^{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.

^{Level II: Basic Assessment}

All my life I was a hammer:  
I struck at everything I touched. 

Then I commit a few Thursdays  
to trees. I am not gentle but I could be. 

Around one tree, I try my basic circling  
steps, tap the tree’s bark with my mallet  

and listen for the difference: alive?  
dead? alive? dead? alive? still alive?  

I muscle coils of clay and learn  
the same lesson again and again– 

could be clay trees family trees  
literal trees: I hear the precarious things.  

I go phone-my-forester asking  
about sounding trees, about my ears?  

How I want to save a few trees  
but don’t understand what I hear.  

All my life I swung the wrong things.  
I put down mallet and muscle,  

circle the tree’s girdling roots  
and ask, “Where does it hurt?”  

The forester returns my call.  
He’s glad he caught me this evening. 

He heard what I asked about trees  
and ears. “It’s subtle, takes practice.”

A nightly spell of sleep falls  
heavy on the sea.  
Blue whales undulate their slow song,  
while soft-bellied mollusks are carried  
down, sand-ways like a wound. 

These swaying underwater breezes, 
this gentle flotsam of an oceanic dream 
are all for me, querida – a keepsake 
of my savage grief. 
Artifacts of deaths that no one died, 
ashes brimming with unnamed souls. 
I hate this disconnected dream,  
this crystalline suburbia,  
this history without light.  
You are the machine, I make and 
remake in my sleep. 

                        We could not save  
each other or ourselves in this forgetfulness. 
Yet, in the making, we disappeared 
into sound dressed in gray,  
where they said our hearts lived.  
Where the sword decides and  
Foucault lectures to the ghosts of crows 
about sex and the biopolitic. 
And what of colonialism? they squawk,  
Y que del negro atado?  
The sea distanced itself and sang 
of its guilty blood, of the bodies  
consumed in its salty lather. 
Forgive these ravenous waves  
for demanding sacrifice, a buffet of 
flesh and fat spread thick and fragrant.  
Pain is a difficult animal to domesticate.

I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but digs holes in the earth, plants trees, buries his shadow. The country hates him and hates me too, a little less, because I have papers. A document is a strange thing. To ask the placenta for its numerical origin. To tell the dirt it belongs to you. Poets should be concerned with how an empire makes us hate the people without papers. Who could be us, who are us, but temporarily less human because it is convenient for the jobs. The jobs are too important to stop the bombs that burn the flesh of the children who were my face as a child, but I live here, with papers. I call it my life. This language is a chain of accidents. What I’m trying to say is no one gives a fuck about your poems but write them anyway. If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something. You are alive among flesh explained back to us as furniture. Hope is a tax. Each word—say it aloud—I am here—is a coin, a debt owed to love. Take the echo seriously. Our living is the plot to sing completion. Let it fill you, let it bruise. Greet the stranger: did you know we share a wick?

I pull my heart out with teeth and claws, 
           leave it glimmering on the glass table: 

Begone! Palo santo, sagebrush, sweetgrass 
           ash in the shadows. Taste cornpollen, 

bitter medicine—the stomach-swirling 
           of forgetting. Cast it out! Memories skein 

beneath the silver surface—butterfly fish 
           that bite. Dash the mirror. The table, 

let a form fall through it. Eat 
           the shards. Fill up the walnut-sized gap 

in your chest where your heart once was. Yes, 
           you—staring into aquamarine and amethyst 

and praying for a miracle. Most terrible and hated 
           and beloved part of you: sever 

the gold chain like a string 
           of spit. Plant a new orchid, 

untouched by everything except the god 
           who is the sun, his body 

rolling in eternity. A newer moon will mesh 
           the blood inside of you.

won’t you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

The world undresses 
its wounds. It wounds. This Father— 
His memory, torn 
clouds: forgetful weather. 
God’s goodness licks 
bowls bone-clean. Our fingers 
twist crumbs from air. 
We are hungry children 
abandoned by our country 
for bombs. For Rockets’ Red glare. How 
could we ever be patriots? 
My father is my flag. 
The national anthem is 
every word, every single word 
my mother could not whisper— 
could not say, 
could not say: 
her father colonized her. 
Made her mother nasty with jealousy. 
Could not say: she can’t stay 
In this world of touching. 
It maims. 
It elects evil. 
It is two gendered. 
It kneels on Sunday. 
The Lord is 
American & 
aims His rifle 
at us, His children 
once beggars 
rise into guerrillas.

