
and I’ll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones 
or I’ll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of day.

To think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser, 
and not a syllogism out of him 
no more than if Pa were still in it. 
Hey! pass over those coppers, 
sweet milled sweat of my burning liver! 
Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing Jesuits out of the skylight.

Who’s that? Hals? 
Let him wait.

My squinty doaty! 
I hid and you sook. 
And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour foetus! 
What an exfoliation! 
Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils! 
My one child 
Scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood— 
Blood! 
Oh Harvey beloved 
How shall the red and white, the many in the few, 
(dear bloodswirling Harvey) 
eddy through that cracked beater? 
And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the arrow.

What’s that? 
How long? 
Sit on it.

A wind of evil flung my despair of ease 
against the sharp spires of the one 
lady: 
not once or twice but . . . .  
(Kip of Christ hatch it!) 
in one sun’s drowing 
(Jesuitasters please copy). 
So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid leather— 
what am I saying! the gentle canvas— 
and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic, 
and farewell for a space to the yellow key of the Rosicrucians.

They don’t know what the master of the that do did, 
that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air, 
and the drums, and the throne of the faecal inlet, 
and the eyes by its zig-zags. 
So we drink Him and eat Him 
and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovis 
because He can jig 
as near or as far from His Jigging Self 
and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks 
How’s that, Antonio?

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. 
Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

Anna Maria! 
She reads Moses and says her love is crucified. 
Leider! Leider! She bloomed and withered, 
a pale abusive parakeet in a main street window.

No I believe every word of it I assure you 
Fallor, ergo sum! 
The coy old frôleur! 
He tolle’d and legge’d 
and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat. 
No matter, let it pass. 
I’m a bold boy I know 
so I’m not my son 
(ever if I were a concierge) nor Joachim my father’s 
but the chip of a perfect block that’s neither old nor new, 
the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.

Are you ripe at last, 
my slim pale double-breasted turd? 
How rich she smells, 
this abortion of a fledgling! 
I will eat it with a fish fork. 
White and yolk and feathers. 
Then I will rise and move moving 
toward Rahab of the snows, 
the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon, 
Christina the ripper. 
Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank 
who has climbed the bitter steps, 
(Rene du Perron . . . . !) 
and grant me my second 
starless inscrutable hour.

The mouth of the mother is the mouth of a wolf. We do not know what is wrong with her, her siblings said, your mother. She has always been that way, as though that way was specific, identifiable, understood among all creatures. She has always been full of fear, petulance, and violence, often traveling from pasture to pasture at night, lamenting her state of being with dolorous howls, her throat full of rasping teeth and starlings. She is a great reaver and spewer of blood, they said, but also flees when met with the slightest resistance, and then hunches into a shivering lump to play martyr. She birthed and devoured a hundred babies before she had you. There was nothing we could do to stop her, either from the birthing or the devouring. Why she did not eat you we do not know, but agree the living was worse for you, that is, until you escaped. We did not think it possible. She carried you around by the scruff of your neck, slung you against rocks, pinned you under her forepaws and bathed you in her moldered breath until you screamed. She taught you nothing, neither to hunt nor to flee, and left you shivering upon the cold rock, scoured by winter sun and blasting winds. She was not a wolf. Not even close. She sent you to vacation Bible school. There you learned questionable crafts and the gentle terror of Jesus. We wanted to intervene, but ancient codes prevented it. When you bled, we looked away. When you ran into the sky, we cheered for you. She raged in your absence, slaughtering rabbits in the garden and digging endless tunnels into the earth. Now you have returned. Her mind is a ruin. She is a small child trapped on a merry-go-round. It would be a kindness to sing to her.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

The scientists say fungi are more closely related to animals—to us—

than multicellular plants. The truth: the shiitake in your fridge

             would treat you better than half the men in the bar tonight,

and it’d taste better too.

I won’t cry when the Anthropocene ends.

             Instead, I’ll breathe in the spores and thank God.

You’re calling it the apocalypse,

and I tell you that it means lifting the veil—

I tell you this thing is ancient—a revelation. This is the last orgasm.

             It’s Eternity. Soft skulls of mushrooms are pushing up

             through our pores

and I’m whispering to you that they’re loving us like men would—

             eating us raw, sucking on our bones, marrying our bodies—

             only, this is better than men.



             But when the mycelium fills my mouth, and I can no longer

             breathe, I want to tell you how

             you remind me of the moon; to hold your hand;

             to let you know

I’m still here, but this



             is inescapable.

You’re looking at me with eyes that ask

             if this is the end, but I think:

This feels like

             coming home.

The moon will shine for God
knows how long.
As if it still matters. As if someone

is trying to recall a dream.
Believe the brain is a cage of light
& rage. When it shuts off,

something else switches on.
There’s no better reason than now
to lock the doors, the windows.

Turn off the sprinklers
& porch light. Save the books
for fire. In darkness,

we learn to read
what moves along the horizon,
across the periphery of a gun scope—

the flicker of shadows,
the rustling of trash in the body
of cities long emptied.

Not a soul lives
in this house &
this house & this

house. Go on, stiffen
the heart, quicken
the blood. To live

in a world of flesh
& teeth, you must
learn to kill

what you love,
& love what can die.
 

I hope my death is not stolen from me
by a fiery blast of Fahrenheit or Celsius      
or another calculatable accuracy.                       

I will gladly relinquish all the pleasures of daily 
bread, the pride and dreams of art—even pulse;
but I hope my death will not be taken from me.

Actually, it is a modest policy;
little there to discuss as to solace
or in the way of privacy.

A valued moment of self-possession? Might it be
something to embrace more than to expulse?
I hope my death will not be pried from me.

