i’m confident that the absolute dregs of possibility for this society,
the sugary coffee mound at the bottom of this cup,
our last best hope that when our little bit of assigned plasma implodes 
it won’t go down as a green mark in the cosmic ledger,
lies in the moment when you say hello to a bus driver 
and they say it back—

when someone holds the door open for you 
and you do a little jog to meet them where they are—

walking my dog, i used to see this older man 
and whenever I said good morning, 
he replied ‘GREAT morning’—

in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other
may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether. 

when the clerk says how are you 
and i say ‘i’m blessed and highly favored’ 

i mean my toes have met sand, and wiggled in it, a lot. 
i mean i have laughed until i choked and a friend slapped my back.
i mean my niece wrote me a note: ‘you are so smart + intellajet’

i mean when we do go careening into the sun, 

i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings 
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car, 
right now! it’d just take a second—

and actually everyone who tried to keep me alive, keep me afloat, 
and if not unblemished, suitably repaired.

but I won’t feel too sad about it,
becoming a star 

After Benji Hart

1. How many hands have touched this food?
2. What were their intentions?
3. How vast is the range?
4. What makes them hands at all?
5. How many seeds survived their birth for this?
6. Did you count yourself?
7. From sprout to pluck, how many breaths old was the oldest?
8. What’s become of its homeland?
9. How many breaths will it add to yours?
10. Or is this a thing that takes?
11. Which things were born dead for this?
12. Did you count yourself?
13. Which born free?
14. Which born food?
15. Is there a state in-between?
16. How old was the well of that answer?
17. If governments and their signed scrolls are Plato’s cave wall shadows, where is the real sun?
18. What’s become of its homeland?
19. How many generations removed from the land are you?
20. What floor takes its place?
21. What is it built on top of?
22. Are the people who tended that place still alive?
23. Are there any living descendants?
24. Is their language still spoken on earth?
25. If you heard it, would your feet twitch?
26. Or does dead mean gone?
27. How many gone things in your place?
28. Did you count yourself?
29. What does your body and the day it makes cost?
30. What is its price, in gone things?
31. Is this sustainable? Better—regenerative?
32. Or will this make you the most gone thing alive?
33. Is god or the human the cave wall shadow?
34. Who says the shadow is nothing at all?
35. Are you still eating?
36. Who?
37. What for?
38. What have you grown in its place?
39. How much is enough?
40. Is enough a place or a count?
41. Is there a state in-between?
42. Or does enough mean gone?
43. Did you enough yourself?
44. In the language of the oldest gone thing, how do you say devour?

I refuse to choose
between lynch rope and gang rape
the blues is the blues!
my skin and my sex: Deep dues
I have no wish to escape

I refuse to lose
the flame of my single space
this safety I choose
between your fist and my face
between my gender and race

All black and blue news
withers the heart of my hand
and leads to abuse
no one needs to understand:
suicide wipes out the clues

Big-Time-Juicy-Fruit!
Celebrity-Rich-Hero
Rollin out the Rolls!
Proud cheatin on your (Black) wife
Loud beatin on your (white) wife

Real slime open mouth
police officer-true-creep
evil-and-uncouth
fixin to burn black people
killin the song of our sleep

Neither one of you
gets any play in my day
I know what you do
your money your guns your say
so against my pepper spray

Okay! laugh away!
I hear you and I accuse
you both: I refuse
to choose: All black and blue news
means that I hurt and I lose.

Chilocco Indian School, Oklahoma, 1922: A disciplinarian says, There is no foolishness, do everything just so… such as keep your room clean, keep yourself clean, and no speaking of your Native language.

For now I can
             just whisper 
kál’a sáw

                  the ’óx̣ox̣ox̣ 
      of your hím’ k’up’íp

wrecked at the base
                         of a century that burns

through my slow blood

/

                                 kiké’t caught

in the blink                                       silúupe

so draw the eyelids
       shut & forget the fire 
tangled among the branches

of your spine
             start where the skin meets

half an autumn
       rusting the edge of winter that is

knifing                        between me & ’iin

you & ’iim ’ee

/

boy     have you forgotten us
                                                is not what they are saying

or are they        asks another century

        how are we remembered
in our choreography
of bones?