one can repeat anything they like 
it’s just dead now and beaten 
there’s a wire 
in the belt of my brain 
and don’t smoke 
you difficult person 
there’s a wire 
picking up missiles on the strip 
breaking space and time with 
an iron sound iron sound 
I can’t go to sleep or unsee life , 
time makes change possible and 
is currently menacing . in this way , 
one learns the simple , vertiginous 
depth of problems , the dead weight 
of forms and the hyenic laughter 
of matthew miller which all meaning 
requires one to reject – the content of life 
is essentially general , not actually . a little fear of god , 
and the heat currents shutting down , 
all shot through with the arrows of slavery 
and white phosphorus . it’s a total 
global project . the fish are still full of mercury – 
he said it cuz he didn’t like it , 
and now we have to dislike it forward , 
with all the implications bursting . I can’t shut my eyes , 
babies with flies on they face – and writing 
with the song cuz conditions have not 
given the means to surpass it . 
this is the end of something . these are the words , 
I’m serious , of serious people , 
awake unsustainably

When you’re called,
you go, Sesshu says. 
But I’m afraid
I won’t go far enough
to stop them
even though
people are dying.
And even though
people are dying,
I remain 
Chicana, a woman 
who won’t keep
this mouth, 
or the other, shut.
So should I
get out of bed  
to write?
Does what I
write matter?
Sesshu says: reread 
Oscar Zeta Acosta’s 
The Revolt of the Cockroach People.
Then I remember:
when you’re
called,
you go.

what the birds know is the way home

it begins with a door that cannot find its own name

the bird who stitches together the last sky must sing the name into existence

and the door opens into the burning of the world

through the door we find each other

and in the wholeness the birds

collective rupture into species being

the last sky world burn sings itself into our feet

soles imbued with prophecy of dirt

good lord last sky world burn there is something beyond you

the birds are taking us to find it

you are singing the door open for us

and through it streams the flood of the people

the feet of the flood of the people burn the world as they run

the last sky world burn is desperate to open the door for us

there are birds making treaties with the sky to facilitate its arrival

there are feet conspiring with the land to ensure the world burn is total

last sky will empty itself of airplanes and war jets to make room for our spirits

the last sky world burn is a sketch of a coming dream

it is our duty to believe in its inevitable birth

the last sky world burn asks a question

it is our responsibility to make the answer

what do I wear to deliver my book
into the world
as it is today
monologued by a woman
a former interrogator and torturer
what would she wear
to the inauguration ceremony
of a museum
of her own imagination on full display
a celebration of the practice
not carried out by one regime, but an enterprise
global and interdisciplinary
stretched out throughout histories
the banality of evil on full display
men in full armor genociding
men in suits smiling to the cameras
and telling journalists they are looking into it
what a torturer wears to a press conference
proud of her alliances
her feminist motto
making history
the madam is “redefining the power suit,” the headline says
her Chucks saw a 4500% increase in online interests
how much does the madam’s suit from Chloé cost?
she says she fully supports
the men behind the ashes and the debris and the skeletons
her closet website lists it all—the suits, the jewelry, the shoes, the outerwear, the accessories, the
casual wear, the formal wear, the home wear
there is a section for the recently identified and for the recently worn
the madam says Iran is the number one enemy
the child, her teeth broken, her hair disheveled, carries her sister on her back
says of course she’s tired
says her sister’s leg is hurt
she will carry her sister
the road stretches behind them and in front of them
the man takes the children to his car, gives them a ride
the decorations of death have risen in many front yards
plastic skeletons and gravestones
the hollowed-out eyes
the desire for horror
store bought and cheap

