these are my people & I find
them on the street & shadow
through any wild all wild
my people my people
a dance of strangers in my blood
the old woman’s sari dissolving to wind
bindi a new moon on her forehead
I claim her my kin & sew
the star of her to my breast
the toddler dangling from stroller
hair a fountain of dandelion seed
at the bakery I claim them too
the Sikh uncle at the airport
who apologizes for the pat
down the Muslim man who abandons
his car at the traffic light drops
to his knees at the call of the Azan
& the Muslim man who drinks
good whiskey at the start of maghrib
the lone khala at the park
pairing her kurta with crocs
my people my people I can’t be lost
when I see you my compass
is brown & gold & blood
my compass a Muslim teenager
snapback & high-tops gracing
the subway platform
Mashallah I claim them all
my country is made
in my people’s image
if they come for you they
come for me too in the dead
of winter a flock of
aunties step out on the sand
their dupattas turn to ocean
a colony of uncles grind their palms
& a thousand jasmines bell the air
my people I follow you like constellations
we hear glass smashing the street
& the nights opening dark
our names this country’s wood
for the fire my people my people
the long years we’ve survived the long
years yet to come I see you map
my sky the light your lantern long
ahead & I follow I follow

on my block, a gate
on my block, a tree smelling

of citrus & jasmine that knocks
me back into the arms of my dead

mother. i ask Ross how can a tree
be both jasmine & orange, on my block

my neighbors put up gates & stare
don’t like to share, on my block

a tree I can’t see, but can smell
a tree that can’t be both but is

on my block, my mother’s skirt twirls
& all i smell is her ghost, perfume

on my block, a fallen orange
smashed into sidewalk

it’s blood pulped on asphalt on my
block, Jordan hands me a jasmine

by the time i get home
all its petals are gone

I remember the boys & their open hands. High fives

of farewell. I remember that the birches waved too,

the white jagged limbs turning away from incessant wildfires.

The future wavered, unlike a question, unlike

a hand or headstone. The future moved & the fields already knew it.

I remember the war of the alphabet, its ears sliced from its face. I

know that language asks for blood.

The children of kudzu, lilac, the spit of unknown rivers. I remember the jury

& the judge of the people. The buckshot that blew

the morning’s torso into smoke.

That last morning I begged the grandmothers to leave their rage next to red candles

& worn photographs of their children & their blue-eyed grandson

with his bleeding heart. The savior bled flowers.

I scattered the stones the trees bore. Gray vultures came for my children.

They knew the old country better than me. They broke through

skyscrapers & devoured both villain & hero.

& boys were pouring, wanted & unwanted & missing yet from the long mouth

where their voices were forced to say they were nothing. But they were men, invisible

& native & guilty beyond their glottal doubt.

I remember calling out to the savage field where more boys knelt & swung

through the air. I remember how their eyes rolled back

in blood, milk, & gasoline. Their white teeth

chewing cotton into shrouds, scars & sheets.

They gave me their last words. They gave me smiles for their fathers.

They slept in my arms, dead & bruised. Long as brambles.

The bullets in their heads & groins

quieting like a day. The meat of nothing.

I held their million heads in my lap when the bodies were taken away.

I don’t know if what’s left will dance or burn.

I wash their eyelids with mint.

But let God beg pardon to them & their mothers

& I don’t know if the body is a pendulum of where love cannot go

when the tongue is swollen with the milk of black boys.

I pulled their lives from the trees & lawns & schools.

The unlit houses & the river. Their forewings wet

with clouds

& screaming. I won’t leave them,

huddled like bulls inside the stall of a word. I am the shriek,

the suture, the petal

shook loose from their silence.

Not hers but mine. Not hers ever again. Ever

hers, my body pulled through, two

long windows open in the dark of birth,

the gold cord raised too in its wake. Awake,

the first morning. The first morning & all,

all the windows were closed inside. A blindness

scalding broken sight. The silence pulled through

my nostrils & veins, the ether of air failing

flesh. I get up from the shape I once was

& open the white blinds in my brother's house.