My end is not to be just a cause in a public sea 
of scientists teaming against a disease,
a private point in a welter of piracy.

After all, won't it fundamentally and rightly 
be mine and no one else's? I hope my death is 
not taken from me; better, it be 
an appointment kept in a private sea.

Hush thee and sleep, little one, 
    The feathers on thy board sway to and fro; 
The shadows reach far downward in the water 
     The great old owl is waking, day will go. 
 
Rest thee and fear not, little one, 
     Flitting fireflies come to light you on your way 
To the fair land of dreams, while in the grasses 
     The happy cricket chirps his merry lay. 
 
Tsa-du-meh watches always o'er her little one, 
     The great owl cannot harm you, slumber on
'Till the pale light comes shooting from the eastward, 
     And the twitter of the birds says night has gone. 

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

I read on my iPhone, stopped at a red light, & next to my car   
a child is playing a street piano fast, counting THREE, TWO, ONE,  
yelling over traffic, I’m PLAYING, sun on the child’s face  

& fingers skittering on keys— 
neurons direct these fingers, a consciousness no one shares  
that says, high notes now, then low, & laughter, 

& an adult urges the child to  come-on-let’s-go,  
but the child plays a crescendo & says  
I AM FINISHING MY SONG— 

& artificial intelligence can use recurrent neural networks to create  
piano music & AI can drive cars, but my eyes tire, 
my eyes are animal eyes with animal need to gaze out 

at red lights & be given the useless-lovely data of a sparrow skimming 
to a telephone wire, a child at a rainbow-painted stringed instrument,  
the sparrow hopping on a wire, the child pressing keys like a question:  

low, high? Low, high? Perception a note not played again, 
& when the light turns green my car drives, 
I am finishing my song. The light is yellow now.

First, the beast showed up in the middle  
of the night, entered the gates without 

a sound, sauntering through the field as if 
this was its home, my own home. Then came

the day and refused to absolve me of my girlhood, 
which was also its own. Its lovely face filled 

the streets of my imagination, & though we are  
both exhausted, it is just getting started. It does not

know what it wants with me. Its gaze, other-worldly,  
carrying with itself the portals to my other-selves

who await us patiently, bearers of thorns and honey, 
always speaking without uttering a word, leading me

to my many crucifixions, until I am readied for my own 
wanting. It has been told before, the tale of the beast 

and the man, the beast and man, the beastman. Man  
with too many eyes, limbs far reaching beyond its moat. 

I cannot say I did not see the signs; I cannot say  
I did not sleep with a sharp blade clutched in my fists. 

When, finally, the day of the awakening comes, I rise 
girl no more. Instead, I am another, I am other. 

And the gnawing has just begun. 

My swimmer’s body a slash at the door,
I listen to you thrash against the shore of sleep
I think we owe this to each other, to never dream
Alone again, to come home when asked. You would
Say I want for you the world, its favors. But the world
Is ending, its favors few. I want for us a future
No longer wrecked against the animal love made of us
I want to say I bore witness to the world
And mean I did not flinch when it felled you
I tried. I didn’t, not really. I held my hand out
Shielding only my face from the sun.
The most American disease is the dis-
ease of self-obsession. In its ruins I find
there are questions I never quite learned to ask:

How can I help?
What did you need?
How will I know?

Dawn isn’t quite broken yet 
My timeline a jigsaw of transformation photographs 
Before and after of shrinking bodies 
Testimonials of calorie counting 
Trending tab is self-starvation as weight loss hack 
I move on to my Instagram stories 
Swipe through this automated gallery of nano films 
One holds my attention 
A little boy without a shirt; scrawny 
Ribs poke through skin; piercing 
White debris scattered over his head; residue from the airstrikes 
Veins pulsating tendrils; from neck to clavicle  
Hands clasp aluminium plate  
Plate turns gong 
Mouth turns blaring horn 
The bang interloping his screams in Arabic 
Closed caption flashes across the screen

“Open the border, we have no flour, we want to live, we want to eat, no food, there is no food here, open the crossings, it’s been more than 70 days, and I haven’t had bread, for the grace of God dear world, for the grace of god, we want to eat”

His voice a cacophonic song; amidst the rubble

The night fills with charged chatter  
from the bar we exited. I ask if I can kiss her 
and wonder what door this will open. 

Soon, she’ll be gone for two weeks, 
and I’ll ride my bike out to a bench 
close to a canal where the crows eat the fallen

left-over fruit from the orchards.  
They’ve been cleared to build new doors 
over the rotting roots. Each day she’s gone, 

I chain smoke to ease nerves and call her,  
already out of breath. Her voice, an elixir I savor  
like the small and sudden bursts of a breeze

cooling my forehead; baptism is a doorway for faith.  
It’s been hard to believe in love again, 
but faith is at the center of every request. 

She answered by kissing me, unlocking  
all the terror stored in these clouds of flesh. 
But I remembered how easily and quickly 

the mind travels vast distances to find meaning  
in the strange and striking shapes of our lives.  
I felt her sweat on my lips. Baptism.

I lost a tooth, a ring, and my weirdo shirt, 
the chapbook I tore apart and put together  
in the middle of the night, 
and that one girl’s laptop.

I still have the pictures we took near midnight;  
eyes too big for my face and head recently shaved,  
new heartbreak learned in my body. The too quiet nights  
jarring in the dark, limbs buzzing— 

On the train the fluorescent lights  
were blinding and my brain was addled  
by sleepless weeks and weeks.  
That girl’s laptop was in a tote bag in my hands and then it wasn’t  
and I was on the platform watching the train disappear.  
How helpless I felt. How everyday was that very day; 
the way everything splintered—

how the world sang. The way  
I could conjure earthquakes;  
The cold of my first winter.  
The way I came alive and burned.