what are the tax percentages on the receipts?
other children hug the dogs
hold on to
the necessary embrace
in a shelter that cannot shelter
the dogs stare at the camera
in shock, their eyes cannot even blink
staring into
he cares for the cats
asks us to be kind to animals
the mother who mothered him into mothering the animals was killed
his daughter was born
he feeds the cats, washes the eyes, heals the wounds
a child was once upon a time running on another stretch of road, all naked
the girl in the picture
the terror of war
the madam wants to look “finished but not overtly fabulous.”
what to wear to the event
launching the book that exposes the complicity
of the scholars and the feminists and the experts and the psychologists and the researchers
of another madam
shattering the glass ceiling optimizing the cleansing
writing the words for land acknowledgements
how do the words rise off the page
to be voiced through a mouth
that welcomes the killing
of the gray horse stuck in the rubble
of the houses
of the humans targeted
a blue sky behind her
in her undefeated resistance of hope and life
our wizard reminds us that no occupation lasts forever

I must have read your letter a hundred times /
drafted my response ascending the washed out pink
of the Wburg bridge (u know the one) repetitive
travel by foot (running) training for the brooklyn
half marathon. how momentum forces the body
forwards in sub 30 weather / all flushed cheeks
& icicle muscle fiber. i saw a beating heart last week
fully open chest cavity / i watched the body mechanics
(surgeons) excise and replace a Very Important Doorway
b/w chambers. it was beating so fast & i was worried for it
the threshold b/w parts, left ventricle / aorta; boroughs
brooklyn / manhattan, the J late at night from W 4th st
the dotted line b/w night & day, the event horizon of
a city pulsing at the threshold of air & land, the body
on ice (temporarily) waiting for the definitive
SHOCK AWAKE, a hand’s gentle massage on
your SOURCE POWER i think of the repetition
of the oral tradition your pedagogic emphasis
& visceral commitment to rearrange space
with more possibility / let the axis wobble
@ the reverberation of your voice drench
my legs are tense from tabulating the miles
a train could take me on the QUEER REVELRY
urban node/s of RESISTANCE all those grungy
house beats shock my heartbeat back into
CONTAGIOUS RHYTHM does the movement
stop when the beat pauses? it’s been 8 years &
i still feel the shock of it buried deep in our
soft marrow hip joints locked from loss
i find relief in the timbre of your voice
widening possibility, opening the cages
at Sednaya prison, M’s breath along my skin,
green & purple & red & black hearts sent
between friends. may the trains bring our
hearts close together again soon.
XO AAK

I miss my magnolias, miss my maples, think
Where did they go?, think, Oh yes, to the past,
that place where everything goes and can I visit? 
No, but also Yes. And can I stay away? Also Yes,
but also No. And in the same way that languages 
only get simpler, people only get sadder. Yesterday 
at the dentist I thought Thank God for nitrous oxide 
and I thought Thank God for Dr. Rachel drilling away 
in my tooth but wanting nothing she does to hurt me.
I wish that were true all the time. That we all wanted
nothing we did to hurt anyone at all. My friend 
with a beautiful house insists that we call his pet 
a companion animal, which I don’t think changes 
very much, but I want nothing that I do to hurt him, 
so I call his dog a companion animal, and then 
I think Is that what my trees were? Not really 
my trees, but companion trees, offering me their flowers 
and then their leaves, offering me their oxygen 
in exchange for my carbon dioxide, not exactly grateful 
for my copious applications of neem oil to kill 
the parasites invading their branches but flourishing 
in the absence of those pests, the flowers
and leaves all I really wanted in return. I miss 
my companion trees, my flowering Jane, 
my flowering Brown Beauty, my flowering Star,
my leafy red maples, scarlet and feathery
all summer. My friend’s companion animal is licking 
my face and my friend asks Could you be content 
anywhere? And I say Yes, I can be content anywhere, 
but then I think Is that true? Of course it’s easy 
to be content at my handsome friend’s beautiful house, 
by his heated pool, in what might be a physical manifestation
of contentment if ever there was one. So I think it again 
on the subway, think it again writing e-mails, think it again 
making breakfast: Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but alas sadly: No. It’s not true. I can’t be content here
in my uncomfortable present, in my uncomfortable chair,
on the uncomfortable subway, at this uncomfortable desk,
in this uncomfortable classroom. But oddly, I am content 
to visit the past, to say Hello everything I’ve lost, 
to say I wish you could come here to the present, 
my lost companion trees. I wish you could meet 
everything I’ve found.

