I look at myself in the mirror
trying to figure out what makes me an American
I see Ecuador and Puerto Rico

I see brujo spirits moving 
across the backs of Santeros
splattered with the red blood of sacrificed chickens
on their virgin white clothes 
and blue beads for Yemaya
practicing religions without a roof

I see my own blood
reddening the white sheets of a stranger
proud American blue jean labels 
on the side of the bed

I see Don Rosario in his guayabera
sitting outside the bodega
with his Puerto Rican flag
reading time in the eyes of alley cats

I see my mother trying to be 
more like Marilyn Monroe
than Julia De Burgos
I see myself trying to be more like James Dean
than Federico García Lorca

I see Carlos Santana, Gloria Estefan,
Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez
More than just sporadic Latin explosions
More like fireworks on el Cuatro de Julio
as American as Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin,
Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin

I see Taco Bells and chicken fajitas at McDonald’s
I see red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple
I see Chita Rivera on Broadway

You see, I am as American as lemon meringue pie
as American as Wonder Woman’s panties
as American as Madonna’s bra
as American as the Quinteñeros, 
the Abduls, the Lees,
the Jacksons, the Kennedys
(Mostly) all of us immigrants to this soil
since none sound American Indian to me
as American as television snow 
after the anthem is played
and I am not ashamed

Jose, can you see...
I pledge allegiance
to this country ’tis of me
land of dreams and opportunity
land of proud detergent names and commercialism
land of corporations

If I can win gold medals at the Olympics
If I can sign my life away 
to die for the United States
Ain’t no small-town hick 
gonna tell me I ain’t an American
because I can spic in two languages
coño carajo y Fuck You

This is my country too
where those who do not believe in freedom and diversity are 
the ones who need to get the hell out

Texas oilmen named this laceration
in the Ecuadorian Amazon "Sour Lake,"
Lago Agrio, and since it’s an oil town
of 20,000, we know its prostitutes, bars
and garbage-strewn parks fill with
indigent colonists who follow
our oil companies to the jungle.
I think not of Tu Fu or Confucius, but
Lonely Planet, which says "an oil town
is an oil town." We take their word,
walk straight from tarmac to terminal to a
bus that will drop us 4 hours from here.
Because we are norteamericanos, our hopes
are high before we watch rain spit from
an immense sky into half-built, wood-plank
shacks on stilts, walls painted with
political slogans and half-legible names
of local consejeros, green hills dotted
by handfuls of trees, and four parallel
pipelines following our bus like
one of the country’s mangy strays,
flowing straight to graffiti on Quito
walls topped with glass shards:
NO FMI  FUERA OPEC  NO COMPRE TEXACO.
Holding hands, we peered far
ahead to Cuyabeno Preserve.
Loaded into canoes for the 2 hour
ride to our huts, we forgot the
tanker trucks, derricks, and squat
bunkers for oil workers along the
road that reminded me of Dachau.
Fernando, our guide, laughs a lot.
We laugh, too, because we see
squirrel monkeys, sloths, caimans,
pink dolphins, and kingfishers. 
We sleep like los indígenas in
thatched huts, dumb with fortune.

"In Antigua I am famous. I am bathed in jasmine
and pressed with warm stones."
—Carnival Cruise ad in the New Yorker

In Albuquerque, on the other hand, I am infamous; children
throw stones and the elderly whisper behind their hands.
In Juneau, I am glacial, a cool blue where anyone can bathe
for a price. In Rio I am neither exalted nor defamed; I walk
the streets and nothing makes sense, voices garbled, something
about electricity, something about peonies and cheap wool.

In Prague I am as fabulous as Napoleon and everyone
knows it. They give me a horse and I tell them this horse
will be buried with me, I tell them I will call the horse either
Andromeda or Murphy and all applaud wildly. In Montreal
I am paler than I am in Toronto. In Istanbul I trip over cracks
in the sidewalk and no one rushes to take my elbow, to say
Miss or brew strong tea for a poultice. In Sydney they talk
about my arrival for days. I sit outside the opera house
waiting for miracles, and when none occur in a fortnight

it's Ecuador, where the old gods include the small scythes
of my fingernails in their rituals and I learn that anything
can ferment, given opportunity, given terra cotta. In Paris
I'm up all night. Off the Gold Coast, I marry a reverend
who swears that pelicans are god's birds and numbers them
fervently, meanwhile whistling. Near Bucharest I go all
invisible, also clammy, also way more earnest than I ever was
in Memphis. For three Sundays I wander skinny side streets
saying amphora, amphora.

^{for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center}

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head 
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago. 
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle 
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. 
Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane 
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, 
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, República Dominicana, 
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs 
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.

Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.

After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations 
across the night sky of this city and cities to come. 
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul 
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, 
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have. 

Tan skin, tan voice,
square jaw and white shirt
pulled taut, a posture

of abstinence. Knots
of muscle, broad shoulders,
tight hips, slender legs—

in high school they called him
Coyote because he was so
skinny. Now my father calls

himself a gym rat, fighting
to get back that slimness,
fighting to fill the quiet

where the gnawing
enters with the wish
of weights sliding

onto the barbell, fighting
age with diet and exercise
and secrets. Coyote

is a trickster who fools
the eye, who makes you
believe he could never die.

Coyote told the first lie.
But his slippery tongue
ran off, let loose, and knotted

itself a noose no language
could untangle, because a coyote
is a coyote is a coyote,

the same in English and Spanish,
a perfect cognate. But understand this:
there could be no heroes

nor villains, no beginnings nor
endings, no happiness nor sorrows,
without a Coyote.

My father and I break bread
over this word because it cannot
become lost in translation

like so many others. We eat guiso
de papa, sudado pescado, and
tallarines rojos over this word.

We toast with chicha morada,
maracuyá, and Inca Kola over
this word. For twenty years

we have sliced panettone on
New Year’s with this word,
our bridge from Trujillo, Peru

to Auburn, Washington, from
booming waves of terracotta
roofs and tangled telephone

wires to dark forests and angled
houses huddled close around the heat
of the railroad. Here, electricity

travels underground, buzzes
beneath the concrete, the little
shake in our tires, the pep in our

step, the caffeine in our veins. Here,
coyotes howl at the witching hour
like a crowd of crying babies, from

the swamp hills across the valley
to the farmland laced with electricity
pylons like paper chains of pancaked

Eiffel towers where he’s resided since
she left him, waiting for a spark
that could only cause a fire.

As a child, he watched cartoons
from morning to noon, just him
and the screen, Wile E. Coyote

chasing after the Road Runner
again and again and again—
and every day, I pass a coyote

lying by the side of the freeway
just before Golden Given Road,
facing away

from passing cars. It has been rotting
there for three weeks in the stench of paper
sulfur, oil, and its own flesh, in long

puddles broken up by grooved cement
mirroring the sky above, cerulean smoked
puffs of white. Three weeks, and no one

has come to bury it. Again and again
and again I look in the rearview mirror,
but I can’t see its expression.

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against 
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud 
rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.

I can’t see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,

including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child’s feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.

with grievance’s command.

I am the daughter she trains
to translate lightning.

I am the half-deaf child she assigned
to tone-deaf judges.

I am the girl
riding shot-gun to iron.

I am birthing feet first
with no mid-wife to catch.

I sprint, high-jump,
and fist-fight in her defense. 

I am a dialect
born inside her quietude.

I susurrate incantations
transcribing her rivered idioms.

She is rivered remembering,
and I am her subpoenas.

^{translated from the Spanish by Manuel Iris and Kevin C. McHugh} 

You wake up, Juan Dominguez,
in your Latin American city
and open the eyes
open the mouth of that face
that is the same
as all who will be forgotten
despite the memory
the photograph
in the passport you never processed.

