On New Year’s Eve, my father overfills the baskets with oranges,
mangoes, grapes, grapefruits, other citrus too, but mostly oranges.

The morning of the first, he opens every window to let the new year in.
In Chinatown, red bags sag with mustard greens and mandarin oranges.

A farmer in a fallow season kneels to know the dirt. More silt than soil,
he wipes his brow and mumbles to his dog: time to give up this crop of oranges.

The woman knows she let herself say too much to someone undeserving.
She lays her penance on her sister’s doorstep: a case of expensive oranges.

At the Whitney, I take a photo of a poem in a book behind the glass.
Above it, a painting: smears of blue, Frank O’Hara, his messy oranges.

The handsome server speaks with his hands: Tonight is grilled octopus
with braised fennel and olives, topped with peppercress, cara caras, and blood oranges.

No one at the table looks up, ashamed by the prices on the chic menus.
The busser fills my water and I inhale him: his faraway scent of oranges.

Seventh grade, Southern California: we monitored the daily smog alerts.
Red: stay inside. White: play outside. I forget what warning orange is.

Clutch was serious about art and said our final projects could be
whatever . . . performative . . . like, just show up with a wheelbarrow full of oranges.

Jan, in all of those first six years, why is all you can remember this:
the mist rising in the sunny air as you watched her peeling oranges.

will become a pessimist                            eventually
trying to find what’s lost                           will ransack the house
the overstayed visa                                     the recipe book
the birth certificate                                     the first passport
nowhere                                                        to be found
the immigrant                                             will travel
drive with the windows down                  stop at the rest stops
always in search                                          trying to find more
of what made you leave                             because nothing can satisfy
the first time around                                  there is something that pushed you out
this is the horrible secret                           this is the terrible secret
the immigrant always an immigrant       there is no returning

My brother was a dark-skinned boy
with a sweet tooth, a smart mouth,
and a wicked thirst. At seventeen,
when I left him for America, his voice
was staticked with approaching adulthood,
he ate everything in the house, grew
what felt like an inch a day, and wore
his favorite shirt until mom disappeared it.
Tonight I’m grateful he slaked his thirst
in another country, far from this place
where a black boy’s being calls like crosshairs
to conscienceless men with guns and conviction.

I remember my brother’s ashy knees
and legs, how many errands he ran on them
up and down roads belonging to no one
and every one. And I’m grateful
he was a boy in a country of black boys,
in the time of walks to the store
on Aunty Marge’s corner to buy contraband
sweeties and sweetdrinks with change
snuck from mom’s handbag or dad’s wallet—
how that was a black boy’s biggest transgression,
and so far from fatal it feels an un-American dream.

Tonight, I think of my brother
as a black boy’s lifeless body spins me
into something like prayer—a keening
for the boy who went down the road, then
went down fighting, then went down dead.
My brother was a boy in the time of fistfights
he couldn’t win and that couldn’t stop
him slinging his weapon tongue anyway,
was a boy who went down fighting,
and got back up wearing his black eye
like a trophy. My brother who got up,
who grew up, who got to keep growing.

Tonight I am mourning the black boys
who are not my brother and who are
my brothers. I am mourning the boys
who walk the wrong roads, which is any road
in America. Tonight I am mourning
the death warrant hate has made of their skin—
black and bursting with such ordinary
hungers and thirsts, such abundant frailty,
such constellations of possibility, our boys
who might become men if this world spared them,
if it could see them whole—boys, men, brothers—human.

The sound of quiet. The sky 
indigo, steeping 
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before 
the air troubled above 
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly 
still. I knew this was
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.

Aging bodies
wake to blue veins
that pop up
and travel like river tributaries
over paper thin skin
pocked with freckles, tags and blotches
that look like unidentified sections
of abstract art

Aging bodies 
Rise up to the chatter and 
creaking sounds of thin, porous bone
that feel like cheap metal pipes
refitting poorly into their stubborn mates

Waking up the aging body is familiar
like an attempt to turn over
the frozen engine of a used car
left out overnight
in a below zero day
in the dead of Minnesota winter  

The ache and noise of an aging body
is like a constant companion,
a highly extroverted friend 
who simply won’t shut up, 
yet is there thru it all.   