After the nurse has taken all the staples
out of Brad’s new scar, he asks me how many
there were, and I regret not counting.
This is the seventh surgery
since his accident fifteen years ago,
the hardest except for the first
because the doctor had to rebreak
the bone and start over.
We can rebuild him, we have the technology
is something Brad likes to say
because before all this,
he was a boy in the 1970s
who watched The Six Million Dollar Man.
The morning of the accident, our sons
were at swim lessons.
I was watching Matthew’s round head 
as he did his bobs, the water slicking 
his hair to his face so he looked like
he was being born.
I never saw him like that since I’d had 
c-sections and my own staples.
One of my last memories of Brad’s brother
happened at Staples.
They were leaving to drive across the country,
and we were saying goodbye, and it was late
and dark, but they were still going 
to try to make it to Montana,
and of course before they left, 
they needed to print something at the last minute 
because for them time was always something 
you could make more of.
We said goodbye under the red sign
that said Staples, and this stapled itself
to the moment so now when I drive by Staples,
I think of Terry bending down to hug me
for one of the last times before he died.
Brad walked into this room
on the same crutches he’s been using
since the original accident.
The handles are wrapped in blue tape,
and parts of the gray cushions are flecking off.
They are the Velveteen Rabbit of crutches.
There are many ways to be broken,
and Brad is all of them. 
After she was dead too,
I read in my mother-in-law’s journal
how grateful she was for me 
so Brad would not be alone.
I thought how prescient because now
it’s just me here with him, and the nurse 
who is funny and kind and fills up 
the room and makes us feel
like things will be all right
but is also almost done with the staples
and on her way out.

nor admire the apples that blossom
during a February heat wave only to
wilt and die in a mid-May freeze. Doom,
such a fickle bitch. She’s snow spilling into
Reno where planeloads of people sick
of winter have gone to gamble in tank tops
and shorts. Here it’s seventy-three degrees, 
warm enough to sunbathe on a Lake Ontario
beach. Overhead a jet pirouettes toward
the airport fluttering white scarves of vapor:
Contrails, kissing cousin to entrails. Mine
are glistening and pink as a sunrise except
for one rotten spot that’s something to watch
in the future. How it always starts for the apple.

^{poem made entirely from letters in the title, after Chen Chen}

a tall iris  
a list of river names 

omens all i see 
fatal bells

o visio  
o loam 

a lit table  
a test small flames retell 

i fall over a rose  
reel into a mess of lilies 

sleet amasses stone 
a sea lives a fever 

in time a lion enters  
o fearsome mane 

roam most near me

The universe demotes me, 
yet again, to coin-operated laundry, 
and each night, when everyone 
is sleeping, our tongues all migrate
one mouth to the left. The tongue 
in your mouth, now, is not 
the one you started out with. Your tongue
is half a world away. None of my dead, either,
have ever been interested 
in coming back. Plastic cups
drift into my yard
from the fraternity house across the street. 
Brothers, I’ve been looking
for someone to hand my body
over to, so that the dirt
will not page through it. Rib bones 
like lines, clouds like accordions, 
and soon enough the rain 
dropping like choir members. What can I say? 
What could be said. The church 
was always so hot. Tongue
come back, come back
for a little bit longer. I’ve only got 
the one death to my name, one death
and I’m not going to ruin it.

That you will leave, like all
things leave, that you have left, 
that you left. The lilacs brace
themselves for this sort of blue.

The howl and bloat, a mechanical
melancholy. My hobby. My horse.
That you left. An infection
of baby’s breath in your wake.

This is no ordinary square swatch.
No baby blanket. That August,
the garbage festered in Brooklyn,
as it festers every August in Brooklyn,

but no other August in Brooklyn
did you leave. The silver slide. A sad
liberation at your departure. An airy
groan. Snide whale was I. Humpback

on a playground bench. That you
left. I shushed and dug. I rattled.
An oyster in my throat. That you left.
Ribbons of sunlight varicosing

the trash bins. I said, I prefer not to say
I’ve lost a son. In spite. Despite. I said,
a very late miscarriage. I’d miscarried,
an unsafe carrier was I, a womb with

no arms, disco ball with no discs
to refract nor reflect. Was crushed.
How easy to dismiss my grief. My girl 
on the swing. Already there. Already here.