The light is specific. It is the 29th morning

of July. Last night they dragged me howling from her

body in the room. The room had a name,

number 3315, in the cardiac wing. In the room

I saw her winged shape leave, rise, forgive the

vessel that fled her. Now mine or ours, I

stare in the mirror while everyone sleeps

the aggrieved sleep of the living. Behind my eyes

a dead woman looks back at me with no trace

of recognition. I say 'Mother' & my own

feral mouth opens. Closes without any light.

^{Mudslide in Rio de Janeiro state...: in the early hours of Saturday, following two days of heavy downpour. A boulder slid down a slope and hit a group of houses in the city of Niterói. Volunteers joined rescuers in silence so that any survivors could be heard.
                       —BBC News, November 11, 2018}

It's as if the marrow of the earth mistook us
for part of itself, our limbs its own settling

form, like we have sunk into chairs and taken as us
our tight-tucked legs, our bellies. Or known the settling

head of our daughter to sternum as an uncleaved us,
one sleeping self inside a woken self. The settling

mud around, its heave, seems simple now: is softening us
into dense dark shape, and we are settling

our gauges too: voice from volume, sediment, shadow, us
from the spaces we lived. Silence settling

who we thought we were, was us,
into this all-consuming lack. Nothing settling

a choke around the circumference of light, drawing us
in. We no longer know if our eyes are open, only settling:

(where our daughter sank her pillow—her hair—and us
somewhere too), though we're yielding there to this, settling

aphotic loss, how we once lived what we could bear: us,
her, no more. Now there is weight so true, a settling

so whole, we could die in its lightness: it exiles us
to formless terror—no blanket, no bed, but settling.

If we could remember that once a throat was us
inside a body. Only: here, or here, inside this settling,

a hint of shade, almost like memory: the sound of us. 
If we could just know again our mouths. We 

could part the earth with our voices, ask to be heard.

            on Gustav Klimt’s painting, 1907-1908

Do you really think if you bend
me, I will love you? You
crack my chin up, your hands
brown pigeons scheming reunion

at my cheek and temple, your jaw
cragged at the end of your thick neck
of longing. I claw onto you
as the only tree here, your

swing. I’m mad for gravity though
I’m bound, diagonally, to
you. Let me. Push from your trunk towards
the edge and my freedom. Leave me

to wither while moss weeps
in the corners, our halo liquid
as yolk, waving from our bodies’ heat,
our divinity melting. My dress

blossoms loudly. You are still
wrestling me closer. If only I could
release to you my mouth just this
once and you would leave me,

but the shadows of your robe are
so haphazard. I know you will try
to smother me again. The poppies scratch. My feet
reach beyond spring.

None of this had to happen.
Not Florida. Not the ibis’s beak. Not water.
Not the horseshoe crab’s empty body and not the living starfish.
Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely.
The asteroid might have missed.
The seams of limestone need not have been susceptible to sand and mangroves.
The radio might have found a different music.
The hips of one man and the hips of another might have stood beside
each other on a bus in Aleppo and recognized themselves as long-lost brothers.
The key could have broken off in the lock and the nail-can refused its lid.
I might have been the fish the brown pelican swallowed.
You might have been the way the moon kept not setting long after we thought it would,
long after the sun was catching inside the low wave curls coming in
at a certain angle. The light might not have been eaten again by its moving.
If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief
of what hasn’t changed yet. Across the world a man pulls a woman from the water
from which the leapt-from overfilled boat has entirely vanished.
From the water pulls one child, another. Both are living and both will continue to live.
This did not have to happen. No part of this had to happen.

—2016

My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger

are now,
each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.

When I danced,
you danced.
When you broke,
I.

And so it was lying down,
walking,
climbing the tiring stairs.
Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you,
what is left of you,
will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone's arthritis,
cracked harp of ribcage,
blunt of heel,
opened bowl of the skull,
twin platters of pelvis—
each of you will leave me behind,
at last serene.

What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?

You who held me all my life
inside your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all.