***

I wish I could take it back; in your childhood bed,  
how it was my face without me behind it  
and my hands without my touch as they slipped out of view. 
I wish I could take back that messy breakfast, a racket at dawn,  
the hours smudged by time. Did I eat it? Did I clean up  
after myself? Enamored by the sharp yellowness of the yolk,  
its flavor buttery in my mouth.

I wish I could take it all back; in the hospital,  
ravaged by every dark impulse,  
your mother sitting across from me, promising me  
I would never step foot in her house again. 

The girl I had been, lost  
among the roots behind your house.  
In a black wig, holding a cigarette,  
enchanted by the whispering leaves.  
My footsteps in the snow.

^{Forbes, July 20, 2020}

The sky is so clean    we can see 
all the gods we’ve negotiated with     Coyotes 
swagger through the neighborhood

unchallenged    Roosters say nothing

The same ambulance lurks on 
our street without sirens every few nights 
and leaves with something 

broken: the veteran four houses south 
who shouts commands each morning while twirling 
his parade rifle     the battered wife 
in the green house across the street     bodies

Lights strobe 
through our blinds     First responders are here again 
When the street becomes dark 
we are brave     We peek out the window

to see Mars’s faraway red glow or to count the dead 
stars

The evening darkens over
After a day so bright
The windcapt waves discover
That wild will be the night.
There’s sound of distant thunder.

The latest sea-birds hover
Along the cliff’s sheer height;
As in the memory wander
Last flutterings of delight,
White wings lost on the white.

There’s not a ship in sight;
And as the sun goes under
Thick clouds conspire to cover
The moon that should rise yonder.
Thou art alone, fond lover.

^{—after Frank O’Hara and Katy Porter}

Dear, I wished you heavens.
If not heavens, earths.
And if a little hell, I prayed the tears
I hid as wet, incandescent smiles
were an ocean on brimstone.
You are one of one.
I never said: Good morning, my heart
but I was the indigo in your hair.
I was keeping time when you danced.
I was stillness and tremor,
break and breach, 
your pen and your cane.
No, I never said: I’m in love with you. 
I said: I dreamed of a child
with your eyes, with your hands.
You are one of one. 
The unrenounceable.
Do not fear death.
You’ll be beautiful 
in the grave.
You’ll be beautiful 
in the Judgment line,
the sun recounting sins 
against our siblings for eons. 
And the shadow I cast
standing outside your garden
will be our cover. 
Dear, I was never lonely. 
I was never cold. 
I was wreathing our canopy.
Some day you’ll love Ladan Osman.
After the hours. After all light.

Given that you are the object 
of the emperor’s touch; given that you object

to his learnt repetition of love; given the abject 
shame of a body entered by another body’s object

permanence; given shame’s objective; 
given your maiden name and the object

of the game: may everybody know, but nobody object— 
the emperor is your maker. And you—his subject

of rule—have tried to say it true, only to be subjected 
to a cruel inheritance in which memory is the subject

of a sentence the mind cannot objectify 
long enough to hold, but holds true enough to subject

all touch to this kingdom of touching, this abject 
poverty of care dressed as care itself—you slept, objectively,

in your emperor’s bed. The rest is subjective, 
but it was no rest.

must look so small, undetectable even,
from the vantage point where I imagine 

a god could see me, and I do sometimes  
imagine a god like a sentient star

out beyond where our instruments 
could find it, then I talk myself 

out of the image. Out of the concept
entirely. From a distance, I know 

I’m an ant tunneling my way 
through sand between plastic panels, 

watched—or not—from outside. 
My puny movements on this planet, 

all the things I’ve done or built 
with my own body or mind, seem 

like nothing at all. But from the inside 
this life feels enormous, unlimited 

by the self—by selfness—
vaster even than the sparkling 

dark it can’t be seen from.

The music was turned up too loud for talking
but everybody talked. Someone I barely knew
was drinking wine and had an arm around me.
The liquid in my glass trembled. This was the year
the chokecherry in the yard grew tall enough
to find the wind, a thing like itself, shifting
and invisible, feeling all the leaves and turning them,
like once you turned my coat collar at the door
to make it even, and then I was ready.

inertia’s at the front door lobbying for a way into the funk
           but packed the wrong tools, left
blues back where bebop jumped over the hammer.
           sold God’s imagination short.
now we’re here dancing again, Bessie’s song got my hips loose
           & what goods a revolution without a two-step?

beloved, there’s a party tonight & everybody gon’ be there

tonight, in Oakland, we carve up maplewood in steel-toe boots,
           stomp keys into the myth of whiteness. uncle sam’s teeth
rattle. Huey clinks the bars with Plato’s Republic between
           here and LA, conjures the one & three count. american chaos.
bass haunts the dichotomy, counterproduces the violence. troubles
           innocence. tonight in Oakland, the party is everywhere
& we cant distinguish one riff from another. black smoke funnels
           out the attic & the lamp shade’s crooked from the kickdrum—

beloved, (i said) there’s a party tonight & everybody gon’ be there

i’m trading in my gold tooth for a hand grenade
           at the back door: morning glory, milkweed, poppy.
the rest have names too, distinct & communal as sin.
           would you believe me if i told you miracles were small
enough to hold? scorched amber. night blooms. forgive me,
           sometimes the light blinds me to the light.

beloved, it’s a party tonight. everybodys here

^{El Retiro, Colombia}

When I step naked into my shower,
I find, staring down at me,
its eight dark eyes peering over
the silver lip of the sprayer, a tarantula
the size of a bar of soap.

There’s a reason we tap out our shoes,
check behind pillows every night
before bed. Spiders and scorpions make
a daily pilgrimage of this house, through
windows and doors, to and from the jungle
that presses in on us from all sides.