In this world your face matters less
than the fruit of your hands:

                          cocoa, black beans, coffee.

The people who besiege you, the demons
that now arise
among the living green
are barely human: one, whom they call  the shadow,
has lion's claws
a serpent’s neck, the wings of an insect.

Their voices are not voices but noise.

The field in which you work lies naked
is a garden without delight, mournful green.

You have seen from here
what the center of Hell is: You lived it in your flesh
without epiphany
without mystical experience,
enlightenment and, perhaps,
without testimony.

This is you, Juan Domínguez:

A simple man,
a quiet worker,
a godless martyr.

Alba

Te despiertas, Juan Domínguez
en tu ciudad latinoamericana 
y abres los ojos, 
abres la boca de ese rostro 
que es el mismo 
de todos los que serán olvidados
a pesar de la memoria 
de las fotografías 
del pasaporte que jamás tramitaste.

Para este mundo tu rostro importa menos 
que el fruto de tus manos:

                            Cacao, frijol, café.

Las personas que te asedian, los demonios
que ahora surgen 
entre la vida verde 
son apenas personas: uno, al que llaman la sombra 
tiene garras de león
cuello de sierpe, alas de insecto.

Sus voces no son voces sino ruido.

El campo en que trabajas se desnuda 
y es jardín sin delicia, verde triste.

Has visto desde aquí 
lo que es el centro del infierno: lo has vivido en tu carne 
sin epifanía ninguna 
sin experiencia mística
sin iluminación y, tal vez 
sin testimonio.

Esto eres, Juan Domínguez:

Hombre sencillo,
trabajador callado,
mártir sin dios.

Bendito, 
bendito, 
bendito sea Dios
los ángeles cantan y alaban a Dios

Memories of my grandfather’s garden come back to me 
differently than other child of the hood memories
Memories of my grandfather’s garden come back to me
in well water voices 
in deep chest hymns
that begin as a gurgle deep in the belly and rise to the throat
slowly
I remember little of the day my friends jumped me in
I remember fists flailing and afterwards 
those deep, fleshy embraces 
only Latinos know how to give
but grandfather’s garden comes back to me with aromas, with tastes
with corridos sung to the sun
and novenas sung to the moon
thanking both sides of life 
the light and the dark
for their bountiful harvests
Ay, Dios mio,
all those nights we knelt together in brown earth
it was always about harmony, about balance
He’d intone deeply thanking the life-giving soil for its gift
and I’d follow suit
carefully pulling up cilantro, manzanilla, yerba del manso
always making sure metal spade never touches fragile root
sweet, ancient Abuelito, 
how could I be anything but a poet after those moments we shared
Don’t you see,
In my grandfather’s garden 
chiles grew
In my grandfather’s garden 
children grew
In my grandfather’s garden 
poems rose from the earth
like the twisted arms of la llorona desperately reaching out 
for her missing children
In my grandfather’s garden all of these things grew
slowly
because beautiful things take time to bloom
In my grandfather’s garden all of these things would rise 
slowly
like well water voices 
like deep chest hymns 
that begin as a gurgle deep in the belly and rise to the throat 
slowly singing
always singing

Bendito, 
bendito, 
bendito sea Dios
los ángeles cantan y alaban a Dios
los ángeles cantan y alaban a Dios

The spirit of Jane 
lives on in you,
my mother says

trying to describe
who I am. I feel like the girl
in the late-night movie

who gazes up in horror
at the portrait of
her freaky ancestor

as she realizes 
they wear the same
gaudy pendant

round their necks.
For as long as I can
remember, my grandfather

has made the same slip:
he sits in his kitchen,
his gelatinous blue eyes

fixed on me. Well Jane, 
he says, I think I’ll have
another cup of coffee.

^{translated from the Spanish by John Keene}

Dagmaris walking away on the beach.
Asunción, her fan, her trim do.
Gloria two days before dying.
Roberto, pointing to nothing.
Idermis behind Oscar, after Jorge.

I so far away I almost cannot make myself out.
My brother wasting a smile.
My aunt as ugly as the word itself.
Grandmother in her best days.
Grandfather with a festive tie.
My father drunk again.
My mother like a distantly spilled perfume.

Mirando Fotos 

Dagmaris alejándose en la playa.
Asunción su abanico su peinado breve.
Gloria dos días antes de morir.
Roberto señalando nada.
Idermis detrás Oscar después Jorge.

Yo tan lejos que casi no me distingo.
Mi hermano gastando una sonrisa.
Mi tía fea hasta el fondo de la palabra.
Abuela en sus mejores tiempos.
Abuelo con una corbata contenta.
Mi padre embriagado otra vez.
Mi madre como un perfume derramado distante.

translated from the Spanish by Francisco Aragón
 

I learned
Spanish
from my grandma

mijito
don’t cry
she’d tell me

on the mornings
my parents
would leave

to work
at the fish
canneries

my grandma
would chat
with chairs

sing them
old
songs

dance
waltzes with them
in the kitchen

when she’d say
niño barrigón
she’d laugh

with my grandma
I learned
to count clouds

to recognize
mint leaves
in flowerpots

my grandma
wore moons
on her dress

Mexico’s mountains
deserts
ocean

in her eyes
I’d see them
in her braids

I’d touch them
in her voice
smell them

one day
I was told:
she went far away

but still
I feel her
with me

whispering
in my ear:
mijito

En un barrio de Los Ángeles

el español
lo aprendí
de mi abuela

mijito
no llores
me decía

en las mañanas
cuando salían
mis padres

a trabajar
en las canerías
de pescado

mi abuela
platicaba
con las sillas

les cantaba
canciones
antiguas

les bailaba
valses en
la cocina

cuando decía
niño barrigón
se reía

con mi abuela
aprendí
a contar nubes

a reconocer
en las macetas
la yerbabuena

mi abuela
llevaba lunas
en el vestido

la montaña
el desierto
el mar de México

en sus ojos
yo los veía
en sus trenzas

yo los tocaba
con su voz
yo los olía

un día
me dijeron:
se fue muy lejos

pero yo aún
la siento
conmigo

diciéndome
quedito al oído:
mijito

We met ourselves as we came back 
As we hiked the trail from the north. 
Our foot-prints mixed in the rainy path
Coming back and going forth. 
The prints of my comrade’s hob-nailed shoes 
And my tramp shoes mixed in the rain. 
We had climbed for days and days to the North 
And this was the sum of our gain: 
We met ourselves as we came back,
And were happy in mist and rain. 
Our old souls and our new souls 
Met to salute and explain—
That a day shall be as a thousand years, 
And a thousand years as a day. 
The powers of a thousand dreaming skies 
As we shouted along the trail of surprise 
Were gathered in our play: 
The purple skies of the South and the North, 
The crimson skies of the South and the North,
Of tomorrow and yesterday.

if cleansing be needed for me 
to be clean, i cling then to 
the grime. the grit of sand 
under my nails not interested 
in the fire necessary to make 
glass. i cling to hair grease and 
skin oil, the fat seasoned into 
the skillet. i want 
            to survive 
the holy fire as impure 
as marbling through good 
meat, mixed as vinaigrette 
on leaves of lettuce and 
spinach. let us see sometimes 
a little less clearly: you can 
choose to be the diamond 
cut into symmetry, rinsed 
of blood; i’d rather be 
the coal stuck in the walls 
of your lungs. 

^{translated from the Spanish by Manuel Iris and Kevin McHugh}

I was always afraid to write

I woke up today, father
in a world where you no longer exist

but it turns out that sometimes death
is the consolation of immigrants:

today we beat the phone calls
and the airports.

Today you enter my house.

Perhaps that’s why
I’m scared of going back,
of watching the afternoon
without you there.

