“He knoweth not that the dead are there.”

In yonder halls reclining

   Are forms surpassing fair,

And brilliant lights are shining,

   But, oh! the dead are there!

There’s music, song and dance,

   There’s banishment of care,

And mirth in every glance,

   But, oh! the dead are there!

The wine cup’s sparkling glow

   Blends with the viands rare,

There’s revelry and show,

   But still, the dead are there!

‘Neath that flow of song and mirth

   Runs the current of despair,

But the simple sons of earth

   Know not the dead are there!

They’ll shudder start and tremble,

   They’ll weep in wild despair

When the solemn truth breaks on them,

   That the dead. the dead are there!

            ^{After reading a letter from his mother, Harry T. Burn cast the deciding vote to ratify the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution}

My parents are from countries

where mangoes grow wild and bold

and eagles cry the sky in arcs and dips.

America loved this bird too and made

it clutch olives and arrows. Some think

if an eaglet falls, the mother will swoop

down to catch it. It won’t. The eagle must fly

on its own accord by first testing the air-slide

over each pinfeather. Even in a letter of wind,

a mother holds so much power. After the pipping

of the egg, after the branching—an eagle is on

its own. Must make the choice on its own

no matter what its been taught. Some forget

that pound for pound, eagle feathers are stronger

than an airplane wing. And even one letter, one

vote can make the difference for every bright thing.

 ^{Upon their arrival in America, more than twelve million immigrants were processed through the Ellis Island Immigration Center. Those who had traveled in second or third class were immediately given a thirty-second health inspection to determine if they were fit to enter their new country. A chalk checkmark on their clothing signaled a health problem and meant a stay in the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital, where they either recovered or, if deemed incurable, were kept until they could be sent back home. Even if just one family member was sick, that person’s entire family was turned away.}

Hide the awkward jolt of jawline, the fluttering eye, that wide

brazen slash of boat-burned skin. Count each breath in order

to pacify the bloodless roiling just beneath the rib, to squelch

the mushrooming boom of tumor. Give fever another name.

I open my mouth, just to moan, but instead cluttered nouns,

so unAmerican, spew from my throat and become steam

in the room. That heat ripples through the meandering queue

of souls and someone who was once my uncle grows dizzy

with not looking at me. I am asked to temporarily unbutton

the clawing children from my heavy skirt, to pull the rough

linen blouse over my head and through my thick salted hair.

A last shelter thuds hard, pools around my feet on the floor.

I traveled with a whole chattering country’s restless mass

weakening my shoulders. But I offer it as both yesterday

and muscle. I come to you America, scrubbed almost clean,

but infected with memory and the bellow of broiling spices

in a long-ago kitchen. I come with a sickness insistent upon

root in my body, a sickness that may just be a frantic twist

from one life’s air to another. I ask for nothing but a home

with windows of circled arms, for a warm that overwhelms

the tangled sounds that say my name. I ask for the beaten

woman with her torch uplifted to find me here and loose

my new face of venom and virus. I have practiced standing

unleashed and clean. I have practiced the words I know.

So I pray this new country receive me, stark naked now,

forearms chapped raw, although I am ill in underneath ways.

I know that I am freakish, wildly fragrant, curious land. I stink

of seawater and the oversea moonwash I conjured to restart

and restart my migrant heart. All I can be is here, stretched

between solace and surrender, terrified of the dusty mark

that identifies me as poison in every one of the wrong ways.

I could perish here on the edge of everything. Or the chalk

mark could be a wing on my breastbone, unleashing me

in the direction of light. Someone will help me find my clothes

and brush the salt from my hair. I am marked perfect, and

I hear the word heal in a voice I thought I brought from home.

<sup>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</sup>

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.

^{what we do not dream we cannot manufacture}

Art follows ear and echo

covers/chooses

selective

eyesight searches the dust

and is surprised by love’s

apophatic blinking

what love sees in daily light

holds open color—ink, roar, melody and quiet

is its own steady gaze

to better endure bumps

“always more song to be sung” between the words

jars memory and its subatomic

moving at the speed of thought

in random thirsts rise 

name the sensations, 

to fish for breath,

combing through hair as tangled as nets, as

thick as the beat of blossoms’ 

a fine line between mind and senses spinning

in which her/my/their body becomes expert 

without waiting for unified theory,

loving the body of one’s choice and

to live so surrounded

with fewer asterisks and

more verbs and

fewer security alerts
 

there eloquence before 

and above

the grave.
 

^{*For Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor}

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired 

           She meant

                      No more turned cheek

                      No more patience for the obstruction

                      of black woman’s right to vote

                      & plant & feed her family

           She meant

                      Equality will cost you your luxurious life

                      If a Black woman can’t vote

                      If a brown baby can’t be fed

                      If we all don’t have the same opportunity America promised

           She meant

                      Ain’t no mountain boulder enough

                      to wan off a determined woman

           She meant

                      Here

           Look at my hands

                      Each palm holds a history

                      of the 16 shots that chased me

                      harm free from a plantation shack

           Look at my eyes

                      Both these are windows

                      these little lights of mine

           She meant

                      Nothing but death can stop me

                      from marching out a jail cell still a free woman

           She meant

                      Nothing but death can stop me from running for Congress

           She meant

                      No black jack beating will stop my feet from working

                      & my heart from swelling

                      & my mouth from praying

           She meant

                      America! you will learn freedom feels like

                      butter beans, potatoes & cotton seeds

                      picked by my sturdy hands

           She meant

           Look

           Victoria Gray, Anna Divine & Me

           In our rightful seats on the house floor

           She meant  

                      Until my children

                      & my children’s children

                      & they babies too

                      can March & vote

                      & get back in interest

                      what was planted

                      in this blessed land



           She meant

                      I ain’t stopping America

                      I ain’t stopping America

Not even death can take away from my woman’s hands

what I’ve rightfully earned

^{Do you know what I was, how I lived? —Louise Glück}

It is a goldfinch
one of the two
 
small girls,
both daughters
 
of a friend,
sees hit the window
 
and fall into the fern.
No one hears
 
the small thump but she,
the youngest, sees
 
the flash of gold
against the mica sky
 
as the limp feathered envelope
crumples into the green.
 
How many times
in a life will we witness
 
the very moment of death?
She wants a box
 
and a small towel
some kind of comfort
 
for this soft body
that barely fits
 
in her palm. Its head
rolling side to side,
 
neck broke, eyes still wet
and black as seed.
 
Her sister, now at her side,
wears a dress too thin
 
for the season,
white as the winter
 
only weeks away.
She wants me to help,
 
wants a miracle.
Whatever I say now
 
I know weighs more
than the late fall’s
 
layered sky,
the jeweled leaves
 
of the maple and elm.
I know, too,
 
it is the darkest days
I’ve learned to praise —
 
the calendar packages up time,
the days shrink and fold away
 
until the new season.
We clothe, burn,
 
then bury our dead.
I know this;
 
they do not.
So we cover the bird,
 
story its flight,
imagine his beak
 
singing.
They pick the song
 
and sing it
over and over again.