But you. Rain on the hot sidewalk.
Turned mist. Handsome aura. Gone. 

will crawl out of the drain and try to kill you
like some 80s horror flick. The picture of us at the Santa Fe 
Railyard, foreheads glistening. The black widow creeping
from the mound of linens still warm from our bodies. Mechanical
hum of crickets when you push into me in the middle of the night, when 
I can’t sleep and the years replay like a foreign movie, a terrible one 
where the voices sound underwater. Failed poems will steal 
your breath when you wake parched, hungover, emptied
in a room full of the steady buzz of the refrigerator. 
When all that excites you is momentary, an earthquake in which 
all the books shake in place, and nothing falls. No one ever reads 
failed poems, but they follow you home in the dark and tuck in 
beside you. Failed poems are cute grim reapers that live in cartoon snowcaps. 
They’re midnight döner kebabs that give you heartburn. 
Once, in Zurich, we were served rabbit paella at a party 
celebrating an exhibition of an artist from Venice Beach 
who used to be homeless but drinks $25 Erewhon smoothies and paints 
hundreds maybe thousands of happy faces with his feet. His canvasses 
go for $25,000. Toe paintings are better or at least significantly 
more profitable than failed poems. Failed poems won’t help you 
earn a living. You will probably have to do freelance marketing 
to sustain the creation of failed poems. Failed poems accrue interest. 
They seep into dreams where all your friends line up to blow 
your husband. They cost a monthly cloud subscription to maintain. 
Failed poems are injected into your father’s veins when he ODs 
for the second time this year. They’re shared to infinity 
when you’re canceled for fringe political views. When you’re six
feet under, a failed poem is written on your head. It’s a prayer 
in the form of a failed poem, the last words 
you hear on earth

A boy asks me
write a poem
to a boy
a poem
is a real thing

like a bike or
goggles for swimming
I’ve been remembering
turtle slow
what it’s like to

be interrupted by myself
beauty a hackney
cab of commerce
sits ahead
proud in the rickshaw

mixing up cultures geographies
biographies like AI
hanging over us
doesn’t hang
cut the gallows tumor

death is a memory
something that happens
to me before
a volcano
stares over the trees

^{—after Louise Glück’s “October”}

Violence has changed
me something beautiful 
worldly, not comfortable 
living in a mouth

I’ve long made habit 
of pulling off my skin 
by the forearm 
at night 
joining the arteries 
of lapping tongues and hardened wounds.

I’ve found joy 
meditating on the quality
of my self served stigmatas 
fracturing the columns 
of holy books

An owl opens its mouth 
a church bell climbs out
akimbo
She has learned 
to tightrope in the dark

My mother exalts her long-gone father.
Driving home, laments the failings of my father.

Sees her ex-husband in my excuses,
tells me: That’s just like your father. 

On holiday, he sneaks away to work;
I take a work call. Like son, like father.

Before, I tried to outrun my shadow
when sun met twilight, like Earth’s late father.

God sacrificed his son for his life’s work.
So we sing heavenward to honor the Father,

the Son, and the Holy Spirit—Forgive me,
for I have sinned, become my own father—

not who raised me, but those who claim me
as theirs. The stone-jawed men who father

havoc through absence, posture a myth for
any gaze. How many don’t know their father?

I’m at my kids’ school, bath time, rubbing their backs
before bed. They will know their father

as the one who showed up & always stayed,
bleary-eyed, did anything to father.

My mother fears she will be forgotten,
invoking Time, like others, as a father.

My wife notes the shifting sky above us.
What gravity gives birth to a father?