I don’t want to see your grave.

I don’t want you to have
a grave

but I will go,
I’m going to look at it and then
I will keep talking
with you.

(Now as I write
I’m again the boy 
who raises his hand
seeking for yours.)

Father,
this morning
you did not wake up
and I do not say goodbye:

Today 
you enter my house.

Elegía y bienvenida para mi padre, a cuyo entierro no pude acudir

Siempre tuve miedo de escribir

hoy desperté, Papá 
en un mundo en el que ya no existes

pero resulta que a veces la muerte
es el consuelo de los inmigrantes: 

hoy superamos el teléfono
y los aeropuertos.

Hoy entras a mi casa.

Quizás por eso
tengo miedo de volver,
de ver la tarde
sin que tú la ocupes.

No quiero ver tu tumba. 

No quiero que tengas 
una tumba

pero voy a ir, 
voy a mirarla y después 
voy a seguir hablando 
contigo.

(Ahora que escribo 
soy de nuevo el niño 
que levanta su mano
buscando la tuya.)

Papá, 
esta mañana 
no te despertaste
y yo no me despido: 

hoy entras a mi casa.

Dear President,

I’m a Hispanic immigrant
You know me
You’ve heard me.

But you don’t

You know my story
You know where I’m from
You know what I look for
You know what I want.

But you don’t

Like thousands of people
Like thousands of stories
I’m a Hispanic immigrant
But you don’t know me.

I left pinolillo y cacao helado
Fritangas los viernes en la noche
Nacatamal los fines de semana
A mi abuela en la casa

Al perrito que quedó solo y llorando
A mi Nicaragua

Mi Nicaragua y su rica cultura
Sus hermosas playas y volcanes ardientes
Su gente amorosa y hermosa

I left my Nicaragua hoping
That my future would look brighter here

I left hoping

Y todo por el
“American Dream”

El American Dream que se va desvaneciendo
The longer I stay
Because the longer I stay
I realize
I am not heard
I am not seen
And I am not wanted here

“Permanent residency or citizenship”
Is the first requisite for any scholarship

Because I have to be one of them
I have to be an American
I have to speak English
In order to have real opportunities

Because while I’m still Hispanic
While I’m still an immigrant
There’s no American Dream

¿Y el sueño americano?

With no scholarships
How do I pay ten thousand dollars per year?
How can my immigrant parents with immigrants’ jobs pay ten thousand dollars per year for each of their children? Or even one?

Where’s the American Dream for them?

There isn’t one
Cause they can’t speak English
And they have to be American

The American Dream
That promised we could study, work, live
Fades away

And if there are so many stories like mine?
If there are so many people like me
If they decide to take away my identity and label me as just another immigrant
If presidents, Americans, put all of us into one group
If they assume that they know each one of our stories and each one of our needs
If they think their system is fair
If they think that they’re helping us
If they think they know what’s best for us
If they know immigrants so well
Then how are we still not seen?
How are we still so overlooked?
How are we still so overworked?

Working for a government that does not want us in their country
That is the American Dream.

there are stars in their caps, soldiers
crouched as if the revolution
only walks at knee level. before them, a sea 

of students: one adjusting his glasses, his face 
turned towards some invisible turmoil, 
this refusal that could bring everything 

tomorrow or simply life. or simply 
bullets slicing the Square, shouts 
& fears running & running into bodies

that ripple 
onto concrete 
like children 

napping under Beijing sun, 
eyelids still as peace—          still
as red pooling, as ink

resisting its meaning—           resisting
the fist of a government crushing ambitions
into pennies 

while a single protestor, white 
shirt tucked in like my father 
wears to church, stands 

before a tank 
the way one stands 
before god:

where it moves, he moves. 
where he stands, it stops. 

man & machine dancing, 
carrier bag swinging from his left 
hand, the other one raised as if

he were hailing a cab, having just 
purchased books for the semester, a pack 
of calligraphy paper & an album 

by John Denver, who my immigrant father 
first heard in China in 1979, Denver’s twang 
blaring across campus, in the halls, on the streets, ringing

through every child’s freedom dream—
so almost-heaven that my father, 
upon hearing the news, eats 

his oatmeal in silence, watches
the spoon’s craters disappear
into mush and the clouds

that float over Arizona 
desert, how they divide light 
from the road.

Don’t call me immigrant
I am the New American 
striving in New America
as a New American
I am not your invader
not an animal
nor criminal
I am a just person
just striving 
in a New America

In New America I am
a full-time student 
overtime worker
volunteering in my free time
if I plan enough ahead for free time
if I can even afford the free time
if my free time is approved

I work hard in New America
3rd shift warehouse 
2nd shift my house
always on call
no days off
freelance for life
4 jobs a week
blue and white collar

Don’t call me immigrant
I am the New American 
surviving in New America
as a New American
I am not your invader
not an animal
nor criminal
I am a just person
just surviving
in a New America

This is New America
student loans for all
high rent 
higher utilities 
low pay
rising healthcare costs
the cost of living
—deadly
no living wage
living enraged 
my cousins encaged 
for wanting to live in
a safer part of
New America

Don’t call me immigrant
I am the New American 
living in New America
as a New American
I am not your invader
not an animal
nor criminal
I am a just person
just living
in a New America

Strong and proud
able to withstand 
the distance I have traveled
the distance from my family 
the distance between us
the distance of our dialects
the distance in our churches
the distance in our homes
the distance between my ancestors
and my grandchildren
the distance from the streets
to the dorm rooms
the distance from the field
to the corner office suite

Don’t call me immigrant
I am the New American 
dreaming of New America
as a New American
I am not your invader
not an animal
nor criminal
I am a just person
just dreaming 
of a New America

Old America
don’t be afraid
we are all America
North America
Central America
South America
We are all Americans
We all strive in Americas
We all survive in Americas
We all live in Americas
They are all the same America

We all dream of a greater America
I want you to be paid a living wage
live in affordable housing
without college debt
or medical debt
or credit card debt
or national debt
I want no more racism
I am speaking of a New America
I am part of New America
whether you like it or not
so join me, please

Off to the stationery store on Avenue A 

to buy paper and metal bookends. 

At least 58 people died in Europe 

this week in a brutal cold wave, 

plunging temperatures to 17 degrees 

below zero. When I step inside, 

I’m suddenly phlegmy and coughing.  

Blood starts pouring out of my 

left nostril. A funny old woman 

hidden inside a blue hooded coat 

darts out the door. Republicans 

point at the millions of immigrant 

workers pouring into the country. 

Then I look in the mirror and see 

a funny looking old woman 

with her head wrapped 

like a mummy and a tissue stuck 

in her nose. King Tut’s mummy 

was recently removed from 

the sarcophagus, and placed 

in a climate-controlled box 

to be displayed at a museum in Luxor.  

My husband often had a bloody nose. 

Maybe we’ll find each other 

in another life. When I think of 

losing my children, I feel my body 

crack into pieces. China’s cracking 

down on subversive meditating 

disciples of the Dalai Lama.  

Be thankful for now, Barbara. 

Today. This minute. Here we are.

The world’s largest Confederate monument

was too big to perceive on my earliest trips to the park.

Unlike my parents, I was not an immigrant

but learned, in speech and writing, to represent.

Picnicking at the foot and sometimes peak

of the world’s largest Confederate monument,

we raised our Cokes to the first Georgian president.

His daughter was nine like me, but Jimmy Carter,

unlike my father, was not an immigrant.

Teachers and tour guides stressed the achievement

of turning three vertical granite acres into art.

Since no one called it a Confederate monument,

it remained invisible, like outdated wallpaper meant

long ago to be stripped. Nothing at Stone Mountain Park

echoed my ancestry, but it’s normal for immigrants

not to see themselves in landmarks. On summer nights,

fireworks and laser shows obscured, with sparks,

the world’s largest Confederate monument.

