Someone had laced the pot,

my date shape-shifting 

in the car’s plush seat. 

I rolled with it, his tongue, 

not sexy or soft, but possibly 

earnest. I must have bit him 

on purpose to regain my breath, 

redirect him away from my throat. 

Get it on, bang a gong, get it on,

his favorite song on the mixtape.

I was a liar, called my parents 

hours later from a distant Finger Lake 

to say I was sleeping at Suzanne’s. 

Is a hydra like the zebra mussel 

taking hold here, forever altering 

the ecology of Keuka and me, half-dressed 

in his younger sister’s top bunk, 

my bony hips against his, 

the popcorn ceiling scraping my back 

each time I was flipped over. 

I’d foreseen this happening 

the second we left the gymnasium 

with its stupid decorations. 

Through the bay window of a child’s room,

the black water licked the dock,

the huge lake a dream

into which I threw my still boyish body.

He wasn’t aware of me, 

nor I of him. How inelegant and sad 

our untangling was, how we’d misremember it.

Write about walking into the building

as a new teacher. Write yourself hopeful.

Write a row of empty desks. Write the face

of a student you’ve almost forgotten;

he’s worn a Derek Jeter jersey all year.

Do not conjecture about the adults

he goes home to, or the place he calls home. 

Write about how he came to you for help

each October morning his sophomore year.

Write about teaching Othello to him;

write Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, 

rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven. 

Write about reading his obituary

five years after he graduated. Write

a poem containing the words “common”

“core,” “differentiate,” and “overdose.”

Write the names of the ones you will never

forget: “Jenna,” “Tiberious,” “Heaven,”

“Megan,” “Tanya,” “Kingsley” “Ashley,” “David.”

Write Mari with “Nobody’s Baby” tattooed

in cursive on her neck, spitting sixteen bars

in the backrow, as little white Mike beatboxed

“Candy Shop” and the whole class exploded.

Write about Zuly and Nely, sisters

from Guatemala, upon whom a thousand

strange new English words rained down on like hail

each period, and who wrote the story

of their long journey on la bestia

through Mexico, for you, in handwriting

made heavy by the aquís and ayers

ached in their knuckles, hidden by their smiles.

Write an ode to loose-leaf. Write elegies

on the nub nose of a pink eraser.

Carve your devotion from a no. 2

pencil. Write the uncounted hours you spent

fretting about the ones who cursed you out

for keeping order, who slammed classroom doors,

who screamed “you are not my father,” whose pain

unraveled and broke you, whose pain you knew.

Write how all this added up to a life.  

 

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.

               for Audre Lorde

This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish.

There are Chugatch Mountains to the east

and whale and seal to the west.

It hasn't always been this way, because glaciers

who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth

and shape this city here, by the sound.

They swim backwards in time.

Once a storm of boiling earth cracked open

the streets, threw open the town.

It's quiet now, but underneath the concrete

is the cooking earth,

                                 and above that, air

which is another ocean, where spirits we can't see

are dancing                joking                   getting full

on roasted caribou, and the praying

goes on, extends out.

Nora and I go walking down 4th Avenue

and know it is all happening.

On a park bench we see someone's Athabascan

grandmother, folded up, smelling like 200 years

of blood and piss, her eyes closed against some

unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache

in which nothing makes

                                       sense.

We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,

the clouds whirling in the air above us.

What can we say that would make us understand

better than we do already?

Except to speak of her home and claim her

as our own history, and know that our dreams

don't end here, two blocks away from the ocean

where our hearts still batter away at the muddy shore.

And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly Native

and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at

eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when

the car sped away he was surprised he was alive,

no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strewn

on the sidewalk

                        all around him.

Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,

but also the truth. Because who would believe

the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival

those who were never meant

                                                to survive?

jaunse tu bhagela ii toke nighalayihe
je andar rahe tohar jahaaj ke nast karihe

The remnant of hind limbs puppets an origin
play that strings baleen to terrestrial

ancestors. Occasionally whales sport hind legs —
as in Vancouver in 1949,

a harpooned humpback bore eighteen inches
of femur breaching its body wall. Disconnected

from the spine, what is their function but to rend
the book of Genesis into two? Why regard

scripture and exegesis as legs and fluke,
sure to fall away, and not eat beef or pork? Why

do I need Hindi in Hawaii as a skeletal
structure, a myth to hook my leviathan jaw?

                                                    What you run from will swallow you,
                                                       what’s inside will splinter your boat

Until I find a name
I will not put it in the soul calculator
I will leave it free and open and unnamed
And not limit my expectations for the kind of person
That goes in one direction of the wind
I will keep all lines of the wind open
And place all my days free and empty
And re-envision what it means to be unencumbered
Or bereft
Not crying but the expanse of numbers
That go beyond the grave to what is left
And it may be true
I said it could be true
That the sunny days do stick to walls
And then enter you
It may be true that the purple bells do chime
Everyday you let them
It may be true that the sweet juice
I put across my lips would not be my last
But that the nights could get better and better
Until the evil is banished until the day
When the sun would crush it anyway
It was true without a set of things like letters
It was true the air was free and open
And I saw things as they were
Without violence
For the first time