/

mouth your birthplace          boy
without mouthing off           tim’néepe    is at the heart

or the heart of the monster
                                         or the grass blood-soaked

from the fresh kill that finally isn’t
                                                             your father

& pray héwlekce when your body is given away       says the
     orphan boy

with lashes licked into his shoulders

forget ’im’íic   because they can         tear every lip from every
     memory

                                     of your mother

/

because you are
torn & because you are
what song fills
your throat
with the color
of carved out tongue

peewsnúut & hi’lakáa’awksa
              is what is voiced in the dark
& so what does it mean
                           asks the boy

/

as the moon
glows mouth open
to the unbearable
taste of ash
blown among the stars

that the boy learned
the ghost’s trail

that milky way
is lit by the dying
brightly echoed

/

c’ewc’éewnim ’ískit
so there had to be breathing

there had to be.

Translations:
kál’a sáw—just in sudden silence
'óx̣ox̣ox̣ —sound of bones and flesh tearing
hím’ k’up’íp—sound of a mouth breaking
kiké’t—blood
silúupe—at or in the eye
’iin—I
’iim ’ee—you (with emphasis)
tim’néepe—at or in the heart, where the mind and felt emotions are housed. Also, the name
of the Nez Perce creation site, Heart of the Monster, located in Kamiah, Idaho.
héwlekce—I disappear
’im’íic—your mom [more intimate] (as opposed to your mother)
peewsnúut—without tongue, or cut tongue, or removed of one’s tongue
hi’lakáa’awksa—he, she, or it is lit all through the night
c’ewc’éewnim ’ískit—the ghost’s trail / the Milky Way

White Earth Reservation, 1938:
wigwam
peaked lodge
bark house
tipi
log house
tar-paper shack
frame house
u.s. rehabitilation house.
sister hilger
you counted each one—
seventy-one tar-paper shacks,
eight united states rehabilitation houses
two wigwams
bark houses at rice camps—
you graphed
photographed
measured dimensions
calculated cubic air space
ennumerated every construction detail—
23 with broken windows;
99 without foundations, buildings
resting on the ground;
98 with stove pipes for chimneys.
house, dwelling, place, structure—
home. Endaayaang.

June to November
the year my mother turned five,
Mary Inez you walked these lands
the fervor of your order tucked
under one billowing black-sleeved arm,
amassing details of crowded quarters,
common-law marriages, miscegenation,
illegitimate children, limited education,
economic dependence on the WPA and CCCs
for charts that have outlived
those Anishinaabeg of the
one hundred and fifty chosen families.

Now you perch in my history
at one of  71 homemade or 79 factory-made tables
sitting tall and precise on one of the 84 benches,
49 backless chairs, or 81 arm chairs,
or standing, Mary Inez, in the homes
of one of the 16 tar-paper-shack families
or 8 frame-house families
for which you record none
under the heading of chairs.

Methodically you recite
like prayers of deliverance
each prepared question:
Why are these so many
unmarried mothers on the reservation?
Why are there so many common-law
marriages on the reservation?
What do you think can be done
to stop
the drinking to intoxication among the Indians?
I hear you interrogate each family
daily gathering indulgences
or ink smudged statistics
on what you label in caps SOCIAL PROBLEMS.
Any unmarried mother in the home?
Any intoxication in the home?
So dutifully you prompt each betrayal—
Father? Mother? Son? Daughter?
and then remind yourself, in print,
in a parenthetical aside
of the unreliability of the interviewee—
(Check this information
with some outside person.)
As if anyone then or now could forget
with whom resides the authority
for your social accounting

Ah, sister, I pity you
the prickly mystery of those questions
whose answers could not be checked
nor changed
by some reliable outside person.
So confidently you asked
Would you like to leave this home?
But seventy-three per cent of the occupants
of tar-paper-shacks on White Earth Reservation
in northwestern Minnesota in 1938
said no.
No matter, you wrote, how dilapidated
and inadequate the homes were,
the tar-paper shack families
were quite unwilling to leave them.