Listen, I promise you, I have
no stake in this world. No
political affiliations unless
love is a political tool, unless
my body is a political tool,
unless my comrades are a
political tool. I have no
high stake in this world, no
children to want to leave
a better world to, nothing
but fucking & bookmaking
that is my legacy & it is as
undeniable as smoke; yet
may disappear like it too. I
turn on the news & not
owning pearls, I clutch my
fancy juicer to my chest
I gather around me my art
& my mirrors, my plants &
my price of the ticket—a bible.
I think they’re coming for
me. For it. For all my
million little nothings they
consider stakes in this world.
I got no gun, I got no pickup
I got no desire to burn the
world; I don’t own the world
I own stand mixers & an
eggplant colored Le Creuset
a tiny apartment with bad pipes
& creaking floors. I have
no stakes. I barely got health,
I barely got muscle. I want
a garden near an ocean
that won’t eventually swallow
me. I want my only job to be this:
clawing at a white page until Black
appears. & suddenly, in that moment
I got something—

I followed here the heart  
I built for you. Here it is, blue 

as the preening peacock’s crest, bruise  
renewed again and again. Blue as

children made vapor, families ground 
to grist raining on the accordion 

chest of the sea. I followed here my own  
forgetting of the fireflies that blink 

like prayers in belligerent grasses; my 
dreams of mattering, as in, appearing—

a noun in your syntax. That stone  
you strike for water. Is this not

the Dream? To take more than  
bodies have to give, then eat without

discord? I want you to know I have 
always understood my place. That 

the only feeling more beautiful than  
your fear is your want. Look, 

how your flowers light the world.

within the loops and lines of our initial correspondence,
each letter holds the history of its defining nature

                                                 now, some will not slip cleanly from my mouth

instead hook into the valley of my lips,
force themselves through the fleshiness of my cheek,
and attempt to jump-swim back down my throat
             choke me         with their spurred dorsal fin, gaping gills
a fish refusing its fate

and I’m reminded of that time at the lake,
where tannins colored the bottom of our paper cups,
dew falling on our faces,
and you told me I tasted like the lake
– spruce and freshwater life –
a memory we share, even if, by next morning,
we see the evening differently
me acutely aware you will never claim me
while you suffer with the fish bones you dared swallow

even through your denial,
you cannot question how,
when I say your name, 
my voice always quivers

  O sweet spontaneous
  earth how often have
  the
  doting

                   fingers of
  prurient philosophers pinched
  and
  poked

   thee
  ,has the naughty thumb
  of science prodded
  thy

           beauty     how
  often have religions taken
  thee upon their scraggy knees
  squeezing and

  buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
  gods
            (but
  true

  to the incomparable
  couch of death thy
  rhythmic
  lover

                 thou answerest


  them only with

                                 spring)

^{—after Beenie Man and Derek Walcott}

who am i?
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m the cramped quarters
            of any vessel voyaging the sea
            with contraband and trafficked cargo
who am i?
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m the rum barrel hollowed out
            and beaten into percussion
who am i?
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m a pidgin picking its way
            into a creole—any savage tongue
            consumed again and again
            until it can be repeated
who am i? 
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m the plátano deep frying sweet
            in oil or i’m the plátano fry-smash-
            fried into tostones
who am i?
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m the hibiscus steamed
            with ginger and sugar
            and allspice and clove
who am i?
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m a field song morphing
            out each new generation’s lips
who am i? 
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m the pilón smashing
            plátano and garlic and chicarrón
            into mofongo or i’m the pilón
            grinding allspice and clove
            and fennel and cinnamon into a jerk
who am i? 
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m this tripped-up tongue
            tryna wind its way through
            english, spanish, and patois
            smashed and ground-up together
who am i? 
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m sugarcane fields burnt or i’m
            the the scotch bonnet burn
            in the curry chicken or
            i’m the ron añejo burning
            its way down the throat
who am i? 
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m a poco man jam
            morphing into a dembow
who am i? 
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m the poems chanted
            over and over on the slave ship
            until they all mishmash smashed
            into a whole new song
who am i?                   who am i?                   who am i?
            either i’m nobody or
            i’m all of the nations
            or i am no nation or i’m a
            singular, ephemeral nation—
            the one i sing into being with this
            savage tongue, the one that disappears
            as soon as the sound stops shaking
            in the ocean salt air

                                                                            ___________
                                                                           |                        |
                                                                                                     |
                                                                                                     |
                                                                                                     |
                                                                                                     |
                                                                                                     |                                                                                                                          ________________
__ __ __ __     __ __ Y __ __ __ __                  

Category: A philosophical phrase

Clues:

1. Lock:                Damn it … not everyone believes what you believe!
   Morpheus:       My beliefs do not require them to.
                                                                           —The Matrix Reloaded

2. It is achieved in solitude but never by separation.

3. No trinity—the ocean moves as one body, never confused with a 
     collection of raindrops.

4. Morning dew has a way more iconic metamorphosis than the butterfly, 
    sadly said no one.

5. It is Spring under a Bodhi Tree awakening to the Earth holding you—in
    wooden arms against grass-hilled breasts—the Earth is always holding you. 