—2013

Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then
They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head
Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly
The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away
Beside which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys
Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.
The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they
Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school
And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.
The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.
The head called to the body. The body to the head.
They missed each other. The missing grew large between them,
Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until
The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies
Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills.
Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,
Sang long and low until the morning light came up over
The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped....
The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named
The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after
The night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair
Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit.
The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night
She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn
Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke
To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang
Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats.
She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily
That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming
Made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn,
And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat
Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm
Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain
Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone
Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called
To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called
And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling
Like the feeling of the stones gouging the soft undersides
Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body
By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles
At the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head
Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take
These things away so that the girl would not see them.
They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.
They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear
Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke....
But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have
Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they
Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,
Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.
What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already
Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know
Was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them,
Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,
Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

My father said I could not do it,
but all night I picked the peaches.
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.
How many ladders to gather an orchard?
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering
and those who had gathered before me.
I put the peaches in the pond’s cold water,
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,
all night my back a straight road to the sky.
And then out of its own goodness, out
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
just after it has been rung, before the metal
begins to long again for the clapper’s stroke.
The light came over the orchard.
The canals were silver and then were not.
and the pond was—I could see as I laid
the last peach in the water—full of fish and eyes.

      What was the experience of death like for you? 

The fluids within my body failed to be held within my body, which, as far as I can tell, does not entirely differ from some experiences of life, 

      At what moment did you know there was an existence beyond earth? 

as when, for example, I lay beneath another’s beautiful body of my own free will for the first time and learned in one of those staggering moments that I had hairs within my nostrils, 

      How did you feel? 

because they stood on end, as if confused by which hole was meant to receive the body that was on top of me, 

      Were you met by anyone? 

rapt into confusion. I once got to see inside of my own lower abdomen. Did you know there is a galaxy there? I have photographs to prove it.

      What things in our world still attract you most? 

My veins make azalea roots that teem with messages. There are lights whose names I don’t know. Malignancies are moons. There’s gold on the ocean shores. Planets made of other planets, growing into one another to rewrite the old rules about space and about time. I saw it all, through the eye within the eye. Someday, I’ll show you.

      What would you like to clarify for our world about your life? 

Daily existence, mine included, was nothing short of improbable. 

      Do you wish to return again? 

Foucault once wrote, “The venomous heart of things and men is, at bottom, what I’ve always tried to expose.” 

      Is there a message you would like to give to our world? 

Rilke once wrote, “You must change your life.” 

      Is there anything that you wouldn’t mind saying that would help assure your friends that you are you? 

Whatever I have loved, I have taken its name in vain.

The Cry violet, or the Viola cryana. Its purple blooms drew the fingers of lovers and of botanists. It grew in the kinds of rocks we have that are made of skeletons of marine organisms, like mollusks, which are small tender muscles housed in curved shells. We said we needed the rocks for our own homes. They died.

The unnamed flowers in The Rolling Stones song “Dead Flowers.” They grew from the sadness and grief of the singers. They spilled out of Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richards’s mailboxes every morning. They were born singed and curled. They died before the guitars were first plucked.

The daisies, or the Bellis perennis, that sheath Brigitte Bardot’s chest in Plucking the Daisy. They began to die when they were first cut, kept dying as the costume designer sewed them into a bralette, and starved while touching her nipples and the cleft between her breasts. In dying, they taught me about some of my hungers.  

The Maui hau kuahiwi, or Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, of the family of mallows. The murderers came to the island on ships launched from colder seas. Soon, little was left of the lava or the rocks that lava cools into, and nothing was left of the flowers. In the future, there will be a way to conjure the ghosts of these flowers’ smells.

Aside from going to the lab where the scientists create the scents of some dead flowers, or the installations the artists made with the scientists so that many can stand together and feel time and space blossoming, there are other things we can do.

For example, we can imagine. We look at photographs—like “Tree with daffodils” and “Flying insect with flowers,” which we’re sending to you—and watercolor within and outside of their lines to see them in another color, with another shape of petal or an extra stamen. We can dream ourselves into the most plentiful rocks and soils.

The trouble is that the human imagination, we’ve learned, can kill more easily than it can resurrect. 
 

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

Inhabitant of earth for forty something years
I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open

their phones to watch
a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When a man reaches for his wallet, the cop
shoots. Into the car window. Shoots.

It is a peaceful country.

We pocket our phones and go.
To the dentist,
to buy shampoo,
pick up the children from school,
get basil.

Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement
for hours.