So they were asked again
asked another way
because it was thought
knowing the alternative
might change their mind:
Would you like to move into a rehabilitation
house; one of those fine new houses
the Indian Bureau built for the Indians?
But the negative answers grew.
Fewer still would think of leaving their home.
Not thirty-five-year-old Anna,
fifty-year-old Mary,
not a widowed mother, sixty-one years of age,
living on the outskirts of one of the highway towns,
not Old Man Mink, seventy-eight years of age,
nor his wife, ten years his junior,
who agreed they liked their one-room shack,
not Mike, twenty-nine and a regular League of Nations,
nor his white wife Jane, twenty-eight,
nor their ten-year-old son.
Gaawiin. Gaawiin niwii-naganaasiin.
Like Jim, forty years of age
and Ella, thirty-eight,
they wanted to stay
in the old ramshackled, tar-paper-covered homes.

And did you hear the bullrush psalms
of Gaa-waabaabiganikaag
as you painstakingly recorded each
softly intoned explanation?
And does the land remember you
Sister Inez, of the tar-paper-shack dwellers?
As surely it remembers Mary 
who felt well acquainted with the woods,
or Anna, who believed she was living
more like the old Indian ways?
Somewhere in that rolling land of rich loam
is the adorned body of Old Man Mink
and perhaps somewhere roams the spirit
of the Midē wiwin elder who vowed
I’ll stay right here. I won’t leave here.
I’ve lived here too long.
I wonder, Mary Inez,
did your BIA-commissioned sojourn
in the land of white clay
somewhere lay its soul mark
looming crow dark
at the ruled edges of report ledgers
spilling into cautious recollection
even as the measured drip of black ink
might draw tabulations
upon white pages?

Before Minnesota winter winds
rattled the 162 full-sized, 104 half-sized,
and 47 less than half-sized unbroken windows,
before that biboon nodin blew through
those 23 houses with cardboard-covered
broken windows or blew through
your tight-lipped post-allotment spirituality
you returned to the Order of St. Benedict
and to the list of standards set out in 1935
by the National Association of Housing Officials,
those standards against which all our measurements
fall short, become sub–sub-standard, sub-human.
You left Mary Inez, the Latin Mass
and rosary zipped safely in one pocket—
the names of each Midē wiwin elder
drumming and chanting in the other.
                    

*All italicized words are taken from Sister M. Inez Hilger’s Chippewa Families: A Social Study of White Earth Reservation, 1938.

so I count my hopes: the bumblebees

are making a comeback, one snug tight

in a purple flower I passed to get to you;

your favorite color is purple but Prince’s

was orange & we both find this hard to believe;

today the park is green, we take grass for granted

the leaves chuckle around us; behind

your head a butterfly rests on a tree; it’s been

there our whole conversation; by my old apartment

was a butterfly sanctuary where I would read

& two little girls would sit next to me; you caught

a butterfly once but didn’t know what to feed it

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl

you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like

to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life.

(We are the lines we won’t cross)

Who hasn’t given up their seat to a man who says
he can’t stand to sit with his back to the door.
Who hasn’t waited, preoccupied with the thoughts of escaping
this or that war, or sweatshop, or relationship,

(To be Asian American is to be told what you deserve)

by now learning that almost all stories in life end in some type of heartbreak—
exhausted, turning your back:
and in so doing, making you vulnerable
to the combustion that is human interaction.

(Every human being alive and dead is a cautionary tale)

Before this there never was a before this, 
but if you don’t know:
many years I’ve taught myself to walk between my child,
any railing they could be tossed over,
put myself between them and, say, train tracks,
knowing others see us as moving targets in a steamed jungle 
the way my parents did for me.

