^{after Bulund al-Haidari}

To the hostages of our policies, my apologies—
the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers
in the once fancy now crumbling cities
of our fading Empire lied then.
They lied then and they lie now.
Everything they say and write is a lie,
about law and freedom, about equality
and justice, in the rubble of the bombs
we make and sell, in the silent cries
of limbless orphans, in the night
lit by white phosphorous and the
relentless sound of buzzing drones.
They tell us we used to have things of
value, even things we ourselves made,
and that it was a place like no other.
All I know is that Sinbad once sailed
to Gaza and so to Gaza he’ll sail once again.

Say What?
Could you please, Pleeeeeeeeeeease repeat
Did you say: Molleta?
Prieta?
Morena?
Ohh African!
Hmmm Soy Puertorriquena
Yes, Puertorican

That I don’t look What ?
Oh, I guess I don’t look cafe con leche
mancha de plátano
Mulata,
high yellow
grifa
By the way
I did not know that there was a puertorican look.
And what exactly is that?
That I just look more what?
Well,    Y   Tu   abuela    dónde      Está?
I should say abuela, tío, Tía, y to el barrio
Let me tell you something
FOR YOUR INFORMATION
Most ricans are a mix of Africans, Spaniards, and Native Americans called
Taínos
By the way, no one has seen a Taíno in the last 500 years.
Sooooo   exactly ... You know what that means
My     English is covered with spices
spices from the Caribbean
Spices that you might find Strange
Because you were born in this cold fast food of a mall of a country
Where Spanish is a foreign word
That you are ashamed to learn

And when you try
Is not there
Only mumbles of a murmur
Susurando el olvido
A reganadientes
Pretendiendo
Escondiendo la vergüenza
You remember Puerto Rico on the 2nd Sunday of every June
When everybody is suddenly proud to be Puerto Rican
No the word is Boricua
Boricuas Here, Boricuas THERE, Boricuas everywhere
And everyone waves the flags
The flags that they don’t even understand
And no one knows why they are here
Yes HERE Now
Do you Know?
why your parents or grandparents vinieron aqui?
De que Pueblo?
Cuando te bañaste en las aguas calientes del Caribe?
Better yet
Do you really know that ...?
We all came from the Motherland
Africa
Even the Spanish people that came with Colon, Columbus
However you want to say it
Lived 700 hundred years under the Moors
You heard that right
The moors as in Arabs as in black Arabs
SO ... in other words
Not only I
But we
Have over 500 years of African mestizaje
The so called “white people” that everyone is so proud of
As in “my grandparents are from Spain
Well if they are ...
They
Too have negrITOs in them
Remember the Gitanos
But that is another story ...
Getting back to the Boricua’s   issue

What history do you know?
Ever heard of
Agüeybaná
Albizu Campos
Luis Palés Matos
Rafael Betances
Arturo Schomburg
Francisco Oller
Julia De Burgos
Rafael Hernández
Segundo Ruiz Belvís
Enrique Laguerre
Mariana Bracetti
Pedro Pietri

Still havING problems figuring me out?
Or is it that you just don’t know
Who you are?

^{After Rumi, After Terrance Hayes}

What aren’t you willing to believe. A heart  
graffitied fuchsia on the street, a missive from another life.
Remember the stem of lavender you found
in a used copy of Bishop’s poems, a verse underlined:  
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. Suddenly, across the aisle  
a woman with your mother’s bracelets, her left wrist  
all shimmer and gold, you almost winced.  
Coincidence is the great mystery of the human mind
but so is the trans-oceanic reach of Shah Rukh Khan’s  
slow blink. Each of us wants a hint, a song
that dares us to look inside. True, it takes whimsy  
and ego to believe the universe will tap your shoulder  
in the middle of a random afternoon. That t-shirt  
on a stranger’s chest, a bumper sticker on the highway upstate.  
Truth isn’t going anywhere. It’s your eyes passing by.

I’ve returned from the question         the motherland 
            a continually illegitimate relationship
I’m a pretend immigrant       afraid of coats and the cold
            stunned by space and the sun   up in the face 
landlocked      behind the barbed wire of mama’s house 

what did I do there     scratch twitch stare 
           wandered with a prima     and her daughters
was asked about the prima      who should have been there
           she left the world      after her mama   mi tía   se fue 
nadie era nadie           en esa casa     only the men

it made my mama sick             to see me leave 
           into the hot night     of her origins
I return for the right    to walk in the dark
           like the black cat family
that roamed our alley           in the valley of Sula

if I woke up at a decent hour      I caught the colibrí
           little brown red god     came around 9   10am
humming into a tree   of little red stems
           never know names 
                       a place of teeny overlooked gods

I drank tea      at the white iron table
           another tía gave mama      they got on so well 
about their nests           in the capital of slurs
           will I be the only bird to be about the tree 
last one flitting           do we want me to be

On the edge of another blue world
the lake looms like salvation. Over
coffee, my mom and tía speak excitedly

about the vibrant villages along the shore,
how you can only get there by boat
across the lake’s beautiful depths, how

the volcanos stand piously over the water,
how each village is named for one of the twelve
apostles. I ask, with complete sincerity,

if that means one is named for Judas.
The waitress brings our food. My mom
and tía eat slowly with side-eyes and silence.

