To be saved by ideas: a fantasy I harbored.
In those days, there was always something
from which I needed saving. The past, its
expansive grammar, the way my grief was
a kind of deranged hope. I wanted a different
country, an old language to burst forth like
a hidden river. “Love is the cause of what
ails you,” wrote Lauren Berlant. Oof. Most likely,
no man is a refuge. But we can try all the same.

It is raining again. I’m struggling to remember
everything. Thank god: it is not too late to tell
a new story. Thank god: a sonnet is not that
deep of a chasm. Soon, I may climb out toward
the long expanse of our remaking.

±That after all this I have still chosen life.
That I have made a way out of one death
in friendship and sex. My Virgil is weak.

The first circumstance the Georgics lead
me: to a question I can farm still in hell,
pretty as it seems to dig out a black pot

to return a shy sapling to itself. A rich man
buys a pasture, 4-acres, tills only a quarter
of his land. Wildflowers, the rest: seeds,

and hope drifting under. A green brigade
to surprise us: purple asters bright cut,
upside down, in reverse, hung to dry.

May I invoke Blake? A grand mother
hanging on the wrong side of the street.
Heliotrope-me from a distance: deadhead

greying and delicate to the passing breeze.
Fragrant after of oil and age, flake. Vigil
-me awake to a life worth saving past

my ken. Friends bear scissors to cut me
down. Press me to a book I have loved,
or so I may have said once in passing.

Asa will know I have born seeds, and slip
my dried life into an envelope, a red pen
taking my name:  JIMIN. Dust to seed

in the unbiblical cadence of a maimed poet:
JIMIN. Esther snips my stem to curl me
into a ring. How fond she is of the victor

in Victorian. Patricia comes bearing herself.
My oldest, dearest friend who has survived
herself so fully in ways I was never able to

gain. In my return my lovers come. Matthew,
first love who is married. Gabriel, my second,
married. In my failures you have found a new

way out and I am not unhappy. I suppose
I am to be farming, led as I am by a mystic
who has written before me. I have spread
myself in a sweat of a forgiveness I must

receive. I have not led a bad life but should I
like to do it better isn’t this what hell is for?
From a distance swaying with rake lifted. High
progress I give myself. Forgive me, myself.

on the subway lose control    of the rain     in her hair
by untying the tight pact of her bun

Help     is the new Amen     Amen, I’m drowning
in women who know what they want

you bread the tilapia   hands gloved in powder
while I tell you about the trip home
a woman spilled her groceries

on the platform eight oranges rolled across the dirty floor

I watched her recollect the planets
and knew something

small and bright as a lime    I bent down
Can I amen you?  and after being born
and born again I was born
again—

do you know what I mean, tilapia hands, let me
turn on the faucet    I know the joy

of Marie Curie sleeping with radium
women aren’t lovely   they’re love

we live in the bitchery of honesty
you, you     most especially
murdering lemon

over fish and singing
a dum-dum song about my ass
you, you     magentamouth transfixtress my magnet

those oranges constellated from yellow line to trash can
her fingernails
lurched fuchsia and turquoise
a cigarette parked behind her ear

cigarettes and fruit, what she put in her mouth
we gathered the flock of

at the top of those subway stairs
hugged in white light
a silver-haired woman

dressed to the nines and tens
pulled the leashes
of two saint bernards
mannish with drool
manifested their attention

and mine     a red kerchief’s splash and woo
at her throat
while down below
the stranger awarded me

an orange which I later peeled in one go while the snow ate my clothes like a man

the air smelled floral
like the earth

was ours     and bragging

I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.

my kin, my ripe bushel of apples,
orcharding, my wealth:  Neelo
with the round face & always on
some kind of exercise routine.  Lubnah
name dripping silk, honey, a fat drop
of yogurt & blueberry.  Lubnah  who i haven’t
seen in years but then looks up at me
from the photo in my baby album,  Khudejha,
who left me when i told my truth, who i knew
my words landed on like a knife, though
i did all i could to cut with flowers, bouquet
after bouquet.  Ruquia,  who i left & missed
with each footstep, would wake in the night
confused, calling her name. the years makes
long our distance, when i see her again
we’re strangers, talking about the people
in our lives like they’re characters in a tv show.
our worlds, fiction to each other, the raging
ocean between us, a murder of marine
life. cut me open & there they are: the ones
who left me, the ones i left, the roots
that ground me, the wind combing
my hair. &  Mamun,  who scared
me across the country for a decade, scattered
me like a seed. i still dream of the world
where i could’ve been his daughter. my ripe.
my beautiful apple. i still dream
of the world where he calls & i answer.

Keep a son from his mother until her last breath.

          When she goes, all she’ll know of him is desert

heat, folded letters, a phantom of his sixteen-year-old self outside

          her nursing home window, unable to come inside.  Venite,

Chepito, venite.  If he could, he’d leave the gang, leave the gun,

          come home.  Venite.  If he could, he’d disappear the war,

his father’s strike, his father’s stroke. If he could, he’d 

          pick a different place, a different time, free his hands

of any crime, of any charge. When he goes, all he’ll know

          of her is the faint fatigue of her voice, her full name tattooed 

beneath his throat. When he goes, all he’ll know of life is 

          every inch of a cell, the way the decades flew by, and how he was made

to rot, alone.

You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty holds a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.

You take no joy when dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.

But when it all has passed and you have lost
The swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.