How many have I displaced, or killed,
I wonder, looking up, surprised by this creature,
each of us weighing options: four pairs of legs
leaping into the falls and down the bluff
of my body. Or two, scrambling out
into the cold to fetch a broom.

And I think, not  my shower today, but  ours.

“You stay up there and look,” I hear myself say,
and with this a small peace forms between us.
My hands lather and scrub. The brown voyeur
drums one hairy finger just at the edge
of the cascade—that thin wet line
between  curious  and  afraid, where each of us
must make a home.

Count me among the noon risers who stumble,
dazed and bad-haired, from the nest midday,
pecking the crazed dirt for half-torn moth, 
pear’s white core, severed worm. I’ve never 
been one to trill at chink of dawn, to hop, 
skip, chirrup before full sun. I’m better 
at picking over crumbs, stitching a quilt
from what’s left, remaindered, given up
for gone. Better at betting the careless 
will miss the best. Count me among
the nightbirds who sip starlight, a guitar’s
fading strains. Find me where moondust 
swirls in streetlamp glow and stray dogs sleep.
What clings to the bone is most sweet.

^{translated from the Latin by Henry Howard}

Martial, the things that do attain
  The happy life be these, I find:—
The richesse left, not got with pain,
   The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;

The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
   No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthful life;
   The household of continuance;

The mean diet, no delicate fare;
   True wisdom join’d with simpleness;
The night dischargèd of all care,
   Where wine the wit may not oppress;

The faithful wife, without debate;
   Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate,
   Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

^{for Can}

I love the slow, tender
hooved gallop behind my left
nipple & how it turns me
into less a prisoner; prisoner
once, now a man less burdened 
by time. I love the rust & callous, the half
of it that makes me weep.
I love my lashes like scimitars,
the scar above my left eye
shaped by a fallen tree branch
& staring too long at the sun. I love
how g-d outlasts belief. I love 
the tooth chipped sliding along
the stone of a mango; 
the brokenness my body coupling 
with hers won’t fashion. I love 
the ridge that parts my bald head.
The days of whisky pickling
my liver. I love eleven rings
on my fingers. The two moons
on each fingernail. I love
all my eclipses. How my history 
begs for song from crackheads 
& soothsayers. I love this prayer,
this sin-eater or ghost or madman
humming to my soul. I love discursive 
& juxtaposition & the alchemy turning 
words into the only parachutes 
I long for. This body long been 
a troubled river. I love the storm. 
The weary. The thousand wild
cicadas. I love every invention,
every windmill turned monster.
I love how I know the deluge; 
how most likely I shall see it coming; 
or if, the empty of its absence. I love 
these two livers. This sac of humor,
this broken vinyl scratched
& spinning, & that one paladin
who refuses to let me be lonely.

^{—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.

^{for P.C.}

My friend grieves while we search 
for an authentic experience, like tacos 
in hand-made corn tortillas. On Zarzamora, 
Letitia’s is busy, so it must be good and real. 
Early April—Lent specials in cursive 
on posters outside. We park near
an unexpected cluster of purple flowers, 
short and wild like a sudden storm. 
We kneel. I think of Anthony of Padua, 
the patron saint of lost things. Both of us 
draw closer. The flowers speak to us. They say—
existence and persistence are the same thing. 
              A brisk spring wind brings sweet 
              peppers and onions, oil and fish.

Twenty-five summers ago
I wrote a poem about the summer ending,
the shadows lengthening, and the light
gone soft and elegiac
like the end of a love song.
It joined roughly a million poems
written that summer alone
on the same subject, but in Spanish
or Japanese, or Swahili,
always the same thing, same shadows
lengthening, same soft light,
and I ended my poem, twenty five years ago,
by saying that the back of my hand
had begun to look like a dead leaf
or the back of someone else’s hand.
And this is just a shout out to say
to that version of me, a quarter
century ago, that the hand in question
looks even more like a dead leaf, even more 
like the back of someone else’s hand,
but—and this is crucial, the importance
of this next observation cannot
be overstated—the strange old hand
is still here, still enduring, still writing itself
into itself.

And isn’t everything risk?

The beloved lives 
Then dies,
Then (if we’re lucky) 
Rises again 
Into a poem or song

Or into the world 
In some other form 
Impossible to predict.

Simplest story, oldest tale: 

Sparrows sing it
From every hedge;

And swallows, also, 
From their nests on the ledge. 

First, there was nothing, then there was me.
Hot summer day. Cosby Show on repeat.
Patriarch in his sweaters.
Dropping bygone knowledge.
His only son wasn’t listening.
“Theo” would’ve fit me, but my mother 
& John Travolta. Welcome Back, Kotter. 
Maybe he’ll be a heartthrob,  she said. 
Locks that go on forever.
My father:  Maybe he’ll be a conqueror,
but he’s got such a pale color.
Namesakes, bad omens,
he scoffed as he held me. Foreigner
on the radio: I want to know what love is.
The world, even then, was burning.
Refugees moved. Trains derailed.
Futures hijacked. We patted ourselves on the back
for the lasting peace we had made.
Grandfathers chomping cigars, shaking hands,
saying  look at what we have made.
Bloodline secure. Which
halfway through existence,
I see the value of more
& more. Studies show
our lifespans are extending
all the time. We’re living
more than we’re dying. I’m sorry,
my father failed to see it. He lived
with abandon. I forgive him,
for when he panicked & ran.
What we do when we see our own mortality.
My mother liked to say, like mothers often say,
you were lucky to be born here.  Now. At this time.
I wonder how that first cigarette, that first Tab
with my aunt tasted when I was milkfed
& she had time for herself again.
Good. The chances were good.
We knew what love is.