The picture of elegance, my grandfather.
I wanted his photograph in the dictionary.
Alone of the men I knew as a kid, 
he always wore a shirt with a collar,
always shined his shoes. Equanimity
in a family on the run from itself.
He amazed me once with a cardboard box
of baby chicks, each in a small square as if
he’d waved a wand over a carton of eggs.
A fuzz of feathers, beaks and fragile lives.
No more afraid than all of us, he said.
Just sit with them, tell them apart, listen.
Only if you see someone, can you become
someone. Long gone, he still is and they are.

Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife

had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning

which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain

the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.

Tomer Butte, named for George Washington Tomer,
who arrived in 1871 to formalize its theft.
As for Sagittarius, at the edge of the center

of the Milky Way, the combined distances
between its stars is forever. Some of those are also
not there since prior to this morning—also known

as 1871—when the people who were here
called the stars what the stars were called then.
Which was referred to as now in some circles.

Even now it looks more like a teapot
pouring into the black cup of a summer night
a brew darker than a pine forest in the new moon.

At the university there’s a map that shows
with dots of black ink all the lightning strikes
on Tomer Butte since the last of the nineteenth century.

What lives on that map never sees the light,
and Tomer Butte was a significant mountain once,
before lava from the west filled its valley in.

Then came the part of forever from that point to Mr. Tomer,
with me breathing down his neck for a while in a further forever,
where everything is or becomes a ghost.

Do not assume the ghosts were birthed by other ghosts.
Sagittarius has an arrow drawn at the very heart
of Scorpio, who stung Orion to death.

It’s not so much that the language of poetry
sells us everything we think we need. We need it.
By what law did Sagittarius make his squatter’s claim

on a place that doesn’t exist, except that
we think we can see it, just above Tomer Butte?
For as Scorpio rises, Orion goes down.

Forgiveness was sitting in your kitchen when you got home, and now rests elbows on the table to watch you reach for a knife. You scrape the papery skin from a ginger root and slice it into thin coins. You think too hard about which mugs to pull from your cupboard: you might reveal too much; should you offer the one with the uncomfortable handle? Water boils. You divide the ginger evenly into both cups and pour. Spoonful of honey. You stir slowly, eyes down as though you might be able to forget. You stir too long. Forgiveness coughs politely, so you turn, place both mugs on the table, sit. Forgiveness leans forward. You lean back. You have forgotten what it is like to live with someone who eats all your cut watermelon, picks clean the skeletal vine of red grapes, shakes water spots onto your bathroom mirror without wiping them away. What thresholds of welcome have you crossed and recrossed? Most mornings, you listen for the body to move through your house and out the door before leaving your bedroom. Most nights, you ghost around each other without speaking. But now, as the rain drizzles into gloaming, you settle into your chairs, inevitable, a cupful of hesitation finally beginning to loosen your tongues.

Though your beauty be a flower
Of unimagined loveliness,
It cannot lure me tonight;
For I am all spirit.

As in the billowy oleander,
Full-bloomed,
Each blossom is all but lost
In the next—
One flame in a glow
Of green-veined rhodonite;
So is heaven a crystal magnificence
Of stars
Powdered lightly with blue.

For this one night
My spirit has turned honey-moth
And has made of the stars
Its flowers.

So all uncountable are the stars
That heaven shimmers as a web,
Bursting with light
From beyond,
A light exquisite,
Immeasurable!

For this one night
My spirit has dared, and been caught
In the web of the stars.
Though your beauty were a net
Of unimagined power,
It could not hold me tonight;
For I am all spirit.

      ^{translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie}

Some damn thing made her mom start talking to her about her fiancé yet again. “He’s just not cast from the same clay we are,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s really got it in him to make it a home.”

And as always happens at such times, the young woman shouted and swore, then she hurtled—like a metal water tank hoisted half-way up towards the roof slipping its trusses to crash back down—out of the house.

In the moment between her opening the front door and slamming it behind her, a tank passed; the sound of its tracks the crushing of little children’s bones, the smell of its exhaust charred corpses.

As she crossed over to the opposite sidewalk a sniper behind her shot a young man at the end of the street, of whom nothing had appeared in the machine gun’s sights except the hair on the back of his head.