Our story began when my parents arrived as immigrants. 

^{{for the D.A.C.A DREAMers and all our nation’s immigrants}}

^{. . . my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life . . .}

^{. . . mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sange unánime
de los que luchan por la vida . . .}

^{—Roque Dalton, “Como tú”}

Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes
each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t
trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek
that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that
didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from
the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies
of another country I can’t fully claim either.
Como tú, I am either a mirage living among
these faces and streets that raised me here,
or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all
I was taken from and can’t return to again.

Like memory, at times I wish I could erase
the music of my name in Spanish, at times
I cherish it, and despise my other syllables
clashing in English. Como tú, I want to speak
of myself in two languages at once. Despite
my tongues, no word defines me. Like words,
I read my footprints like my past, erased by
waves of circumstance, my future uncertain
as wind. Like the wind, como tú, I carry songs,
howls, whispers, thunder’s growl. Like thunder,
I’m a foreign-borne cloud that’s drifted here,
I’m lightning, and the balm of rain. Como tú,
our blood rains for the dirty thirst of this land.
Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need
to save ourselves, and our country from itself.

While they wait in long lines, legs shifting,
fingers growing tired of holding handrails,
pages of paperwork, give them patience.
Help them to recall the cobalt Mediterranean
or the green valleys full of vineyards and sheep.
When peoples’ words resemble the buzz
of beehives, help them to hear the music
of home, sung from balconies overflowing
with woven rugs and bundled vegetables.
At night, when the worry beads are held
in one palm and a cigarette lit in the other,
give them the memory of their first step
onto solid land, after much ocean, air and clouds,
remind them of the phone call back home saying,
We arrived. Yes, thank God we made it, we are here.

In North Philly, we were ambushed by a rogue visitor;

one that clutched our throats and threatened to choke us

out of our budding Americana.

That March, someone reported us to immigration.

And after an investigation,

we were sent a decision.

Arriving in a letter, neat and succinct, was our invitation to travel.

The Mayson family is ordered to depart from the United States of America

at your own expense on or before April 2, 1979.

And we were guilty of the worst crime.

We had no papers.

Dirty immigrants.

Huddled masses.

Illegal aliens.

Pretending to be Americans,

hiding in plain sight among the good people of Philadelphia.

Frenzied lot of Liberians we were,

not even living high off the fat of the land.

We didn’t even sip their milk or their honey.

A shrinking life we had.

So hushed in fact,

that night I strained to hear my father cry—

my mother’s whimpers, barely audible.

And even I learned to tuck this voice

under my tongue

and didn’t release it for years.

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest—
Did you leave Nature well—
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me—
I have so much to tell—

I got your Letter, and the Birds—
The Maples never knew that you were coming—
I declare - how Red their Faces grew—
But March, forgive me—
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue—
There was no Purple suitable—
You took it all with you—

Who knocks? That April—
Lock the Door—
I will not be pursued—
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied—
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come

That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame—

^{translated from the Japanese by William George Aston}

The cry of the cicada

Gives us no sign

That presently it will die.

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
’Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.

It doesn’t have 
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want—

but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.

              10

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

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.

Whenever I spend the day crying, 
my friends tell me I look high. Good grief,  

they finally understand me.  
Even when the arena is empty, I thank god  

for the shots I miss. If you ever catch me  
only thanking god for the shots I make,  

remind me I’m not thanking god. Remind me  
all my prayers were answered  

the moment I started praying  
for what I already have.  

Jenny says when people ask if she’s out of the woods,  
she tells them she’ll never be out of the woods,  

says there is something lovely about the woods.  
I know how to build a survival shelter  

from fallen tree branches, packed mud,  
and pulled moss. I could survive forever  

on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me  
to stop measuring my lifespan by length,

but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things  
can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up

a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it? 
I’m infinite, I know, but I still have a measly wrinkle

collection compared to my end goal. I would love  
to be a before picture, I think, as I look in the mirror

and mistake my head for the moon. My dark  
thoughts are almost always 238,856 miles away 

from me believing them. I love this life, 
I whisper into my doctor’s stethoscope

so she can hear my heart. My heart, an heirloom
I didn’t inherit until I thought I could die.

Why did I go so long believing I owed the world
my disappointment? Why did I want to take

the world by storm when I could have taken it
by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers

on the side of the road where I broke down?
I’m not about to waste more time

spinning stories about how much time
I’m owed, but there is a man

who is usually here, who isn’t today.  
I don’t know if he’s still alive. I just know

his wife was made of so much hope  
she looked like a firework above his chair.

Will the afterlife be harder if I remember
the people I love, or forget them?

Either way, please let me remember.

Sometimes when you start to ramble
or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble
you will say Well, now I’m rambling
though I don’t think you ever are.
And if you ever are I don’t really care.
And not just because I and everyone really 
at times falls into our own unspooling
—which really I think is a beautiful softness
of being human, trying to show someone else
the color of all our threads, wanting another to know 
everything in us we are trying to show them—
but in the specific, 
in the specific of you
here in this car that you are driving
and in which I am sitting beside you
with regards to you 
and your specific mouth
parting to give way
to the specific sweetness that is
the water of your voice 
tumbling forth—like I said 
I don’t ever really mind
how much more 
you might keep speaking
as it simply means 
I get to hear you 
speak for longer. 
What was a stream 
now a river.

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always in bowls

folding, pinching, rolling the dough

making the bread

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always under water

sifting rice

bluing clothes

starching lives

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always in the earth

planting seeds

removing weeds

growing knives

burying sons

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always under

the cloth

pushing it along

helping it birth into

skirt

dress

curtains to lock out

night

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always inside

the hair

parting

plaiting

twisting it into rainbows

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always inside

pockets

holding the knots

counting the twisted veins

holding onto herself

let her hands disappear

into sky

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always inside the clouds

poking holes for

the rain to fall.

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

                                              One river gives
                                              Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.
 

“I cannot go to school today,”
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
“I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox
And there’s one more—that’s seventeen,
And don’t you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut—my eyes are blue—
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I’m sure that my left leg is broke—
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button’s caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle’s sprained,
My ’pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow’s bent, my spine ain’t straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is—what?
What’s that? What’s that you say?
You say today is . . . Saturday?
G’bye, I’m going out to play!”

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
                 Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
       the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
       recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
       Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
       of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
       what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
       We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,--

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn’t,
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn’t a-been so cold
I might’ve sunk and died.

     But it was      Cold in that water!      It was cold!

I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby
And thought I would jump down.

I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn’t a-been so high
I might’ve jumped and died.

     But it was      High up there!      It was high!

So since I'm still here livin’,
I guess I will live on.
I could’ve died for love—
But for livin’ I was born

Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry—
I’ll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.

     Life is fine!      Fine as wine!      Life is fine!

^{—after Gwendolyn Brooks}

My wild grief didn’t know where to end.
Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied. 
Whole swaths of green swallowed the light. 
All around me, the field was growing. I grew out 
My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face. 
Even in the greenest depths, I crouched 
Towards the light. That summer, everything grew 
So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green. 
Wildest grief grew inside out.

I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming 
In every crevice of my palms. 
I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it 
There: A salt wind lifted 
The hair from my neck. 
At the edge of every green lies an ocean. 
When I saw that blue, I knew then: 
This world will end.

Grief is not the only geography I know. 
Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness, 
Come spring. Every empire will fall: 
I must believe this. I felt it 
Somewhere in the field: my ancestors 
Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon. 
No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, then 
Oh, I’ve loved so immensely. 
That summer, everything I touched 
Was green. All bruises will fade 
From green and blue to skin. 
Let me grow through this green 
And not drown in it. 
Let me be lawless and beloved, 
Ungovernable and unafraid. 
Let me be brave enough to live here. 
Let me be precise in my actions. 
Let me feel hurt. 
I know I can heal. 
Let me try again—again and again.