We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.

We watch. Watch
others watch.

The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy.

It is a peaceful country.

And it clips our citizens’ bodies
effortlessly, the way the President’s wife trims her toenails.

All of us
still have to do the hard work of dentist appointments,
of remembering to make
a summer salad: basil, tomatoes, it is a joy, tomatoes, add a little salt.

This is a time of peace.

I do not hear gunshots,
but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky
as the avenue spins on its axis.
How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.

On the beach and the beach in Chicago means a more urban situation than I’ve ever
held two children played in sand or I dreamt I was in Malden, seeing what Malden
was, to feel there. I was overweight and swimming in my body. There were other
children in the neighborhood I spent time with each day. We would go in a pack to
the corner store to buy candy. My favorites were a goop I squeezed from a tube and
pastel yellow and blue droplets in a grid on wax. I missed my father. I ate wax in my
impatience. We smashed dry ramen noodles with our hands while the bag was still
closed. We were sealed with the moment. Not looking down from above, not some
feet out ahead but flush with perception. In each music, a trace. My uncle owned a
photography shop near Les Cayes, where he developed film and made shirts and mugs
with people’s faces on them. When he shot himself, no one explained why someone
might do that. Where does anyone get their inspiration? In writer’s block, deep mind
tries to keep surface mind safe, which creates a mutating form of hunger. Something
around the corner. The changeable velocities of thought break barrier. I will not run
until it’s time. My uncle’s mother, the day he died, had heard of his male lover. My
uncle and his wife had just married. They’d conceived a child. My uncle transferred
his remaining funds into his eldest son’s bank account. The present moment can be
your mother, whether or not your mother was trying to hurt you. In Malden, on the
hood of Bob’s car out in front of the house, the phenomenon of clouds moved me.
Decades later, in front of a mirror, I see my body for the first time. A tension behind
my eyes passes, as if my reflection had been made of clay and someone pushed it
into a shape I could see and understand.

You are a human being at the club. Driving, texting. You are a nurse in Vegas and enjoyed it. Who are you? What your name is up in the bathroom? The black body routine in front of the mirror, the voice of Eartha Kitt. There’s no races, class, style, refinement, eye contact, elegance, and glamour can get you anywhere. About being an animal lover but also to hunt. In her living room, on TV, someone, a bus driver who saved someone. People eating around a body. Be more in touch with the body. The wind and body are no longer distinct. The body-mind look straight ahead when walking down the street. A voice can speak for herself. She can say no and doesn’t speak for others. How powerful people act? They erect. Powerless people make themselves small. It’s a good idea to try to come across as more powerful lol am I ever gonna see you again or just texts. You’re gonna cry when I’m gone / and it won’t be long. Since feelings are physiology I feel touched and I’m crying in the club. Keep in touch. How are people responding to you? As you change.

everything that made you
ends here.
the first sound
of your whole life
ebbs and dips
in a green line burned
across your last hope;
a stream of black bile
sighs at the quick of her mouth.
the anchor of your faith
has come undone
from the ankles bare
under the sheet,
your body’s mirror
a window onto backlight.
all the laying on of hands
becomes a gnashing of teeth,
your uncle’s hand
a flag to the alarms
a do not resuscitate,
the halt of padding feet.
how startled the last breath.
how surprising the relief.
afterthought of your arms
awake keeping your brother
from falling into dust;
here; hold him, hold him up;
as she held him—hold him;
though it's not enough,
hold him, in the chasm
of the last room
on the longest night,
her brother weeps
into the wall.
hold.