Before she raised her hand to her friend’s doorbell a bulldozer had extended its metal claw towards the walls of the next-door building, so that it crumbled into pieces on the ground.

Under the rubble a doll with disheveled hair and dusty clothes was playing some music out of her belly, next to her a notebook in which the boy had drawn what he imagined of a bulldozer destroying a house that he imagined as his own.

The boy sits silent while the woman at his side (his mother) hits herself on the head, his father having preceded him to prison. The boy will grow up one day and will love a girl who has grown up also, and then he will be betrothed to her.

The boy who got engaged to the girl—after they grew up, and he got out of prison—had been saying goodbye to her at the end of the street, and stayed there watching her walk away until she entered her house. Then he slowly walked along the street from one end to the other, passing in front of the sniper, who eventually took the decision to put a bullet in the back of the boy’s head, after the tank had gone down the street, and he’d heard the sound of a door slamming and a girl had dashed by from one sidewalk to the other, all of which he took to be evil omens, and were a real bringdown, made him feel sinistrous and doomy—so he pulled the trigger.

يوم مشؤومٌ من أوّله

لعنةٌ ما جعلت أمّها تُعاود الحديث معها عن خطيبها. "ليس من طينتنا"، قالت لها، "ولا أظنّه قادرًا على فتح بيت". 

وكما يحدث دائمًا في مثل هذه المواقف، صرخت الفتاةُ وشتمت، ثم اندفعت كسقوطِ خزّانِ ماء معدنيّ فلت من الحبلين اللّذين يرفعانه نحو السّطح، قاصدةً الخروج من المنزل. 

عندما فتحت الباب، وقبل أن تصفقه من ورائها، كانت دبّابةٌ قد مرّت، صوت جنازيرها طقطقة عظام أطفال صغار، أمّا رائحة عادمها فجثثٌ متفحّمة. 

حين عَبَرَتْ من رصيفٍ إلى آخر، كان قنّاصٌ قد أردى خلفها، آخر الشّارع، شابًا لم يظهر منه في منظار البندقيّة سوى شعر مؤخّرة رأسه. 

قبل أن تضع يدها على جرس منزل صديقتها كانت جرّافة قد مدّت مخلبها المعدنيّ نحو جدران العمارة المجاورة فتهاوت قطعًا على الأرض.

تحت الرّكام، كانت دميةٌ تشعّث شعرها واغبرّت ملابسها تعزف بعض موسيقى من بطنها، إلى جوارها دفترٌ رسَمَ فيه الولد ما تخيّله جرافةً تهدم بيتًا تخيَّلَهُ بيتَهُ. 

الولدُ يجلسُ صامتًا بينما تضربُ السيّدة إلى جانبه (أمُّهُ) على رأسها، والأبُ سبقهُ إلى السّجن. سيكبر الولدُ ذات يومٍ وسيحبُّ بنتًا كبرت هي الأخرى ثمّ يخطبها.

الولدُ الذي خطب البنت -بعدما كبُرا، وخرجَ من السجن- كان ودّعها أوّل الشارع، وظلّ ينتظرها هناك حتى دخلت منزلها، ثم عَبَرَهُ على مَهَلٍ، من أوّله إلى آخره، مارًّا أمام القنّاص الذي اتّخذ، عند نهاية الأمرِ، قرارًا بوضعِ رصاصةٍ في مؤخرة رأسه، بعدما عبرت دبّابةٌ الشّارع ذاته، وسَمِعَ صوت انصفاق بابٍ تلاهُ عبورُ فتاةٍ قفزت من رصيفٍ إلى آخر، اعتبرها كلّها علامات شؤمٍ عَكّرت عليه مزاجه ودفعته للتطيّر فضغط الزّناد.

A long, slow dusk on the day before solstice—
I did it, I did it, I did it: song of the pond frogs.
Shrill piping of the cliff swallows, fluting of a vireo,
Raspy song of the Bewick’s wren. So commotion
In the trees! These evenings of long light
Must be high festival to them. It’s the time
When the light seems tender in the needles
Of the pine, the shimmer of the aspen leaves
Seems kindly on the cliff face, gleams
On the patches and gullies of snow summer
Hasn’t touched yet. And the creek is flush
With life, streams of snow melt cascading down
The glacial spills of granite in a turbulence
The ouzel, picking off insects in the spray,
Seems thrilled by, water on water funneling,
Foam on foam, existence pouring out
Its one meaning, which is flow. Up here,
In the last light, the vireo’s warble declares,
Repeats, falls silent. The swallows, soaring,
Dipping. They must be feeding their young
The insects they are gleaning from the pond.
And the frogs: I did it, I did it, I did it
Fall silent one by one as dark comes on.