Rose Rosette Disease
is a death sentence for roses.

Unlucky plants must be pulled
root and all

lest the virus spread to neighbors.
Those afflicted

look straight outta Mordor—
stems dense with evil

spikes, stunted buds,
leaves curled tight

like parsley. But, lo,
fret not. Carly arrives

bearing hope:
the internet believes

these angry thorns
on our Moonlight Romantica

are merely coltish growth.
Lay down your shovel, Todd.

Hide your shears.
It’s so easy to be afraid

when a thing is new—
the beak of a day-old chick

held to water pan,
the back of a hand

held to baby boy’s breath.
Or strange new moles.

It can be difficult to see
the dermatologist.

Even an older man’s life
can be new at times.

Moonlight Romantica—
fifty-some pale yellow petals

rolled up in a meaty bloom.
The rose catalog tells me

the fragrance will be sweet.

^{for Sean Ferguson}

The mother laid her boy to sleep
in a laundry hamper. Its weave curved 
around his head just as the glow 
of a dying planet had curved 
around Kal-El, another boy ejected 
into space. Buckled into 
the seat of her stationwagon, 
the hamper traveled north, as far 
from the panhandle as Ephrata, Washington, 
no father for miles. For her boy 
his mother packed the stroller, 
a painting, and all the towels 
in the damp rowhouse near the airforce base. 
For her boy she drove eleven days. 
Now the boy is forty, he lives 
in LA, he’s learned to love 
without caution. She lives alone, 
she attends church twice a week. 
The minister argues that hers 
is a heroism of the natural order 
overthrown: the patriarch gone mad, 
the son preserved to replace him. 
Yet the mother sees the little stories 
curtained by the great. She is certain 
that, during those eleven days of driving, 
she was mythic. They were mythic. 
Mary and Christ. Jessica and Paul. 
Heroine and hero, together in flight. 

            When I think on Your nearness, I picture a lizard biting my thumb. We’re both rather private, and I’m not quick. That’s why I’m writing. I love listening for You from this distance. Truth be told, I’m comforted by Your steady silence and absence. I know You are there by how often I feel Your absence, not at all like abandonment, not wholly like loneliness, which has its share, but also like the wake that follows when I leave a friend’s potluck into cold streets crazed by ice. If You are a grammatical mood, You are homo irrealis. If You are a verb, You are a copula. You were the year I lived in a food desert. The year of the solar eclipse. The year of the abscess and overdraft fees. The year Lake Merritt reeked of death, choked by algal bloom: yellowfins, flounder, crabs, striped bass, and bat rays choked by algal bloom. The year I landed in Florence, I was the only one from my flight questioned (first in Italian, then English): Where are you from? Not African? How much money do you have on you? Where is your passport? Why are you here? In the Convent of San Marco where, once, friars tended a garden of simples and a great library of 400 books, Fra Angelico painted frescoes inside their cells, a small scene from the life of Christ beside a smaller window, and each cell I entered shook me like a good line break, a poem’s leap of faith, and in my unknowing, and in my surprise, was happiness. Fra Angelico knew what to withhold, scripture being a shared language, and painted details, not props. The door to hell kicked off its hinges, indelible, sure. But the nails. The bent nail.

Copper keeps life from my womb; aluminum  
fills my pores, silver my teeth. My blood won’t hold iron, 
so I take it daily. Food brings a sickness I can’t measure 
under my tongue, only on my waning waist. Some metal 

belongs in the body. The day a grate raised my skirt 
on the street, I noticed only one rush of air between  ore
and whore. The boy who learns to caress his face with a blade 
will grow into a man I’ll pay to slice my skin with steel. Beauty 

is no alchemy: it merely means making space for more things 
that shine. Like the ancient statues men scrapped for daggers. 
Like powder packed into bullets, their touch so intimate
it kills. Like any body in this millennium, I’ll survive 

in silicon chips after death. Until then, lead me 
somewhere precious. Guide me with ungloved hands.

You like to fight. You desire sweat  
and snap of bicep,  
thick resource of thighbone,  
shouldering aside obstacles. 
You like to thrust your way in and find 
something hard and real to go up against— 
call it a wall, call it 
your brother. Call it the angel  
who came to wrestle 
but was forced to bestow  
a blessing. Strength is a woman  
with her hand knotted in a lion’s mane.  
Yours to claim or disavow.  
I wield no gun,  
slingshot, nor lightning bolt.  
Only the memory  
of membrane and synapse, 
how you once had to belly-crawl 
through my very body 
to get into the world.  
I live in you as beauty,  
call it spirit or flesh, 
call it a swift elbow strike  
to will the wall DOWN 
that separates—let mine be the blow  
that wakes the castle 
from its dream of parapets and spikes.  
Let mine be the courage  
of the trembling tongue 
that confesses its true need, 
so you can lie in my arms, a cub again 
at last, a sheaf of immortal flowers.

I like how Stevie Nicks speaks like a Martian sometimes.  

“I came here for a reason,” she said in a 1983 interview. 
As if simply relaying the directive from her mothership.  

“I didn’t come here to be a mother …” Bet that sounded  
pretty alien then. Coming from a young pretty woman.  

Like a Trojan horse. Feminism disguised in a frilly dress.   

It makes me think about my birth mother. Like Stevie, 
she didn’t come here to be a mother. Unlike my mother,  
who couldn’t get pregnant but wouldn’t let that stop her 
from becoming what she came here to be. My mother,  

as passionate about adoption as she was about choice. 

I like how that confuses some—those who like to point 
out that abortion might’ve prevented her from adopting. 
I suppose those dimwits came here to be … well, dimwits.  