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

for seven days
we left him 

on the lawn
near a flower 

no english 
in his spine

just asleep 
like jesus 

he is a cloud
admit it

When I talk to my friends I pretend I am standing on the wings 

of a flying plane. I cannot be trusted to tell them how I am. 
Or if I am falling to earth weighing less 

than a dozen roses. Sometimes I dream they have broken up 

with their lovers and are carrying food to my house. 
When I open the mailbox I hear their voices 

like the long upward-winding curve of a train whistle 

passing through the tall grasses and ferns 
after the train has passed. I never get ahead of their shadows. 

I embrace them in front of moving cars. I keep them away 

from my miseries because to say I am miserable is to say I am like them. 

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?

The splendid body is meat, flexor
and flesh pumping, pulling, anti-
gravity maverick just standing
upright all over museums and
in line for the bus and in the laundry
aisle where it’s just standing there
smelling all the detergent like
it’s no big deal. So what if a couple
of its squishy parts are suspended
within, like beach-bungled jellyfish
in a shelved jar, not doing anything?
Nothing on this side of the quantum
tunnel is perfect. The splendid body,
though, is splendid in the way
it keeps its steamy blood in, no matter
how bad it blushes. And splendid
in how it opens its mouth and
these invisible vibrations come
rippling out—if you put your wrist
right up to it when that happens
it feels somewhat like the feet
of many bees. The splendid body
loves the juniper smell of gin, loves
the warmth of printer-fresh paper,
and the sound fallen leaves make
under the wheel of a turning car.
If you touch it between the legs,
the splendid body will quicken
like bubbles in a just-on teakettle.
It knows it can’t exist forever, so
it’s collecting as many flavors as it can—
saffron, rainwater, fish-skin, chive.
Do not distract it from its purpose,
which is to feel everything it can find.

My grandmother kisses
as if bombs are bursting in the backyard,
where mint and jasmine lace their perfumes
through the kitchen window,
as if somewhere, a body is falling apart
and flames are making their way back
through the intricacies of a young boy’s thigh,
as if to walk out the door, your torso
would dance from exit wounds.
When my grandmother kisses, there would be
no flashy smooching, no western music
of pursed lips, she kisses as if to breathe
you inside her, nose pressed to cheek
so that your scent is relearned
and your sweat pearls into drops of gold
inside her lungs, as if while she holds you
death also, is clutching your wrist.
My grandmother kisses as if history
never ended, as if somewhere
a body is still
falling apart.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

No shoes and a glossy
red helmet, I rode
on the back of my dad’s
Harley at seven years old.
Before the divorce.
Before the new apartment.
Before the new marriage.
Before the apple tree.
Before the ceramics in the garbage.
Before the dog’s chain.
Before the koi were all eaten
by the crane. Before the road
between us, there was the road
beneath us, and I was just
big enough not to let go:
Henno Road, creek just below,
rough wind, chicken legs,
and I never knew survival
was like that. If you live,
you look back and beg
for it again, the hazardous
bliss before you know
what you would miss.

We'll say unbelievable things 
to each other in the early morning— 
  
our blue coming up from our roots, 
our water rising in our extraordinary limbs. 
  
All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles 
and ghosts of men, and spirits 
behind those birds of flame. 
  
I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, 
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through. 
  
It is a short walkway— 
into another bedroom. 
  
Consider the handle. Consider the key. 
  
I say to a friend, how scared I am of sharks. 
  
How I thought I saw them in the creek 
across from my street. 
  
I once watched for them, holding a bundle 
of rattlesnake grass in my hand, 
shaking like a weak-leaf girl. 
  
She sends me an article from a recent National Geographic that says, 
  
Sharks bite fewer people each year than 
New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records. 
  
Then she sends me on my way. Into the City of Sharks. 
  
Through another doorway, I walk to the East River saying, 
  
Sharks are people too. 
Sharks are people too. 
Sharks are people too. 
  
I write all the things I need on the bottom 
of my tennis shoes. I say, Let's walk together. 
  
The sun behind me is like a fire. 
Tiny flames in the river's ripples. 
  
I say something to God, but he's not a living thing, 
so I say it to the river, I say, 
  
I want to walk through this doorway 
But without all those ghosts on the edge, 
I want them to stay here. 
I want them to go on without me. 
  
I want them to burn in the water.

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                                              I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

I have eaten 
the plums 
that were in 
the icebox

and which 
you were probably 
saving 
for breakfast

Forgive me 
they were delicious 
so sweet 
and so cold

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Traveling alone for weeks with only 
bicycles and boats 
and Tolstoy for company, 
I hardly ever speak. 

For days a single sentence 
semicolons inside me, 
a long rough cord of knots. 

^{—after The Centennial Banyan at Bayside Market Place in Miami-Dade County}

The Banyan at Bayside 
stands sentry  
over the city it watches.  

Nourished by a century  
of sea breeze and salt brine,  
Miami sidewalks soften  

beneath its crown. Leaf knit  
canopy so grand,  
we have forgotten 

it began as a seed  
that fell from the beak  
of a migrant bird  

fleeing its origins 
in search of sunshine, 
a warmer abode,  

the dream of a home  
gathered from fronds  
and sticks, from detritus, 

hope alone,  
fueling its wings 
spurring it on. 

This is how  
a county grows— 
one kernel at a time.

The seedling begets the sprout, 
the sprout begets the sapling, 
the sapling digs in and strives  

for light, for height,  
for the strength required 
to anchor itself, to grow  

into a trunk that will  
extend its branches  
toward us all, 

verdant arms laden  
with blossoms, with berries,  
with mangos, with flowers 

for our tables, our altars,  
the offerings we cast  
into our river, our ocean,  

for the dirt-warmed hands  
of the gardener who knows  
to prune only  

what can be transplanted, 
what can be regrown 
from the cutting,  

a scion strong enough  
to root itself within  
a new spot 

and grow in soil  
studded with coral  
and limestone, 

wanting only to offer  
itself, to bloom  
again, once more 

For my uncle, a drink must be extravagant 
pleasurable but not sentimental. There must be 
a love for the gurgle of the bottle, a sound 
for the click of neck & lip which sleeps for years 
in the canals of his ears. There must be fire 
down his throat. The tumbler must have nerve 
despite the pain in his backbone, despite the leg 
that goes off. As a child when he first learned 
to form questions did the answers light up 
the bottle pocketed in his father’s jacket.
On winter holidays when he got so lit my father 
drove him home & most likely put him to bed. 
I always knew he would come like this, outdrinking 
everyone & no one lifting a finger to stop what then 
meant nothing now means every lick of it. I love 
to see the lines of his eyes curve when he savors 
juniper berries like a good monk in a monastery. I love 
to hear him say, you gat dat right, when he speaks 
of my dead father. It is possible to make a phrase sound 
so beautiful there’s a rhythm to it. From my uncle 
I’ve learned so much I’ve got nothing on his father.
I could paint the notes for you, the madder 
& amber color of a bottle in a Rembrandt painting. 
Such a non sequitur, I must exaggerate to be exact.
All my lousy life I have fallen for it, this dark brew 
personified. I can tell the answers by the way 
the gin rises in a burst out of his throat. I mean it 
like a clenching mourner, I’ve carried a flask. 

^{translated from the Spanish by Ana Portnoy Brimmer}

^{Wall, I love you because time 
awakens in your frame. 
—Marigloria Palma} 
 

I stayed home with my things today. 
The walls revealed the year’s callousness. 