This is an ode to aging bodies
who cough and spatter and wheeze like sounds of old cars,
who drive thru the day anyway
making poetry from pock marks, skin tags, speckled hands
and remain unbothered 
by the constant twitch and crunch of bone grinding into thinning cartilage

Rather they hear this noise as music, 
a jazz riff or a smooth soul remix, 
a moan of an old-time blues band. 
Lulling the aging body back to sleep. 

If blessed and favored 
aging bodies wake up the next day 
to the twitch, crunch and chatter and of thin, porous bones 
To the pulse of blue veins 
The feel of wrinkled, sagging skin 
The sound of an old time blues band 

Calling to every aging body
to rise up
And do it all again

Everything goes
into this three-pound confessional:
oil fragrant with peanuts,
sometimes sesame, always garlic.
It can reincarnate last night’s rice
I cook down hard, until it’s evolved
into brown crunch infused
with jasmine and salt. My skillet
has gone to war, seared
steaks, downed men,
transformed flabby pork
belly into an armor of crispy
chicharrón to be dipped
in peppered vinegar or tabasco.
It has cradled so many uncarved
chickens whose caverns have housed
whole lemons sliced like cathedral
windows of sun, apple pears,
or onions like unmapped globes.
I bless the chicken
with soy sauce, coconut
vinegar and even a bit
of ginger that bites like a woman
at the peak of bliss.

This is how I get the men
to love me.

I watch them eat
in unarmed silence,
spellbound by potatoes
I’ve scalloped, then fried
in butter and shallots.
I’ve sautéed that cod
to a softness that renames
their tongues, as if eating
were a thousand
and one nights,
and they can’t move
and they wait for centuries
on their knees,
begging: Just a bit more.
Just a bit more.

^{Based on local newspaper reports
and recollections from the time.}

1929, the early days of the Great Depression.
The desert air was biting, but the spirit of the season was alive.

Despite hard times, the town of Nogales, Arizona, determined
They would host a grand Christmas party

For the children in the area—a celebration that would defy
The gloom of the year, the headlines in the paper, and winter itself.

In the heart of town, a towering Christmas tree stood,
A pine in the desert.

Its branches, they promised, would be adorned
With over 3,000 gifts. 3,000.

The thought at first was to illuminate the tree like at home,
With candles, but it was already a little dry.

Needles were beginning to contemplate jumping.
A finger along a branch made them all fall off.

People brought candles anyway. The church sent over
Some used ones, too. The grocery store sent

Some paper bags, which settled things.
Everyone knew what to do.

They filled the bags with sand from the fire station,
Put the candles in them, making a big pool of lighted luminarias.

From a distance the tree was floating in a lake of light—
Fire so normally a terror in the desert, but here so close to miracle.

For the tree itself, people brought garlands from home, garlands
Made of everything, walnuts and small gourds and flowers,

Chilies, too—the chilies themselves looking
A little like flames.

The townspeople strung them all over the beast—
It kept getting bigger, after all, with each new addition,

This curious donkey whose burden was joy.
At the end, the final touch was tinsel, tinsel everywhere, more tinsel.

Children from nearby communities were invited, and so were those
From across the border, in Nogales, Sonora, a stone’s throw away.

But there was a problem. The border.
As the festive day approached, it became painfully clear—

The children in Nogales, Sonora, would not be able to cross over.
They were, quite literally, on the wrong side of Christmas.

Determined to find a solution, the people of Nogales, Arizona,
Collaborated with Mexican authorities on the other side.

In a gesture as generous as it was bold, as happy as it was cold:
On Christmas Eve, 1929,

For a few transcendent hours,
The border moved.

Officials shifted it north, past city hall, in this way bringing
The Christmas tree within reach of children from both towns.

On Christmas Day, thousands of children—
American and Mexican, Indigenous and orphaned—

Gathered around the tree, hands outstretched,
Eyes wide, with shouting and singing both.

Gifts were passed out, candy canes were licked,
And for one day, there was no border.

When the last present had been handed out,
When the last child returned home,

The border resumed its usual place,
Separating the two towns once again.

For those few hours, however, the line in the sand disappeared.
The only thing that mattered was Christmas.

Newspapers reported no incidents that day, nothing beyond
The running of children, their pockets stuffed with candy and toys,

Milling people on both sides,
The music of so many peppermint candies being unwrapped.

On that chilly December day, the people of Nogales
Gathered and did what seemed impossible:

However quietly regarding the outside world,
They simply redrew the border.

In doing so, they brought a little more warmth to the desert winter.
On the border, on this day, they had a problem and they solved it.