In my favorite fantasy    
                                                   I am given             

                                        permission    I am prone    
                                        face toward the light 
                                                      beach queen    bathed in body

A thought that comes from a coming-from     the sweet place

                           where a sunset isn’t indescribable
 				                                      something simply looked at

                                                      The sun sets    I sit
                                                      sinless in sand 
                                                      I sip only once

Christmas Eve, 2016

Before everyone died – in my family – first definition I learned was – my mother’s maiden name, ULANDAY – which literally means – of the rain – and biology books remind us – the pouring has a pattern –  has purpose – namesake means release – for my mother meant, flee – meant leave – know exactly what parts of you – slip away – drained sediment of a body – is how a single mama feels – on the graveyard shift – only god is awake –  is where my – family banked itself – a life rooted in rosaries – like nuns in barricade – scream – People Power – one out of five – leave to a new country – the women in my family hone – in my heart – like checkpoints – which is what they know – which is like a halt  – not to be confused for – stop – which is what happened to my ma’s breath– when she went home – for the last time – I didn’t get to – hold her hand as she died – I said I tried – just translates to – I couldn’t make it – in time – I tell myself – ocean salt and tear salt – are one and the same – I press my eyes shut – cup ghost howl – cheeks splint wood worn – which is to say – learn to make myself a harbor – anyway – once I saw a pamphlet that said – what to do when your parent is dead –  I couldn’t finish reading – but I doubt it informs the audience – what will happen – which is to say – you will pour your face & hands – & smother your mother’s scream on everything – you touch – turn eyelids into oars – go, paddle to find her.

Six months ago, the measuring of whiskey
left in the jug, urine on the mattress, couch
cushions, the crotch of pants in wear. You watch
how breath lifts a chest, how a person breathes—
sick hobbies of when we must. You watch
how you become illiterate at counting.
Six or seven broken breathalyzers; a joke
formulates in your throat & you
choke back your windpipe as punchline.
How many sobs in parking lots before sun
lugged above horizon? The heart hammers
all too familiar songs behind your ribs
& these notes cut away at you. You read online
how television, internet, starving children
in numbers greater than three, polar bears,
rain forests, light from an off direction
all desensitize the human brain’s ability
to empathize. You wonder how
you chew the word panic in your jaws,
let meaning burrow into molars
seep in crevasses between root & bone.
How rot tends to the insides. You wonder
now with the inpatient tags, the cafeteria visits,
the doctors, the psychiatrists, the when do you
get to come homes, the hesitation of our bodies
sharing space again, the words I have not
drunk today & your brain in flinch, how you
excavate organs for what’s left, for salvage.

7. Letters arrived in intervals, as with everything else one might come, one might not regardless of whether there’d been a response. We prepared at all times. Bent over. We dreamed things would be different. Every time the door opened we each smiled in a way to make clear we’d never seen our own face. 

8. An appendix washed up, pages current-smoothed, leaning funny. We stood and watched the skin stretched and sewn. The so-called imaginary, so-called interior, so-called paradoxical private sphere. 

13. Dailiness was the anxiety through which we waited. Buttons undone, like clearance. Not what we wanted but what we didn’t know we had to have. Private acts to attempt in public. Productive relationships to sites of violence. Lace-fronts. A dollar to run to the store. 

19. However useful, the language was degrading, incompatible and lacked necessary verbs. The ability to compress, overflow and alter the landscape through a low swollen hum. To smell strongly in the morning, at the grocery or over the phone. 

24. There were moments we were incapable of decision. An opening through which to register an image pungent through its own material law. A body pulled inward, door unlocked. Irresponsible to. That this moment would return. Return us. That this, and only this, would be the day. 