Still, bet they can’t help but hum along when they hear 
Stevie Nicks songs. Failing to realize that all those songs  
are her children. That she gave birth to them for us.   

“Because,” she said. “I want to enhance this planet.” 

Eleven o’clock, and the curtain falls. 
The cold wind tears the strands of illusion; 
The delicate music is lost 
In the blare of home-going crowds 
And a midnight paper.

The night has grown martial; 
It meets us with blows and disaster. 
Even the stars have turned shrapnel, 
Fixed in silent explosions. 
And here at our door 
The moonlight is laid 
Like a drawn sword. 

My mother took the bag from its box— 
home to my father’s ashes for thirteen years— 
and poured its heft into a form she made  
on the potter’s wheel—a vase, damp and unfired. 
She pinched the rotating lip, and sealed the clay  
perfectly shut, a technique I haven’t yet mastered.

We planned to launch it like a football at low tide,  
but when we arrived, the beach was lined with people, 
and there was no subtle way for my brother to toss it out past  
the children kneeling in the surf, the surfers awaiting the break. 

To carry my father out, arm above my head, heavy with him— 
or hold him against my chest, side-stroking  
with one hand while the clay disintegrated into the water— 
I wasn’t dressed for it.

Instead, we dropped him in the water by the docks  
by the old Shrimp Shack, all 6’4” of him, 
and I watched the vessel slowly descend, a few bubbles  
emerging as if the last breath left in a dying lung.

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.

The wind has come up  
and now there is a cloud behind the mountain.   
How many times did she tell me the story   
of my birth? The story ended when she’d say,  
and that was the happiest day of my life, and  
I’d feel a little sad because I’d had no child  
and would never have a day like hers. Sometimes,  
I can see the river bottom and its glitter  
of stones. Then a fish leaps in sunlight rippling  
the surface. Sometimes, I listen to the birds,  
our seers, the pileated always laughing. I’ve read  
the dead in dreams are never dead,  
and yes, it is their aliveness that is reassuring,  
their going on even as they leave us here. Just now  
the shadow of wings, and a far-off child’s voice  
shouting  Hey, Mom.

^{“Because the grief knot is known to slip apart ‘with astonishing ease,’
it is considered one of the most insecure of knots.”
—Wikipedia, “Grief Knot”}

I not-see houses at the not-edge of the trees. Nothing gnaws through brush:
no football deflated, no crumpled seltzer cans. Possums emerge and are 
not-run over. This yard is a certified wildlife habitat. These yards Make America
Laugh Again. Go Blue. From the top of a parking garage, I face the endless
not-anything. It is almost-green as I know it not-here. A golf course is not a rash,
not a sore, not a scab. It’s not so bad. A not-lover tells me these are Midwest Clouds 
after we drive under the same frothy white for hours. There is not-not-ocean
on the other side of the road. Listen. I came from not-here. I know better than 
to fault the land. ‘Āina has not-not-synonyms. There is no water I can look at 
or not-look at and not-think of poison. Ground plumes. Oil spills. The not-
government not-warns of PFAs. Not-alarms at white foam. I am not-embering
with my not-anger. In this corner of not-Michigan, There is no public access 
to tracts of forest, wetlands, shorelines. These are not unprecedented times. 
What not-new not-apologies will we hear in one hundred years? Who will not 
make them? I am not-not-exhausted afterwalking twelve miles in not-woods 
open to not-scientists like me. There are no switchbacks. With every step, I not-
remember no mountains. No hemlocks. No cedars. No spruces. No dwarf rose. 
No roses. No roses. Nō. My mother taught me to shake branches like hands, 
to know pines by their follicles. Without her, I not-name plants with not-names 
for other plants. How much to not-remember! Mother not-not-is a metonym. 
When I not-sleep, I not-hear the train not-wailing. I am not too far from her.

We’d lift gin from your mother’s cabinet  
and walk the hallways of Robert Asp Middle  
taking swigs in plain sight from a 20 oz  
Pepsi Clear, your gap tooth flashing  
at teachers we passed, your hands forgetting  
to pass the bottle, screwing and unscrewing  
the cap. After that I moved. We lost track.  
The news was six months old by the time  
I heard. When they don’t say what happened  
you know what happened. We used to catch  
rides from highschoolers out to the Red to jump  
the bridge. Water thick with clay. Red with clay.  
We kept close watch for underwater logs.  
Smoked Menthols. A 40-foot drop into swirls  
of currents. One time you stayed under  
and kicked downstream to trick me. Nervous,  
I stared at the surface for signs. No signs.  
I stumbled down the bank to dive in.  
The moment you were certain you had me  
the valley cracked with your laughter.

The going. The letters. The staying.
The life of the little boy. The staying
and the life of the little boy. The
letter. The mushrooms. Dear Mom,
I’m writing to say how good it felt
when we took the mushrooms. Our skin.
The boy getting on the bus and the
street lamp. It’s getting cooler. The life
of the little boy. The life of the little boy.
The going. The letters. It’s getting cooler.
It’s a little bit better. We took the
mushrooms and got on the crowded bus.
I’m writing to say how everyone seemed.

Like everything delicious, I was warned against it.

Those mornings, I’d slowly descend the stairs

in my plaid Catholic school uniform skirt, find my parents

eating behind newspapers, coned in separate silences.

The only music was the throat-clearing rasp of toast

being scraped with too-little butter, three passes

of the blade, kkrrrrr, kkrrrr, kkrrr, battle hymn of the eighties.

When I pulled the butter close, my mother’s eyes

would twitch to my knife, measuring my measuring--

the goal, she’d shared from Weight Watchers,

a pat so thin the light shines through. If I disobeyed,

indulged, slathered my toast to glistening lace,

I’d earn her favorite admonition, predictable as Sunday’s

dry communion wafer: “A moment on the lips . . .”