^{John Keene, in an interview with Tonya Foster in Bomb Magazine, Fall 2015, posits “[c]apitalism being the quintessence of reason, in one way, and of unreason, in another,” and speaks, later, of “the victims of unreason…”}

Until they’re all converted, every block has a skinny white lady of indeterminate age with an underbite and a cigarette in her right hand swinging as she makes her way down the block. Sometimes this lady organizes the trash in the courtyard in the middle of the night into neat bundles of bulk, bags and recycling. Sometimes this lady screams through the wall that you’re a whore and he’s a faggot or mumbles under her breath when you pass her in the hallway, the street, the bodega. She wears the same small blue jacket and gray hoodie all winter, face the very image of the moon in Le voyage dans la Lune, space capsule in her

eye. Until they’re replaced,” she may or may not have children, who may or may not be bigger than her, may or may not be wholly or partially white, who indicate some sort of dalliance with boundaries she seems loathe to cross, at least socially, now, and they may or may not also smoke cigarettes, organize the trash or clean the sidewalk, or mumble beneath their breath when you pass. None of them is the super or the super’s family or in any way connected with anything official like the super, but they keep the building, and it’s environs, clean, and for this they earn a begrudging respect from their neighbors, until they are gone.

Until the buildings are all filled with white people who have money to spend at cafés and wine bars, and for a little while thereafter, there is, on every block, a black man dressed for all seasons in a camel hair coat, hat with ear flaps, and tattered leather gloves who paces the street speaking to no one In particular in a language no one the neighborhood understands; not Arabic, Spanish, Nahuatl, or English. This man may or may not have a small white dog he pushes in a stroller, he may or may not pull a toddler out of the path of an oncoming car; the ambulance may or may not call at his door repeatedly, the health department may or may

not issue repeated summons. Until they are gone, the people of the block will feed him from the block party proceeds, and the bodega will make of him an honored guest; he may or may not carry a boombox or plastic bag he uses to pick up detritus of the night’s garbage wind and under snow melt remainings. Until he is displaced, he may or may not have a house or apartment, space which is only entered by him, his shopping cart and himself alone, and when he approaches his own threshold his shouts and cries turn to low and coarse offerings at keyholes, punic columns of books in a foyer of grime, until they are gone.

I hear the sound of the sprinkler outside, not the soft kind we used to run through
but the hard kind that whips in one direction then cranks back and starts again.

Last night we planned to find the white argument of the Milky Way 
but we are twenty years too late. Last night I cut the last stargazer 
lily to wear in my hair. 

This morning, the hardest geography quiz I’ve ever taken: how does one carry
oneself from mountain to lake to desert without leaving anything behind?

Perhaps I ought to have worked harder. 
Perhaps I could have paid more attention.
A mountain I didn’t climb. Music I yearned for but could not achieve.

I travel without maps, free-style my scripture, pretend the sky is an adequate
representation of my spiritual beliefs. 

The sprinkler switches off. The grass will be wet. 
I haven’t even gotten to page 2 of my life and I’m probably more than halfway through,
who knows what kind of creature I will become.

What new name will you bear in a world governed by code and calculation

What program will reveal the ratio between communal identities and the loss of the body

You are not known or pronounced

Your nonce nonchalance does not convince

Your scores are neither high enough to qualify, nor deep enough to be legible, nor detailed enough to play from

Custodian of nothing, childless, rude and startled

So many scintillating shards or conversations when things shatter

Savagely unbodied by the microscopic architecture of psalmless palm

Drawn means tired or created or a naked sword or tied up and torn asunder

It’s not loving someone who can’t love you back, but the end of loving them that’s the saddest

Now emotional intimacy has tech, yoga has tech, sex has tech, even tech has tech

You don’t even know what day it is, what the weather is like or where you’re supposed to be next

Let yourself be found like water through rocks, you are what’s lost, you are the pool collecting in the ground

Speak now speak always speak in the long undrawn colloquy of night

You rode your bike from your house on the corner to the dead end of the street, and turned it around at the factory, back to the corner again. This was the loop your mother let you ride, not along the avenue with its cavalcade of trucks, or up the block where Drac the Dropout waited to plunge his pointy incisors into virginal necks. You can’t remember exactly your age, but you probably had a bike with a banana seat, and wore cutoff jeans and sweat socks to the knees. You are trying to be precise but everything is a carbon-like surface that scrolls by with pinpricks emitting memory’s wavy threads. One is blindingly bright and lasts only seconds: You are riding your bike and the shadowy blots behind the factory windows’ steel grates emit sounds that reach and wrap around you like a type of gravity that pulls down the face. You can’t see them but what they say is what men say all day long, to women who are trying to get somewhere. It’s not something you hadn’t heard before. But until then, you only had your ass grabbed by boys your own age—boys you knew, who you could name—in a daily playground game in which teachers looked away. In another pin prick, you loop back to your house, where your mother is standing on the corner talking to neighbors. You tell her what the men said, and ask, does this mean I’m beautiful? What did she say? Try remembering: You are standing on the corner with your mother. You are standing on the corner. This pinprick emits no light; it is dark, it is her silence. Someday you will have a daughter and the dead end will become a cul de sac and all the factories will be shut down or at the edges of town, and the men behind screens will be monitored, blocked. And when things seem safe, and everything is green and historic and homey, you will let her walk from school to park, where you’ll wait for her, thanks to a flexible schedule, on the corner. And when she walks daydreaming along the way and takes too long to reach you, the words they said will hang from the tree you wait under.