Sometimes it pays to go to Bojangles. To drive
out of the parking lot, see the red awning: Fish & 
Duck Skills. A man walks out and it is broad
daylight. Back when I was a new adult in Chattanooga
I’d dare myself to go to the Adult Book Shop on
Market Street in the daytime or to the gasoline 
station that my parents frequented, the one close
to our old house, where pornography was stored
in plastic. Back then I only dreamt in violence. &
living was an act of deliberate volatility. Likely,
I could trace it all back to Vaughn who laughed
in my face when I told him I’d been molested
that this was the reason having sex with boys 
was an act of self-hatred, how Vaughn shared
not his story of sexual assault, but my story,
with any Tyner Junior High teen willing 
to listen. So much was going on back then:
the little race riots between us & Ooltewah,
the White gay guy who thought he was Prince
and was terrified of being found out 
that he wasn’t Prince & that he was gay,
the boys who would store their guns in our
lockers, my girl friends and I pretending 
we were gay, kissing each other in the hallway,
on the lips, in front of the teachers, because
designer clothes were expensive and scandal
was free. I didn’t bother telling anyone 
that I was queer and that just about every
single day I didn’t wish I was White, I just
wished that White people weren’t. But
I fished for the Whitest voice and duck tailed 
my hair knowing that one day no one would remember
that I put a gun in my locker, that I kissed
Deidre on her lips, that I sang “the freaks
go out at night” at the top of my lungs & thrust
my hips to “Candy” on my way to the pep rally. No,
what people would remember was that I was
Black. The end. 

          After the exhibition “La Gravedad de Los Asuntos 
                 (Matters of Gravity)”
 
The Mexicans and the Russians were always in on it 
This is collaboration in zero gravity democracy 
—blurry violet lights and no clear answer 
This is a nuclear glow in the dark so we can start over 
We board planes to Mars and six engines fire
 
You spin away. It’s candy guts out here—all our voting machines are breaking 
You tumble and can’t stop, but 
Grab a harness—an adult pigtail
 
Six plane engines click on and your homie has to 
Push you so you can swing at the exploding star 
A way of thinking, una estructura doblada
 
Alguien cortó oropel azul en cuadritos 
And stuffed it into the piñata. A yellow paleta 
Big as a chicken, floats to the right hand corner and balances 
Tipping into the comrade’s hands
 
What’s a layer of confetti and candy compared to DDT 
The kind you sprayed over all our naked bodies 

We’re diamonds: hard, shiny, and we 
Get processed to go through 
We don’t infest, pendejo. We invest 
There goes your friend again, diving toward 
The paleta, which has to be pineapple flavor
 
We were always in on it together 
Me and my honey watch a video on loop 
We gently hold each other like the beach balls we are 
The light dims and that constellation swings 

Only one Russian cosmonaut will smile at a time 
They watch a compa swim away 

Reach out 
Don’t make someone else do your work for you 
Some of us were grounded 
The whole time 

I’m few deja-vus from repeating my whole life
I need to study the shapes of things before death
Before declaring myself a better failure:
  waiting mostly for files to get uploaded or downloaded.
My movements are by the book.
I will remember history, all of it, before uttering the next sentence
And in its silence, I will navigate my headache
“something is not what it is”
And we are lost several worlds over 
Exploring the art of other civilizations
After we subjugate them 
And leave the trees behind
To carry on the sensitive task
Of clearing the air
Stop and think of the pointlessness of desire
We keep going, wasting days between orgasms
And thousands of poems
To keep the pleasantness of clothes
We are all implicated
In the father’s death,
The mother’s death etc.

            After Ocean Vuong’s “Prayer for the Newly Damned”

Dearest Mother, what becomes of the girl
no longer a girl?

The stretch marks from my once breasts
have migrated 

to their new tectonic 
flats. But you can always find 

hints of what used to be. 
Trust me, it is more beautiful 

this way, to look closely 
at my body and name it things like: 

	   Pangea & history & so, so warm. 

Look at me now 
and you’ll see how blood 

faithfully takes 
the shape of its body, 

never asking 
too many questions. 

Dearest Mother, how many rivers
did I run across your belly? 

Do you love
that they will never dry up? 

Dearest Mother, I’ll make all 
this water worth it.