To be a good
ex/current friend for R. To be one last

inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship
advice for L. To be advice

for my mother. To be a more comfortable
hospital bed for my mother. To be

no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,
America for my uncle, who wants to be China

for me. To be a country of trafficless roads
& a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go

fast. To be a cyclone
of laughter when my parents say

their new coworker is like that, they can tell
because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t,

can’t be one of them. To be the one
my parents raised me to be—

a season from the planet
of planet-sized storms.

To be a backpack of PB&J & every
thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming

their own storms. To be, for me, nobody,
homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D

& be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars,
simple decoration for the new apartment

with you. To be close, J.,
to everything that is close to you—

blue blanket, red cup, green shoes
with pink laces.

To be the blue & the red.
The green, the hot pink.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly 

Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly 

actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly 

honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently 

initially Things got ugly ironically usually 

awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully 

occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly 

quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully 

infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially 

frequently unfortunately Things got ugly 

increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly

embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly 

regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly 

ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully 

with design by Anthony Cody 

As he holds his wife’s hand, the nurse tells him to
breathe. He will be a good father. He 
could be. His wife tows a boat on land with her teeth. 
Don’t worry. Good father. Breathe. Later,
everyone smiles when he jogs with the stroller. He 
feigns interest in ponies. He pushes a swing and his daughter
giggles. He applies sunblock, and 
helps warm the bottle, and he is
inducted into the fatherly hall of fame. He 
jumps on the trampoline, and the chorus sings Good Father. He wipes
ketchup off her cheek at the zoo, and the old women 
laud. He is told he is a new breed of
man. Evolved. His knuckles just barely or
never scraping the ground. He hugs
often enough, packs her lunch, and the crowd 
pours on the applause. He lays her down for 
quiet time. It goes somewhat well. 
Rejoice, the people shout, for here is a
saint, as he lifts diapers to the conveyor belt.
Truthfully, he feels slightly
unwell. A bowl of plastic fruit is pretty, but 
vaguely toxic. He sleeps fine
without a mouth affixed to his chest. His bottle of
Xanax is half full. The nurse says,
You will be a good father. He jogs with the stroller. He reaches the
zenith of a very small hill. 

What is home: 
it is the shade of trees on my way to school
    before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding 
    photo before the walls crumbled. 
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants
   slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and 
   put in a museum. 
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and 
   roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house 
   to ashes. 
It is the café where I watched football matches
   and played—

My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold
   all of these? 

The seed is a wound in the form of a little girl buried alive. Buried inside me the sol de la terre. What do I remember of last night’s dream, that the children were painting a mural that spread beyond the surface of the wall. There was a blue spirit a benevolent ghost with no eyes that hung over the children like a cloud reaching out its arms. Did the image fatigue me? I was fatigued by everything. There were space chairs facing the walls and I kept falling asleep. 

Cry at my library carrel. Cry when I step off the bus. A crystal-clear sky over midtown and I no longer have the energy (will?) to masticate subjective experience. Wrote nothing about the breakup. It’s as though nothing actually happens to me. 

I wanted a quiet life—to keep the casket. They don’t even notice I’m half-here, while the other half lives in the crypt. Go down to the grotto with your headlamp and crowbar. Release the girl lost and afraid. I’m not here. No one touches her. Reserve a little for myself. To self-witness. But what’s become of my mind there is no world. What did I want to say to him—that there’s a crypt-shaped seed I show to no one: it is my fate. The impossibility of making a day, leaking one’s soul for want of an angel. The night was forever. And pearls of light rained down on me I lost myself in the lonely expedition toward the center of everything I would become: nothing there’s no time but love was a thing hanging in the air at night when I’d stalk the streets with my heart in my mouth. 

Bury my heart in the haute mer. Find me not I’ve flushed it to spare myself the humiliation of being seen. She’s nowhere to be found or maybe there’s a casket bobbing on the ocean with a note inside that says, “The secret to survival is to disappear.”

imagine a tulip, upon seeing a garden full of tulips, sheds its petals in disgust, prays some bee will bring its pollen to a rose bush. imagine shadows longing for a room with light in every direction. you look in the mirror & see a man you refuse to love. small child sleeping near Clorox, dreaming of soap suds & milk, if no one has told you, you are a beautiful & lovable & black & enough & so—you pretty you—am i.

Sometimes you don’t die

when you’re supposed to

& now I have a choice

repair a world or build

a new one inside my body

a white door opens

into a place queerly brimming

gold light so velvet-gold

it is like the world

hasn’t happened

when I call out

all my friends are there

everyone we love

is still alive gathered

at the lakeside

like constellations

my honeyed kin

honeyed light

beneath the sky

a garden blue stalks

white buds the moon’s

marble glow the fire

distant & flickering

the body whole bright-

winged brimming

with the hours

of the day beautiful

nameless planet. Oh

friends, my friends—

bloom how you must, wild

until we are free.