(Already so many ghosts)

To be an Asian body in America is to belong nowhere.
And what people cannot hold, they push.

What if
instead of being the opposite of a trust exercise
we were made sails
our purpose: to turn our backs 
to a wind we can’t see.

Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in. I have learned to repeat these words to myself whenever I feel stuck.

Fear rustles mantras out of my body. I have risked a motherland. Why not also seduce the foreigner who implores nativity if loneliness can be broken and shared?

When Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical debuts on Broadway in April of 1968, it becomes the first production to include a nude scene with its entire cast.

Around the same time, Star Trek has popularized the phrase, Where no man has gone before.

Our bodies contain elements of outer space. So that when we’re naked we are gazing at the universe.

The night of my second panic attack, after getting released from the hospital and determined to change my mental health’s course, I dream of a nebula in the shape of an octopus, holding an astronaut in each tentacle. From my perspective, the cosmonauts feed on all my arms.

No more falsehoods or derisions. Golden living dreams of visions. Mystic crystal revelation and the mind's true liberation.

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, plurality overtakes singularity. History becomes bored by its self-referentialism. Triangles burrow into single lines. Equal signs collapse on the spikes of other equal signs.

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, we give birth to information and information delivers us. I make a fist and my fist speaks in four languages. Letters enter me and suddenly I experience flavors few before me have.

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, gender is a tree is a building is a cloud. It is anything that hasn’t been said. The truest instinct one listens to more and more.

^{Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976}

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or 
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number? 
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I 
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
                   terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I 
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
                   wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

Sometimes, I hear my house speaking
to me in small bangs, a crack here,
a crack there, sixteen years,
the stairs have got steeper, longer,
higher, or my knees have
            given in to my years that were
splintered along these looming hills.

This Pennsylvania landscape of uneven
spaces, like ghosts coming out of new
walls, these things that inhabit a home
before we sign away our lives
at the Broker’s office.
            These ghosts that followed
us after we fled the war, the war dead

we passed along Liberia’s roadways
in search of refuge, those clinging ghosts
of the dead from Soul Clinic rubber
bush Displaced Refugee Center, where
rebels executed tens of thousands
            of our own kinsfolk, mothers, fathers,
friends, neighbors, children,
whole families. Ghosts, clinging

forever, to us, as we fled, visiting, following
after all these years, to live where we
would live, like Ruth to Naomi,
   “Entreat me not to leave you,
or to turn back from following after you;
for wherever you go, I will go;
and wherever you lodge, I will lodge.

Your people shall be my people,
and your God, my God,” your country
will be my country, where you die,
we will die, again, and again, like they
killed us, we will die a million times,
buried with you, and as long as you live,
we will live, forever and forever.

In the beginning there was darkness,
then a bunch of other stuff—and lots of people.
Some things were said and loosely interpreted,

or maybe things were not communicated clearly.
Regardless—there has always been an index.
That thing about the meek—how we

shall inherit the earth; that was a promise
made in a treaty at the dawn of time
agreed upon in primordial darkness                

and documented in the spiritual record.
The nature of the agreement was thus:
The world will seemingly be pushed past capacity.

A new planet will be “discovered” 31 light-years away.   
Space travel will advance rapidly,
making the journey feasible. The ice sheets will melt.

Things will get ugly. The only way to leave
will be to buy a ticket. Tickets will be priced at exactly
the amount that can be accrued

by abandoning basic humanity.
The index will show how you came by your fortune:            
If you murdered, trafficked or exploited the vulnerable,

stole, embezzled, poisoned, cheated, swindled,
or otherwise subdued nature to come by wealth
great enough to afford passage to the new earth;

if your ancestors did these things and you’ve done nothing
to benefit from their crimes yet do nothing to atone
through returning inherited wealth to the greater good

you shall be granted passage. It was agreed.
The meek shall stay, the powerful shall leave.
And it all shall start again.

The meek shall inherit the earth,
and what shall we do with it,
but set about putting aside our meekness?