6. The moment a raindrop touches the ocean, it becomes the whole ocean.

7. “Even if you are not ready for the day, it cannot always be night”—G. Brooks 
    “... the devil my opp, can’t pay me to stop…”—K. West
                                                                       (—YouTube fan mashup)

8. Fail and hang, death can’t save you—rebirth starts this game over.

9. Raindrops in the ocean suffer imposter syndrome;

10. there are no raindrops in the ocean—it is honing this sole wisdom.

11. This is the single most important answer of your life to get right.

^{Notes from an open house}

It’s hard not to cheer for the brother 
that claims he bought weed 
from Ta-Nehisi Coates at Howard

or the hairdresser that compliments your fade 
then asks about the plastic step by the toilet, 
making you the first to introduce her to the phrase,

“Squatty Potty.”

It’s hard not to wish them luck, 
the Black buyers, when your landlord 
puts the building up for sale.

Today, 30 strangers shuffle through 
your ground floor, north-facing apartment, 
each wearing a different shade of “sorry.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you”  is followed by 
“Thank you for opening your home.” 
As if we owned the lock, the key, the hinges.

“Landlord”  is a 15th-century word

so feudalism never ended, 
it just put on a surgical mask, 
learned to take its shoes off at the door.

A man taps the walls with his knuckles, 
searching for rot. It is polite 
when he points to the paint bubbling beneath the window

and shares the diagnosis: “water damage.”

You don’t know which embarrassments 
are yours and which to give back 
by the end of the month.

Someone asks, “How’s the neighborhood?” 
And you wonder how to protect 
what you are only borrowing.

This small sliver of Oakland, 
where the children ask you your favorite animal 
and the animal becomes your name.

Where a brother plays soul music 
from his window, and that’s how Sam Cooke 
ended up at your wedding.

Maybe it’s the L.A. in you, 
Los Angeles, where your people 
owned nothing but the Fatburger between your fingers,

not even the contested colors of your block, 
that inspires you to start banging on each new stranger 
parading through your home, demanding to know,

“Where you from?”

And even though 
you are not from here or there either, 
you keep a quiet tally of their responses.

So quiet, by your window, you can hear the realtor 
discussing with a man that was just inside your kitchen 
why the rent is so low for the area.

And it’s not. But you know the sound of a hungry dog 
or the scent of an oilman determined to drill when he says, 
“You’ll get my offer by the end of the month.”

but in this poem nothing dies.

Alone in the poem, I make myself
brave. No—I show brave 
to my body, take both to the ocean. 

Come hurricane, come rip current, 
come toxic algal bloom. 

In March, I drift past the estuary
to watch an eight-foot dolphin 
lap the Mill River 

like a cat pacing a bathtub, 
sick and disoriented. 

Biologists will unspool her empty intestines, 
weigh her gray cerebellum.
She swam a great distance to die 

alone. I’m sorry—I lied. I can’t control 
what lives or dies. I need a place

to stow my brain. To hold 
each moment close as a sand flea
caught in my knuckle hairs.
  
Please, someone—
tell me a poem can coax 

oil from a sea bird’s throat. 
Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—

what can my hands do now?