I left out the stuff that piles up 
impulses consequences 
the outfall. 

Open ocean between the bedroom and kitchen. 
The balcony a port unrestricted by cabotage. 
The entire coast in its windows. 

I moved freely. 

I stayed home today. 
I’ll go out tomorrow.
 

Hoy Casa

^{Te amo pared porque en tu torso 
abre ojos el tiempo. 
—Marigloria Palma} 
 

Hoy me quedé en la casa con mis cosas. 
Las paredes revelaron la crudeza del año. 

Dejé afuera lo otro que se junta 
los impulsos las consecuencias 
la desembocadura. 

Mar abierto entre el cuarto y la cocina. 
Puerto sin cabotaje el balcón. 
La costa entera en sus ventanas. 

Me trasladé libremente. 

Hoy me quedé en casa. 
Mañana salgo.

^{translated from the Spanish by Ana Portnoy Brimmer}

I’ve watched myself 
be cheap astonishment. 

I’ve watched myself be uneven heart 
anachronistic clumsy big small. 

I’ve been vertigo 
on the flesh of the tongue. 

As well as 
visceral friend 
mistake. 

I’ve donned flowers in my eyes 
sadness in my hands and posture. 

When looked at 
I became intended cosmos 
trace of existence. 

Facing the mirror I knew 

I could’ve been born 
on the other side. 

Never having learned of words. 

I could’ve easily
borne another name.
 

Otro nombre

Me he visto ser 
la barata forma de sorprenderme. 

Me he visto ser corazón dispar 
anacrónico torpe grande pequeño. 

He sido vértigo 
en la carne de la lengua. 

También 
víscera amiga 
equivocación. 

He llevado flores en los ojos 
tristeza en las manos y en la postura. 

Me miraron 
y fui intención de cosmos 
marca de paso. 

Frente al espejo supe 

pude haber nacido 
justo en el otro lado. 

Jamás haberme enterado de la palabra. 

Fácilmente pude haber tenido 
otro nombre.

 

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. 
We hear with our skeletons’ bones.
We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, 
a walled garden. 
Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.
A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.
Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.
Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,
restarts.  

A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.

Unborn ones, take nothing for granted.
Not nectar, not thirst.

May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.

May you have your portions of beauty, of grief, 
in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine. 

My father is all  
at once. It is noon and widens  
further into another  
landscape of feet.  
The words he uses are a measure  
of the half-point 
to silence. We listen  
to the mirror on the wall  
and my father is bent  
down with 
grizzle and returning 
spaces. My father reminds me  
of my father. Father  
as conveyance, as legal 
document, as night flight, lost  
pitch. Next question. For something  
to do, we name the body  
by streaming daylight:  
knee, nerve, stomach. Reason  
the tender sound of sun. Name hope 
as a pleasantry. We are spending  
our time folded  
into it, finding 
ourselves. We are not  
doing nothing. We are planning 
the task of letting go  
of all thought and my father is root 
and tree. I put my hand  
on his hand 
and build a small  
mountain. I haven’t described 
his voice. An hour passes again.  
A sound not said. A negative 
ghost. A rain  
unbuckles the leaves. 
Perhaps we’ll look  
in the mirror and see 
what just happened— 
what I mean  
is, the future. 

^{El Retiro, Colombia}

When I step naked into my shower,
I find, staring down at me,
its eight dark eyes peering over
the silver lip of the sprayer, a tarantula
the size of a bar of soap.

There’s a reason we tap out our shoes,
check behind pillows every night
before bed. Spiders and scorpions make
a daily pilgrimage of this house, through
windows and doors, to and from the jungle
that presses in on us from all sides.

How many have I displaced, or killed,
I wonder, looking up, surprised by this creature,
each of us weighing options: four pairs of legs
leaping into the falls and down the bluff
of my body. Or two, scrambling out
into the cold to fetch a broom.

And I think, not  my shower today, but  ours.

“You stay up there and look,” I hear myself say,
and with this a small peace forms between us.
My hands lather and scrub. The brown voyeur
drums one hairy finger just at the edge
of the cascade—that thin wet line
between  curious  and  afraid, where each of us
must make a home.

The shadow I cast when I stand  
in the sun has disappeared
beneath the trees, shadows
of crows over the roof
of the post office, or the field
of clover they fly above, throats
open, stitching the world
together with a fine thread,
doing the work of belonging.
Nothing is too trivial to love
enough to walk toward it,
your footsteps leaving 
badges on the earth, even
the nettles that chafe
your ankles worthy of love,
sparks of pain, like your
shadow, that prove
you’re alive.

Count me among the noon risers who stumble,
dazed and bad-haired, from the nest midday,
pecking the crazed dirt for half-torn moth, 
pear’s white core, severed worm. I’ve never 
been one to trill at chink of dawn, to hop, 
skip, chirrup before full sun. I’m better 
at picking over crumbs, stitching a quilt
from what’s left, remaindered, given up
for gone. Better at betting the careless 
will miss the best. Count me among
the nightbirds who sip starlight, a guitar’s
fading strains. Find me where moondust 
swirls in streetlamp glow and stray dogs sleep.
What clings to the bone is most sweet.

^{translated from the Spanish by Manuel Iris and Pat Brennan}

My mother looks out her window and says it’s raining 
I look outside
it is actually raining    She tells me
when you were a child you looked for puddles
to see the clouds        I open my window

everything smells like the taste of jicama

we hang up the phone              step outside 
and smile
as if we were looking at the same rain.

Mi madre mira

Mi madre mira su ventana y dice llueve
miro afuera
realmente está lloviendo        dice 
cuando niño te buscabas charcos 
para ver las nubes      abro mi ventana

todo huele como a sabor de jícama

colgamos el teléfono      salimos a la puerta 
sonreímos 
como si viéramos la misma lluvia

^{translated from the Spanish by Manuel Iris and Kevin McHugh}

Sometimes I’m afraid you will talk
in the language in which I cannot dream.

I almost always wish
that you live first
the language of the house,
the one in which I lull you to sleep,
in which I imagine you
telling me your things.

(You still do not know
that there is a different music, outside)

Lately
I have been afraid of the months
because you were born here,
in this place, in this language
in which I am a foreigner

and I want
to live
in your world
in the language that you will have,
within your words.

I am afraid
that you will also know
the impossibility of belonging.

But you will build your own homeland, like anyone else.

If someone asks you where are you from,
tell them that you came from your father’s heart,
a heart that would learn any language
to talk with you.

El idioma de la casa

A veces tengo miedo de que hables 
el idioma en el que no puedo soñar.

Casi siempre deseo  
que primero vivas 
el idioma de la casa,  
el mismo en que te arrullo, 
en el que te imagino  
platicándome tus cosas. 

(Todavía no distingues  
que afuera hay otra música)

Últimamente 
tengo miedo de los meses  
porque tú has nacido aquí, 
en este sitio, en este idioma  
en el que soy un extranjero

y yo quiero  
vivir dentro  
de tu mundo, 
del idioma que tendrás,  
de tus palabras. 

Me da miedo 
que conozcas 
la imposibilidad de pertenecer.

Pero te harás tu patria, como cualquiera.

Si te preguntan de dónde eres  
diles que has venido del corazón de tu padre, 
de un corazón  
que aprendería cualquier idioma 
para hablar contigo.

I lost a tooth, a ring, and my weirdo shirt, 
the chapbook I tore apart and put together  
in the middle of the night, 
and that one girl’s laptop.

I still have the pictures we took near midnight;  
eyes too big for my face and head recently shaved,  
new heartbreak learned in my body. The too quiet nights  
jarring in the dark, limbs buzzing— 

On the train the fluorescent lights  
were blinding and my brain was addled  
by sleepless weeks and weeks.  
That girl’s laptop was in a tote bag in my hands and then it wasn’t  
and I was on the platform watching the train disappear.  
How helpless I felt. How everyday was that very day; 
the way everything splintered—

how the world sang. The way  
I could conjure earthquakes;  
The cold of my first winter.  
The way I came alive and burned.