She tosses a bolt of fabric into the air. Hill country, prairie, a horse trots there. I say three yards, and her eyes say more: What you need is guidance, a hand that can zip a scissor through cloth. What you need is a picture of what you’ve lost. To double the width against the window for the gathering, consider where you sit in the morning. Transparency’s appealing, except it blinds us before day’s begun. How I long to captain that table, to return in a beautiful accent a customer's request. My mother kneeled down against her client and cut threads from buttons with her teeth, inquiring with a finger in the band if it cut into the waist. Or pulled a hem down to a calf to cool a husband’s collar. I can see this in my sleep and among notions. My bed was inches from the sewing machine, a dress on the chair forever weeping its luminescent frays. Sleep was the sound of insinuation, a zigzag to keep holes receptive. Or awakened by a backstitch balling under the foot. A needle cracking? Blood on a white suit? When my baby’s asleep I write to no one and cannot expect a response. The fit’s poor, always. No one wears it out the door. But fashions continue to fly out of magazines like girls out of windows. Sure, they are my sisters. Their machines, my own. The office from which I wave to them in their descent has uneven curtains, made with my own pink and fragile hands.

Out here the surf rewrites our silences.
This smell of ocean may never leave me;
our humble life or the sea a dark page

I am trying to turn: Today my mother’s words
sound final. And perhaps this is her first true thing.
Her hands have not been her hands

since she was twelve,
motherless and shucking whatever the sea
could offer, each day orphaned in the tide

of her own necessity—where the men-o-war
ballooned, wearing her face, her anchor of a heart
reaching, mooring for any blasted thing:

sea-roach and black-haired kelp, jeweled perch
or a drop of pearl made with her smallest self,
her night-prayers a hushed word of thanks.

But out here the salt-depths refuse tragedy.
This hand-me-down life burns sufficiently tragic—
here what was cannibal masters the colonial

curse, carved our own language of the macabre,
sucking on the thumb of our own disparity. Holding
her spliff in the wind, she probes and squalls,

trying to remember the face of her own mother,
our island or some strange word she once found
amongst the filth of sailors whose beds she made,

whose shoes she shined, whose guns
she cleaned, while the white bullet of America
ricocheted in her brain. Still that face she can’t recall

made her chew her fingernails, scratch the day down
to its blood, the rusty sunset of this wonder,
this smashed archipelago. Our wild sea-grape kingdom

overrun, gold and belonging in all its glory
to no one. How being twelve-fingered she took her father’s
fishing line to the deviation, and starved

of blood what grew savage and unwanted. Pulled
until they shriveled away, two hungry mouths
askance and blooming, reminding her

that she was still woman                    always multiplying
as life’s little nubs and dreams came bucking up
in her disjointed. How on the god-teeth

she cut this life, offered her hands and vessel
to be made wide, made purposeful,
her body opalescent with all our clamoring,

our bloodline of what once lived
and will live and live again.
In the sea’s one voice she hears her answer.

Beneath her gravid belly
my gliding hull
a conger eel.

As a girl I held the hind
legs of the small and terrified, wanted
the short-fur and the wet meat furrowing.

Wanted the soft cry of the quavering
boy at primary school, rockstone

mashed up against his tender head,
the sick milk of us poor ones sucked
clean from a Government-issued plastic bag.