&   for  years    i   skipped  over                        crevices. avoided   the  cracks
split  by the   ancient roots  of                            trees. my young  self treated
each break   in   the  earth   like  a                     cliff   echoing   my  mother’s
name—why give a child the responsibility     to keep a mother whole—& i
recall  how   my  mother  broke   the                      bridge  of   her  body four
times  bringing   four  daughters  into                the   world.   our  dimple  &
babble  cries   becoming   the  joy  to              rebuild  herself,   holding  the
weight  of   breast  milk,  overtime                 at the  mercado,   hunger  that
spoke   to    her   through   tantrums.                           now  in    my    thirties
i    reminisce  about   saddle   shoes, the ones                 i  wore  in   catholic
school   where   sister  lilia  a   white  nun  in               black  veil  once   said
to   a  class   full   of   brown   girls   that                birth  was    beautiful   her
only   proof  were   outdated     diagrams                        of  women’s   insides
becoming   newly   fledged   mothers,  images                    of    women   with
mannequin  stares   when a child  spilled  out                       of   them.    how
sister   lilia    spared   us   the   ache  of   truth   &               jumped   straight
to    claiming  this  miracle,   miraculous  like                      the  movies   with
actresses   with    their   fake   swollen    stomachs           &  almost   perfect
hair   &  damp   skin   &  pretend   husbands          holding  video   cameras
feeding  their   wives  ice  chips.   i  say                  this to say, i want to make
room   for  the  real   work,  to               celebrate  the   overworked  muscle,
the   stretch  marks  like              the  ridges   of  dried  grapes   the  effort it
takes   to    make   sweet             fruit,  to   honor  the  blood   that  leaves  &
the    blood   that  stays           never  aftermath   of  flesh  but   a  mosaic  in
what   it   means   to            have   a    light   escape   from    inside  you   &
watch  it become   its       own  kind   of  living.

It is not only the arrow that delivers sorrow.

Walking alone through the storm-blown
after a dinner crowded with voices can be

its own devastation. Or a wild mustang asleep

in the knapweed, which is one invasive asleep
in the arms of another. This after the smell

of gasoline and finding scattered on the path

blossoms like the little yellow shells of pistachios.
I’m astonished when the moon holds its wink

all dawn, even through the smoke from the neighbors

who woke early to burn their trash. It’s something
like the opposite of the birds whose song’s absence

made the season transparent and thin for me

without my ever knowing it. Or the arrow—which is
the sorrow—piercing the silence of this sudden loss.

A few days after solstice, I follow bobcat tracks to the lake.
The moss is glowing, the water all thawed, the cold
a kind of wholly coat. A willow, bald without its leaves,

towers over its frail reflection. I sit on a bench, begin to read
old journals. Then I close my eyes and cringe before that girl,

the younger me, makes another bad decision. I want to tell
that girl to stop running, trespassing, stop showing off wounds
to strangers like some perverse shadow puppet flailing inside

the theater of her brooding, restless heart. I tell her to stop and tie
her shoes, to check for ticks. I urge her to banish her urge to tear

the peonies up from the soil just to see the roots naked, render
them wild, but she’s wistful and shifty and cannot hear me—she skips
up the mountain or down the stairs onto the train platform, no coat,

dives dumpsters for breakfast, dances all night. Hitches rides
from boys on motorbikes. Meets lovers: someone who dressed hair,

who threw their ID cards in a fire; someone who could write a line
in an extinct script, someone who studied ocean waves. She’s fallen
for the stories—I know how that story ends. On the floor,

too anguished to write, she curls her spine and holds her breath.
Stop crying, for god’s sake! I can’t look—so I face the willow.

But it also weeps, and now I’m weeping. I’m not on the other
side. Ink leaks from the pen, catching up to the speed of rue
and awe. On this day, I’ve found that girl at this lake, alive

and well after all these thrumming years. I admit I’ve missed her.
What selves have we buried alive, what selves have we survived?

All she wanted—to live and die at once. On a field of ghostly
wildflowers, the willow dreams of catkins—every season,

the bud and the husk, the cathedrals we’ve built out of sorrow.

How to begin the story without being obvious:
the wet face, eyes swollen dim, the swallowed
moan … Who cares and Who cares, you ask. We all have
our pain, and it is so bloody boring, so obvious. But 
that is the point: there is a sword, and we know
it is a sword, but despite our knowing we accept
the dual. What remains curious is our umbrage
when the tip of the blade enters. We are shocked. Why 
do we never believe it will go through the skin,
that the skin, ephemeral as a cloud, does nothing to protect
the heart? I dream of Pushkin,  
in my arms. Thrust through. I give him my breast.
A man who would never have loved me.
I kiss the tight curls on top of his head. It is the moment 
after his duel for another’s love, another’s honor.
Being me, I believe I can save him. I can’t. 
When I wake from this dream he is dead.
But the dream repeats itself. Every dusk,
the longing. Every daybreak the loss.