***

I wish I could take it back; in your childhood bed,  
how it was my face without me behind it  
and my hands without my touch as they slipped out of view. 
I wish I could take back that messy breakfast, a racket at dawn,  
the hours smudged by time. Did I eat it? Did I clean up  
after myself? Enamored by the sharp yellowness of the yolk,  
its flavor buttery in my mouth.

I wish I could take it all back; in the hospital,  
ravaged by every dark impulse,  
your mother sitting across from me, promising me  
I would never step foot in her house again. 

The girl I had been, lost  
among the roots behind your house.  
In a black wig, holding a cigarette,  
enchanted by the whispering leaves.  
My footsteps in the snow.

“Embuste,” Abuela said. 
            A more polite way to say 
                        “Lie!” or “Liar!” Not true

that story told—a tale 
            spun from cobwebs 
                        and a trail of smoke, 

so flimsy it crumbled 
            with the weight of 
                        its fiction. Embuste,

gentle reprimand, anger 
            demoted to delight, 
                        perhaps even pride.

Not for the brazenness  
            but for the embroidery.  
                        And then her lively eyes 

narrowed, warning us: 
            less hasty stitching  
                        next time. Sturdier thread.  

Who is the you behind the you
you revive every morning and follow out
into sun covered in fog, under white pines

and over bridges crossing cold
flowing streams, rivers of snow melt?
When you board the train willingly

with a letter that begins, I don’t wish
I’d never met you, do those double
negatives negate your shame

and suffering? When you plunge up
the tracks, pass the mountains of your lost
New England shangri-la, your past

and family and dissolution of what mattered
most to you, do you keep your eyes averted
or do you watch the stopped mills

and sullen bricks? When you see
a raccoon on the flat factory roof do you
turn to your seatmate and include them

in the marvel? Or do you stop up
your ears with buds, and how will
those buds flower? Into song,

speech, music without words?
What do you ask yourself as coffee
brews in the back and you smell

pastries in the microwave, the café
car and its offerings, and you remember
Malcolm X worked the cross-country trains?

As did your father’s uncles, and their
father and uncles, and theirs, and on back?
How do you board and sit and watch

and listen, leaving behind the ruined cities
you track through? How do you keep
quiet? How do you see the stilled

cranes, the rusted machinery of childhood
that has yet to be cleared, the human
lives in buses and cars and on foot

passing by still, or waiting at the bus stops,
waiting at the stations of these former
sites of industry and bust, these Camdens

and Amboys, Bridgeports and Holyokes?
Who are you and how do you pass through
and how is it the best you can hope for is

that someone writes I don’t wish I’d never
met you, what have you ever done? What will
you do now? Where and how will you get off,

beside which mill or factory, which storage tank
or coker unit, where will you find the refinery
intended for the soul? The one that burns through

the self? That will finally change this world?

^{for Indrek}

I.  
In Estonia, Indrek is taking his children  
to the Dollar Market to look at bananas.  
He wants them to know about the presence of fruit, 
about globes of light tart to the tongue, about the 
twang of tangelos, the cloth of persimmons,  
the dull little mons of kiwi. There is not a chance 
for a taste where rubles are scarce and dollars, harder.  
Even beef is doled out welfare-thin on Saturday’s platter.  
They light the few candles not reserved for the dead, 
and try not to think of the small bites of the coming winter,  
of irradiated fields or the diminished catch in the fisherman’s  
net. They tell of bananas yellow as daffodils. And mango—  
which tastes as if the whole world came out from her womb. 

II  
Colombia, 1928, bananas rot in the fields.   
A strip of lost villages between railyard   
and cemetery. The United Fruit Company   
train, a yellow painted slug, eats  
up the swamps and jungle. Campesinos  
replace Indians who are a dream and a rubble  
of bloody stones hacked into coffins: malaria,  
tuberculosis, cholera, machetes of the jefes.  
They become like the empty carts that shatter  
the landscape. Their hands, no longer pulling green 
teats from the trees, now twist into death, into silence 
and obedience. They wait in Aracataca, poised 
as statues between hemispheres. They would rather 
be tilling their plots for black beans. They would 
rather grow wings and rise as péricos—parrots, poets,  
clowns—a word which means all this, pericos, those  
messengers from Mictlán, the underworld, where ancestors  
of the slain arise with the vengeance of Tláloc. A stench 
permeates the wind as bananas, black on the stumps, char  
into odor. The murdered Mestizos have long been cleared  
and begin their new duties as fertilizer for the plantations.  
Feathers fall over the newly spaded soil: turquoise,  
scarlet, azure, quetzal, and yellow litters  
the graves like gold talons of bananas.

III   
Dear I, 

The 3’ x 6’ boxes in front of the hippie  
market in Boulder are radiant with marigolds, some 
with heads as big as my Indian face. They signify 
death to me, as it is Labor Day and already  
I am making up the guest list for my Día de los Muertos  
altar. I’ll need maravillas so this year I plant caléndulas  
for blooming through snow that will fall before November.  
I am shopping for “no-spray” bananas. I forego 
the Dole and Chiquita, that name that always made me  
blush for being christened with that title. But now 
I am only a little small, though still brown enough 
for the—Where are you from? Probably my ancestors  
planted a placenta here as well as on my Calífas coast  
where alien shellfish replaced native mussels, 
clams and oysters in 1886. I’m from  
the 21st Century, I tell them, and feel  
rude for it—when all I desire  
is bananas without pesticides. They’re smaller 
than plantains which are green outside and firm 
and golden when sliced. Fried in butter  
they turn yellow as over-ripe fruit. And sweet. 
I ask the produce manager how to crate and  
pack bananas to Estonia. She glares at me   
suspiciously: You can’t do that. I know.  
There must be some law. You might spread  
diseases. They would arrive as mush, anyway. 
I am thinking of children in Estonia with  
no fried plátanos to eat with their fish as  
the Blond turns away, still without shedding  
a smile at me—me, Hija del Sol, Earth’s Daughter, lover  
of bananas. I buy up Baltic wheat. I buy up organic 
bananas, butter y canela. I ship banana bread. 

IV  
At Big Mountain uranium  
sings through the dreams of the people.  
Women dress in glowing symmetries, sheep  
clouds gather below the bluffs, sundown  
sandstone blooms in four corners. Smell of sage  
penetrates as state tractors with chains trawl the resisting  
plants, gouging anew the tribal borders, uprooting 
all in their path like Amazonian ants, breaking 
the hearts of the widows. Elders and children 
cut the fences again and again as wind whips 
the waist of ancient rock. Sheep nip across  
centuries in the people’s blood, and are carried 
off by Federal choppers waiting in the canyon 
with orders and slings. A long winter, little wool 
to spin, medicine lost in the desecration of the desert. 
Old women weep as the camera rolls on the dark 
side of conquest. Encounter rerun. Uranium. 1992. 