At lunchtime children were lethal
and precise, a horde hurling “Ben-foot”
at she who was helpless and I

waking too-surprised to hear my own
cruel mouth taunting. Her smile some
handsome forgery of myself.

Grateful, even now,
they cannot see the bald-wire
patois of my shamdom—

Makeshift, dreaming the warmth
spent in the muscle of the living,
the girl I grew inside my head dreaming

of a real girl, dreaming.
I wanted a pearled purse so I stole it.
I wanted a real friend so I let him. Let her.

Let him. Let him. Let him.

This beauty I am eager to hoard
comes slippery on ordinary days,

comes not at all, comes never.

Yet I am a pure shelled-thing. Glistening
manmade against the wall where one
then two fingers entered

the first time,
terror dazzling the uncertainty
of pleasure. Its God as real as girlhood. 

The translucent claws of newborn mice

this pearl cast of color,

the barely perceptible

like a ghosted threshold of being:

here     not here.

The single breath we hold

on the thinnest verge of sight:

not there   there.

A curve nearly naked 

an arc of almost, 

a wisp of becoming

a wand—

tiny enough to change me.

I.

Suffrage:

In late middle English

intercessory prayers,

a series of petitions.

Not the right—but the hope.

Universal:

applicable to all cases—

except those marginalized

and unnamed.

A belief, but not a fact.

II.

In the trombone slide of history

I hear the suffer in suffragette

the uni uni uni in universal—

each excluded ikwe: women

from five hundred tribal nations

mindimooyenh or matriarchs

of ancient flourishing cultures

still disenfranchised by race,

still holding our world together

in the dusky and lawless violence

manifest in colonial america.

Twenty-six million american women

at last granted the right to vote.

Oh, marginal notes in the sweet anthem

of equality, Indigenous non-citizens

turn to the older congress of the sun

seek in the assembled stories of sky

a steady enlightenment—natural laws

(the mathematics of bending trees,

sistering of nutrients—maizebeanssquash,

or wintering wisdom of animal relatives)

each seasonal chorus colored with resilience—

earth voices rising in sacred dream songs.

Even now listen, put on the moon-scored

shell of turtle, wear this ancient armour

of belonging. In the spiral of survivance

again harvest the amber sap of trees

follow the scattered path of manoomin

the wild and good seed that grows on water.

Oh water, oh rice, oh women of birch dreams

and baskets, gather. Here reap and reseed

raise brown hands trembling holy with endurance.

Now bead land knowledge into muklaks

sign with the treaty X of exclusion.

Kiss with fingers and lips the inherited

woodland flutes and breathy cedar songs.

Say yea, eya, and yes. Here and here cast

your tended nets—oh suffered and sweetly mended

nets of abundance. This year and each to follow

choose, not by paper but by pathway, a legacy:

woman’s work—our ageless ballad of continuance.

^{Josefa Segovia was tried, convicted & hanged on July 5, 1851, in Downieville, California, for killing an Anglo miner, a man who the day before had assaulted her.}

Are the knees & elbows 

     the first knots  
 
                     the dead untie?
 
       I swing from a rope
 
                     lashed
 
       to a beam. Some men
 
along the Yuba river
 
               toss coins
 
         into the doubling water.
 
                   Visible skin.
 
            Memorable hair.
 
     Imagine: coal, plow,
 
                     rust, century.
 
                 All layers
 
         of the same palabra.
 
                                       Once
I mistook a peach pit
 
               on a white dish
 
         for a thumbprint.
 
   Wolf counselor.
 
                       Reaper.
 
             Small rock.
 
   The knot just under
 
       my right ear
 
whispers God is gracious,
 
             God will

increase. The soul,
 
                   like semen,

       escapes
 
the body
 
         swiftly.

^{boats used by African emigrants to reach Spanish islands}

A girl asleep beneath a fishing net

Sandals the color of tangerines

Off the coast of Morocco

A moonlit downpour, God's skeleton

Bark, dory, punt, skiff

"Each with a soul full of scents"

Day after day spent shaping

A ball of wax into a canary

Little lamp, little lamp

The word "contraband" arrived

In English in the 16th century via Spanish

Throw your shadow overboard

Proverbs, blessings scratched into wood

The tar of my country better than the honey of others