I couldn’t stop my head from chiming, forever on the hips.

Hips? They were my other dangerous excess.

I was growing them in secret beneath my skirt,

and when I walked the dog after breakfast

and a truck whooshed past from behind, the trucker’s eyes

sizzling mine in his rear view, I knew my secret

wouldn’t stay a secret long. They were paired, up top,

by a swelling, flesh rising like cream to fill, then overfill

the frothy training bra. Everything softening on the shelf,

milk-made. Meanwhile, at breakfast, sitting on my secret,

I’d concede, scrape kkrrrrr, kkrrrr, kkrrr, lay down

my weapon, dry toast sticking in my craw. I’d think

of the girl from school, seventeen to my fourteen,

who crawled out the window of first-period bio

to meet her boyfriend from the Navy base. She’d collar

his peacoat, draw his mouth to her white neck,

or so I kept imagining. Slut, the girls whispered, watching

her struggling back through the window, throat

pinked from cold and his jaw’s dark stubble,

kkrrrrr, kkrrrr, kkrrr. Only fourth period,

and already I was hungry for lunch, or something.

Thank you, Republican parents, thank you,

Catholic education, thank you, Reganomics—

words I never knew I’d write. But I hereby acknowledge

repression’s inadvertent gifts. Folks who came of age

in liberal families, permissive cities, the free-love sixties,

how far they must go to transgress—

Vegas, latex, sex tapes, a sugaring of the nostrils?

Yet how close at hand rebellion is for me.

Merely making married love with my married husband,

I’m a filthy whore. Merely sitting down to breakfast

and raising the butter knife, I’m living on the edge.

—2019

we let our hair down.  It wasn't so much that we 
worried about what people thought or about keeping it real 
but that we knew this was our moment. We knew we'd blow our cool
 
sooner or later.  Probably sooner.  Probably even before we 
got too far out of Westmont High and had kids of our own who left
home wearing clothes we didn't think belonged in school.

Like Mrs. C. whose nearly unrecognizably pretty senior photo we  
passed every day on the way to Gym, we'd get old.   Or like Mr. Lurk 
who told us all the time how it's never too late

to throw a Hail Mary like he did his junior year and how we
could win everything for the team and hear the band strike 
up a tune so the cheer squad could sing our name, too. Straight

out of a Hallmark movie, Mr. Lurk's hero turned teacher story.  We
had heard it a million times. Sometimes he'd ask us to sing
with him, T-O-N-Y-L-U-R-K Tony Tony Lurk Lurk Lurk. Sin

ironia, con sentimiento, por favor, and then we
would get back to our Spanish lessons, opening our thin
textbooks, until the bell rang and we went on to the cotton gin

in History. Really, this had nothing to do with being cool. We
only wanted to have a moment to ourselves, a moment before Jazz
Band and after Gym when we could look in the mirror and like it. June

and Tiffany and Janet all told me I looked pretty. We
took turns saying nice things, though we might just as likely say, Die
and go to hell.  Beauty or hell. No difference. The bell would ring soon.





With thanks to "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks

There was love and there was trees.
Either you could stay inside and probe your emotions
or you could go outside and keenly observe nature.
Describe the sheen on carapaces,
the effect of breeze on grass.

What's the fag doing now? Dad would say.
Picking the nose of his heart?
Wanking off on a daffodil?

He's not homosexual, Mom would retort, using her apron as a potholder to
    remove the apple brown betty from the oven.
He's sensitive. He cares.
He wishes to impart values and standards to an indifferent world.

Wow! said Dad, stomping off to the pantry for another scotch. Two poets in
the family. Ain't I a lucky duck?

As fate would have it, I became one of your tweedy English teachers, what
    Dad would call a daffodil-wanker,
and Mom ended up doing needlepoint, seventy-two kneelers for St. Fred's
    before she expired of the heart broken on the afternoon that Dad
    roared off with the Hell's Angels.
We heard a little from Big Sur. A beard. Tattoos. A girlfriend named Strawberry.
    A boyfriend named Thor. 
Bars and pot and coffeehouses, stuff like that.

After years of quotation by younger poets, admiration but no real notice,
Dad is making the anthologies now.
Critics cite his primal rage, the way he nails Winnetka.

On nights like this, she sleeps with the car’s jack handle
            in her hand, the smell of oil and metal oddly comforting
in such a public place. She keeps her clothes

in a cardboard box on the ’54 Chevy’s back seat,
            along with a green wool blanket, two towels, a bag
of books. And tonight she piles blouses, blue jeans,

sweater, skirt—all of it—on top of her body, hunkering
            down low on the front seat. She’s parked beneath
the brightest overhanging street light she could find

at the edge of this shopping mall parking lot, slammed
            the door locks down tight. Tomorrow, she’ll drive
across town, tell a pack of lies to a do-gooder doctor.