V  
I worry about winter in a place  
I’ve never been, about exiles in their  
homeland gathered around a fire,  
about the slavery of substance and  
gruel: Will there be enough to eat?  
Will there be enough to feed? And  
they dream of beaches and pies, hemispheres  
of soft fruit found only in the heat of the planet.  
Sugar cane seeks out tropics; and dictates  
a Resolution to stun the tongues of those  
who can afford to pay: imported plums, bullets,  
black caviar large as peas, smoked meats  
the color of Southern lynchings, what we don’t  
discuss in letters. You are out of work.  
Not many jobs today for high physicists  
in Estonia, you say. Poetry, though, is food  
for the soul. And bread? What is cake before 
corn and the potato? Before the encounter  
of animals, women and wheat? Stocks, high  
these days in survival products: 500 years later tomato  
size tumors bloom in the necks of the pickers. 
On my coast, Diablo dominates the golden hills, 
the faultlines. On ancestral land, Vandenberg shoots  
nuclear payloads to Kwajalein, a Pacific atoll, where 68%  
of all infants are born amphibian or anemones. But poetry  
is for the soul. I speak of spirit, the yellow seed 
in air as life is the seed in water, and the poetry 
of Improbability, the magic in the Movement 
of quarks and sunlight, the subtle basketry  
of hadrons and neutrinos of color, how what you do 
is what you get—bananas or worry.  
What do you say? Your friend,   
                                                       a Chicana poet. 

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Pass me the Kleenex.
Here he is now, here, and I do nothing.
I am aware of a necessity of moving
but I do nothing.
It’s something structural, like anthrax.
Here he is now, here; & I do nothing.

We wake up in the beds our mothers slept in.
Here he is now, here, & I do nothing.
My father, in a fairly distinguished life
made room for his grief.
Time, after her death, for the diagnosis
and for the twins, & the beloved his

to twine up outside, & long afterwards
lady, you got a wonder.
Sorry you died, lady: some have not recovered:
I would have known you: the twins have not recovered
they bluster on motorcycles and give my mother a hard time
where she is.

is from Vietnam. Green card, she says. Many  
people, my uncle the doctor, died in boats after April 30, 1975, she says. She tells me about  
her fiancé. Thirteen years and when I couldn’t get back for my visit  
after September 11, 2001, the new laws, she says, he kicked me out. His mother, she  
says. She went back for a visit in 2007 and he was a doctor, offered 
her an apartment, but she likes 
her own money and she wouldn’t do that 
to his wife, she says. When my friend  
the performance artist, a vamp, shows up to meet me, the woman who cuts and paints  
my toenails tells us about the last guy who asked her out. Got her number from their shared  
bank teller. Drove her around and then brought her back to his house. When she refused  
his advances—Did he even make you dinner? the performance artist asks—he told her she was a  
high-quality woman. I remember dating, all the pop-up ads for instructional guides on  
Becoming a High-Quality Woman. Save your money, she says. The bell on the door  
is a white crystal pocket 

and a college student walks in. Fill? The performance artist and I make plans for sushi  
while my toenails dry. When I am ready to pay, the woman who cut and painted my toenails stops  
as she’s walking to the register and hugs me from behind. So tall! she says, tenderly, petting  
my forearm hair. It is May 18, 2016, and our good president has now been at war longer  
than any other in American history.

Ears are the eyes on the sides of your head. 
Memory lives here, between these apostrophes. 
As if to predict music, the ear contains a drum.

A musical note calling out for the shape of music. 
For the coin in the slot to unlock the gears. 
For the egg with a horse in it.

Some people are born addicted to sense. 
Some are born infected with silence. 
Poetry is an-ant-ant-anti-antibiotic.

“A horse pill.” 
Yes, there is an actual horse in this pill. 
Imagine it like a fetus pressed to the shell.

The reason there are no unicorns is just that. 
This is the egg tooth. 
And you, what did you pay to enter this world?

From a couch 
littered with throw pillows 

they are staring at me 
and my open notebook, 

and even though their tails 
are not twitching 

and their secret inboard 
motors are not audible, 

I know they are assuming 
in unison 

that I am writing 
yet another dog poem 

rather than one about 
the two of them,

but as you can see, 
they are actually 

featured here, 
an irony which is all 

I have to compete 
with their ceaseless gaze.

In the mirror I’ve said, “Immigrant
my name is argument,
as small as my means”

As weakly as the moon reflecting
The gravity of stars
Trying to unearth ancient huacos—vessels
For gods

Who otherwise inhabit local boulders,
Traffic circles, the Circle K,
But I’ve been dreaming

Of killer ghosts to be dealt with
In real-time ways like
               breathe in, hold,

               turn away—blood
               on my face
               and shirt and hands—

From a wayward truth about great ancestors

“They’re damaged, they’re damaged,
they’re so
comfortable,” said

In a three-line English
That should help me wash
The present moment of belief, this

On a day without gods,
With only the staff they offered us to strike Earth
And there make the navel of the world

Don’t even bother to break it

In the shadows of city lights, we dwelled,
untold stories, almas olvidadas,
enduring streets where dreams were bought and sold.

Corazones—like broken glass,
reflecting pain, the sting of scorn,
searching for love en la oscuridad.

Walking the piers—our runway, steps unsure,
inocencia perdida seeking solace, grace,
amidst the chaos, makeshift homes.

Voices silenced, cries ignored,
por un mundo that turned a blind eye,
yet we found familia in our souls.

Remember these legends,
children marked by endless strife,
love soaring entre el odio.

In this lucha, there was truth,
in this love, there was vida,
in this survival, there was hope.

Para mi gente ...
chequealo ...
Bushwick on my mind
quinceañeras at the bodega
with their pretty pink dresses
luscious dark eyes
longing to cut the Valencia cakes
while Mr. Softee lingers
over coco helados y piragüeros
fighting for the last dollar

Across the street,
santeros dressed in white
with their collares
buying chickens at the poultry shop
for their next tambor
to be held this Sunday
in someone else’s crowded basement

Maggie cruisin’ back and forth
back and forth
keeping the dealers in check
as the sounds of beepers
Rottweiler fights
Freestyle
& chanting from the Pentecostal church
fill the air with the smells
of pernil, alcapurrias y empanadas
from La Claribel—
the best cuchifrito in town

Up on the roof,
Miguelito giving blowjobs
to gray-haired old men
so that he can get a fade
at Paul’s boutique
or buy mami that fake painting
she wanted for $5.99
down Knickerbocker Avenue

Malitza walking by
pregnant with her second baby
only 18 & already night manager at McDonald’s
She wasn’t gonna end up consumed
in the empty little crack bags
she counted
every morning
on her way to Grover Cleveland High School

Hector, her boyfriend,
home from playing handball all day
lying shirtless on the couch blunted out of his mind
staring at the roach on the ceiling
one single roach in a vast desert
or maybe an alien exploring a new world
the ceiling fan—
his spaceship

Doña Carmen sneezing so loud
the walls so thin
Hector says ‘Salud’
& she hears him from the second floor
over Walter Mercado
on Canal 41
Turning off the kitchen lights
so that the roaches can scurry into the darkness—
their freedom
like the children playing out all night

Waiting for the L train
‘Mira, Georgie ...
Gimme a quarter!’
‘Fine ...
but cha betta pay me back tomorrow!’

Life in Bushwick,
Ain’t it a trip!
One day we’ll all be buried
beneath the ground we spit on 

—after Czeslaw Milosz


Let’s say he actually
did not
arrive on a boat—
that the relentless colonel
never found his subtle throat hidden
under the trance of the clave
or thunder hands that spoke
repiques of those crimes
Let’s say he went to Nueva York
on the assumption
Mario Bauzá
Machito or
Tito (Rodríguez or Puente)
could make his legs & hips move
in a constellation of joy
Let’s say he merely
tried
to hear the echo of his arms
flapping through a factory
like a red rag fastened to that fan
Let’s say the cold
often froze his vowels
tan Caribeña 
tan resualosa y mermelada—
Could the immigrant even
mute the melody of his tongue—
They say it is silence
that makes music
But this will be like
drumming
on a distant tuft of cloud like
the colonel cutting the sound he never found
But it takes years of forgetting
for a stranger
to breathe the saltwater
or glance at a pile of stones
& say
I arrived through this portal
This is now my home . . .