^{for J.}

Afloat out on the starlit water
where ordinary life’s a dream
as to two figures in a frame,
I touch the moon, and watch it shatter.

But when I touch you, you remain,
my body weightless in your arms
while quietly your hand conforms
to the hard griefs along my spine.

Beneath the sky’s unseeing eyes
I let my head rest in your palm,
making a little world of calm
for luck and longing to revise 

scenes too early to recall—
the frightened mouth, the soured breast,
abandoned den or splintered nest
resurfaced in the Lovers’ Pool.

Where our bodies intersect
like children whose fingers cross
to make a promise promise less
and guard this moment from the next.

And now before you disappear,
I’ve brought us once again to soak
in sulfur, salt, and arsenic,
so that in here, we’re always there.

How nearly can I  
inhabit someone  
else’s body? I don’t  
have any money.  
Prostrate, scrolling  
through other people’s  
clothes, I’m wearing  
the tearable pink dress 
I met you in. It came  
taped up in a box 
that smelled like house  
and once held water filters.  
These truncated mannequins  
I imagine angels appear as— 
headless torsos, voices  
emanating from necks— 
scare me like you did.  
Still I let divine will  
fill me like a windsock,  
commencing a delirious  
motion. Now my love is a line  
pulled by no current.  
Thanks for your purchase!  
wrote the woman in Queens 
on scalloped cardstock. 
Pulling her dress over  
my head, light sieved  
through sheer silk  
and I saw the threads  
binding my delight. 

I’m a penguin, birthing outside myself, racing  
down a glacier. My flippers behind the wheel  
of a fastback Mustang in a rainstorm.  
Sometimes I find comfort in the weather,

shaped like a gourd and web-toed. I unname him,  
my father who cursed us all. Instead, I name mud pies.  
I mix the grit with melting snow and bake them  
in the sun, the rich organic churn and worms rotting 

as they warm. I don’t regret the unsaid  
or the disgrace I release. I wake unafraid  
the morning after each of my children is born.  
Penguins aren’t starfish; limbs gone never return. 

My nest becomes unclutched. 
What I accomplished is tremendous.

The family I’m staying with,  
because my father is working,  
have called their dog Darkness,  
and it is a beautiful name.  
I’ve decided to camp.  
And out here in an old tent  
on the edges of their property,  
Darkness encircles me.  
I burrow my back into the field,  
strangely soft with a grass I don’t  
know the name of. I should know  
the names of grasses, and of trees,  
and of so many things.  
                                    Soon, the thick  
wind loosens into coolness and the light  
begins to dim. As I look up into Darkness,  
the underside of her tongue is spotty  
with inky-on-pink constellations.  

Her body makes me think of my own body,  
my fingertips dry as match heads 
that will light this nameless grass if I’m  
not careful. 
                  Darkness is a good teacher,  
and she guides me to be gentle with myself.  
With a nuzzle of her head into my hand,  
she says, in her way, that I am ok.  
I stroke her so long that the heavy night  
settles, and all that is left is the white blaze  
on her chest. 
          Soon, my eyes, and I, will adjust.  
But for now, I’m suspended,  
in this moment that is the sum  
of all moments.  
The grass, it occurs to me,  
is bluestem. The air is amniotic.  
And I cry a good cry as the great dog  
keeps on guarding me. 

The pale sound of jilgueros trilling in the jungle.
Abuelo rocks in his chair and maps the birds
in his head, practiced in the geometry of sound.
 
My uncle stokes the cabin’s ironblack stove
with a short rod. The flames that come are his
loves. I cook—chile panameño, coconut milk—
 
a recipe I’d wanted to try. Abuelo eats,
suppresses the color that builds in his cheek.
To him the chile is a flash of snake in the mud.
 
He asks for plain rice, beans. Tío hugs his father,
kneels in front of the fire, whispers away the dying
of his little flames. We soak rice until
 
the water clouds. On the television, a fiesta…
 
The person I am showing the poem to
stops reading. He questions the TV,
circles it with a felt pen. “This feels so
 
out of place in a jungle to me. Can you
explain to the reader why it’s there?”
For a moment, I can’t believe. 

You don’t think we have 1930s technology?
The poem was trying to talk about stereotype,
gentleness instead of violence for once.
 
But now I should fill the little room
of my sonnet explaining how we own a TV?
A shame, because I had a great last line—
 
there was a parade in it, and a dancing
horse like you wouldn’t believe.

I am a child  
of wonder again and 
rain tells me to watch 
for snails and slugs. 

I gather dirt, sand, and sticks 
for the terrarium 
where I make a safe home 
away from footsteps, fast cars, and ditch water.

I don’t want them to die  
so I make them  
a space for living. 

I ask my ma to buy lettuce 
because in the book I got from the library 
I learned they will eat lettuce.

I am  
greedy to learn  
what keeps everything alive.

Their spiral shapes leave shiny trails behind. 
I imagine I am a snail leaving  
magic everywhere I go.

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.

I always wanted a daughter, which is 
to say, I wanted a better self,

flicked from my marrow—made 
flesh. I wanted this bone-of-my-bones

to move in the world, exceptional 
and unharmed. Not this world. But a world

almost exactly unlike it. Same 
paved streets and street cafés, same slow

unfurl of spring. Only, in that world, 
the green of field and orchard is still wanton

with winged things, their bellies powdered 
with the flowers’ gold dust.

Daughter, I say, and I mean a list 
of what-ifs, a cacophony of sorrows.

I imagine her tall, lithe as willows. 
When I say Daughter,

I mean a match, ready to strike herself 
against the world that isn’t

this one. I mean luck. I mean a river 
empty of drowning. I mean an arrow

aimed at an unnamed star. Someone 
once said a daughter is a needle in the heart.

I would take that needle, sew her a dress 
of yarrow and blood.

In the world not this one, 
I have a daughter. She is a long braid,

a memory of fire. She goes before me, 
shining darkly, into a city—

of gold, of salt—that I will never see.

What are these strangers 
sitting on the table in their ruffled
collars. They open, close, open,
emit the scent of cracked pepper 
and honey. Magenta punctuation marks 
at which to pause. Pink commas 
against the green scrub. 
I would trade ten goats for one whiff 
of peonies opening in a vase. 
An ancient proverb says 
you should not let a woodpecker 
see you plucking a peony 
lest it peck out your eyes. 
We are afraid of happiness. 
Peonies are to loneliness 
what wind is to the trees. 
Are they animal? Mineral? 
Vegetable? They move 
as the sun moves. When I 
brought them home 
they were dark. Now, 
a whisper, balletic tulle. 
They are not diminished 
even as they turn to smoke.