She’ll lie about her name, her address, her age—
            she’ll invent a husband. After the impossible
calendar questions, the awkward, back-opening

gown, the cold feet in iron stirrups, the knees
            spreading, the gloved hand pressing, the fingers
probing—the earnest-faced doctor will tell her

(while pulling gloves off, while tossing them
            into a gray metal bin), will tell her: yes. A baby
is arriving in late August—as if

she should expect a visitor, maybe stepping off
            the Greyhound bus, suitcase in hand—
and she remembers how her grandmother would call

her period the unwelcome visitor, how she’d say
            the only thing worse than the monthly visitor
is no visitor at all. The doctor will say everything

looks fine. He’ll say No charge for today. He’ll smile a little,
            shake her hand. The best he can do.
Then he’ll leave her alone in that white, white room

and she’ll button up her wrinkled work uniform, slip out
            onto the street, and make her way back
to the shopping mall to work the snack bar’s sorry

evening shift, serving coffee, burgers and fries to bored
            store clerks and tired housewives. Soon, like everyone else,
her high school principal will notice the swelling arc

of her belly, and he’ll call her into his windowless office,
            sit her down on a metal chair, and recite
district policy excluding pregnant students

from attending school. He will insist
            it’s for her own good. The girl will say he’s wrong.
She’ll say she’s not pregnant at all. He’ll call in

the kind, freckled woman who teaches history, and the girl
            will deny it again. She’ll deny it
over and over—to all of them—determined to hold them off

until graduation in June. Spring will be long, and filled with rain.
            But tonight, large flakes of snow hover in the light
and she thinks of her mother, scrambling toward the promise

of a job—her mother and the five younger kids, sleeping
            600 miles away on the floor of a rented house in a warm
desert town this girl has never seen, and she starts the car, lets it run

a few minutes with heater on and the urgency
            of Grace Slick’s “Somebody to Love” on the radio,
and she pulls the blanket close around her shoulders, imagines

the dense, pressed asphalt under the car, and the ancient
            earth beneath the asphalt, and she watches
the snow grow heavy, pile up, darkening.

An act can be many things at once. 
We can be deliverers or takers both.

Was he saying thank you to the airbags, 
thank you to the chassis for its metal

promise to stop the impact short of 
breath and body and the bureaucracy

of the outside world. Praising all of it 
today. Praising the collision recalculated

that it could have been worse. Where 
is poetry if it is not at the base of

the wreck. Rich said it clearly. So clear 
we could see the ocean’s bottom

as if the glass had been emptied out 
from one last sip. My son and then

my other son and then the one 
who knows what I’m talking about. 

What if I say I want this poem to bless 
you, the reader. Will you take it? Will

you trust that it, line by line, truly 
means to protest harm, means well?

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.

The fire-eater and twirler
had the beach crowd glued
until a few boys lit 
fireworks that exploded 
shimmering over everybody.  

Nothing could divert 
the crowd faster
than fireworks 
booming and sprinkling 
over earth. I did not 

try to read a poem
about passion bursting
like a geyser. 
I did not
have a microphone, 

or audience,
or fireworks.

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. 

I cup my ear to your chest and 
wait for a wind chime, 
but man does it sound oily in there. 
So it is. Deep-fried, a clucking shame. 
Poor Randall Butterbean: a bird between lucks. 
But isn’t this fine? Isn’t it swell? 
Wouldn’t you rather be kettle-cooked than smeared under a 
rain boot? 
Sidewalk paté, some years later, with no pension to speak of? 
Don’t worry, my chicken— 
for the vigil, I’ve hired the best 
one-man-cockroach-band money can buy! 
              (So the talent is thin, so what? 
You know how cars pile up in the desert.) 
Anyway.         Cockroach maestro, 
won’t you sing our sweet boy downstream? 
Do you think he quivered/ 
Do you think he bled/ 
Wings pinned down/ 
To a hospital bed/ 
Did Jesus pass him/ 
In a white Ferrari/ 
Or did his heart just go              POP!

^{—after Edna St. Vincent Millay}

I.   
I forget there were good things, too— 
Revere Beach and feeding seagulls soggy french fries,  
watching them plunge into the sand, then emerge,  
the red spot of their beaks mistaken for ketchup. 

II. 
Beauty intercepts the drive home. The sky  
beckons with its clouds the shape of a ribcage  
opening upward. Another is a honeycomb.  
Imagine being brushed by the air enough times. 
Imagine you’re unrecognizable.

What if I told you he wasn’t that bad? 
That you couldn’t smell it on his breath 
after all, & that he wasn’t one of the loud ones 
the way he is in all my poems? Not at all 
like the viral headlines made him seem? What if 
I told you he smiled in PTA meetings & never spoke first? 
That he sat on the sidelines at little league games 
& laughed with other parents? That he loves to sink 
his soft hands into soil & clip the crisped 
edges of dog-tongue rhododendron leaves because 
they make him feel small? What if I told you 
he sits in church basements with other white-whiskered 
men to talk about how proud they all are of their 
gay sons? & the whirling manic I cartoon him to be 
in line at the rehab hospital, or barking through 
car windows with an open Sauv Blanc bottle 
cinched between his khakis—what if I said 
that was all mostly for me?

There was no achievement
In | the airfield |. The airfield was
Our wedding. No, it was our house
Become our | plane |.

I collected the intensifiers of lightning
And | circled | them around me.
I named my seven sons
And then blew up their phones.

The baby has learned the language of desire
And what it means | to possess |. For outside
He says | my outside |. For down, he says
My down. Not inside, but outside. No. No.

| No |. The baby has learned the language of mirrors.
Self-reflected, re-embodied, and un-hinged.
What does | a baby | look like to a baby?
Hot and dark. Hot and dark.

Apple as | an apple | as an apple as a substance.
Say night night to this one.
Say night night to everyone.
Say goodbye to whoever is not in the room.

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.

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying; 
My dog and I are old, too old for roving. 
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying, 
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving. 
I take the book and gather to the fire, 
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute 
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire, 
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet. 
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander 
Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys 
Ever again, nor share the battle yonder 
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies. 
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers 
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers. 
Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power, 
The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace, 
Summer of man its sunlight and its flower, 
Spring-time of man all April in a face. 
Only, as in the jostling in the Strand, 
Where the mob thrusts or loiters or is loud, 
The beggar with the saucer in his hand 
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd, 
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion, 
Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march, 
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion, 
Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch. 
Give me but these, and, though the darkness close, 
Even the night will blossom as the rose.