10. Here on my knees I look for the single animal: you left

                                                   ravaged at the edge of a meadow

9. Is everything accounted for? The fingers dipped

                                     beneath the torso—to keep this body bright

8. Every breath we are desperate to take

                             sounds as if a war lost against a country of promise

7. Discarded halos: the light you remember

                   in your head—you feed on what is crushed between the teeth

6. America declares these dreams I have every night be re-

                                                      dreamed & pressed into names

5. Upended petals of qém’es

                                 abandoned like torn butterfly wings—we’é I pray

4. I pray that nobody

                  ever hears us

3. An eye gone

           bloodshot: I tear through the crisp apple of your throat & find—

2. myself: this—a boy beside a boy. An eyelash

                            fallen at the base of a valley, our dark bones bursting in-

1. to bloom. I stare into your beloved face & enter: yes,

                 yes, this nation, under god, its black sky we lay our nightmares to

0. where I am your animal: my Lamb—now eat

            me alive.

And what, in fact, is dignity? In those

Who have it pure, it is the soul’s repose, 

The base of character—no mere reserve 

That springs from pride, or want of mental nerve.

The dignity that wealth, or station, breeds, 

Or in the breast on base emotion feeds, 

Is easy weighed, and easy to be sized—A bastard virtue, much to be despised.

True dignity is like a summer tree. 

Beneath whose shade both beast, and bird, and bee,

When by the heated skies oppressed, may come,

And feel, in its magnificence, at home; 

Or rather like a mountain which forgets

Itself in its own greatness, and so lets 

Vast armies fuss and fight upon its sides,

While high in clouds its peaceful summit hides,

And from the voiceless crest of glistening snow, 

Pours trickling fatness on the fields below;

Repellant force, that daunts obtrusive wrong,

And woos the timid steps of right along;

And hence a garb which magistrates prepare,

When called to judge, and really seem to wear. 

In framing character on whate’er plan, 

‘Tis always needed to complete the man, 

The job quite done, and Dignity without, 

Is like an apple pie, the fruit left out. 

<sup>I'd like to be under the sea

In an octopus' garden in the shade.

            —Ringo Starr</sup>

The article called it “a spectacle.” More like a garden than a nursery: 

hundreds of purple octopuses protecting clusters of eggs 

while clinging to lava rocks off the Costa Rican coast. 

I study the watery images: thousands of lavender tentacles 

wrapped around their broods. Did you know there’s a female octopus 

on record as guarding her clutch for 53 months? That’s four-and-a-half years 

of sitting, waiting, dreaming of the day her babies hatch and float away. 

I want to tell my son this. He sits on the couch next to me clutching his phone, 

setting up a hangout with friends. The teenage shell is hard to crack. 

Today, my heart sits with the brooding octomoms: not eating, always on call, 

always defensive, living in stasis in waters too warm to sustain them. 

No guarantees they will live beyond the hatching. Not a spectacle 

but a miracle any of us survive.

Deep in my biceps I know it’s a complement, just as
I know this is an all-black-people-look-alike moment.
So I use the minimal amount of muscles to crack a smile.
All night he catches sight of me, or someone like me, standing
next to deconstructed cannoli and empty bottles of Prosecco.
And in that moment, I understand how little right any of us have
to be whoever we are—the constant tension
of making our way in this world on hope and change.
You’re working your muscles to the point of failure,
Michelle Obama once said about her workout regimen, 
but she knows we wear our history in our darkness, in our                         patience.
A compliment is a complement—this I know, just as the clock
will always strike midnight and history repeats. This is how
I can wake up the next morning and love the world again.

& there’s no taking it back now.

What comes next? Charcoal underbone, 

darkroom for soliloquy & irises wide

at home. Some underside party popping

off & ending with me counting resignations

on a couch made from my last pennies—

copper profiles cushion deep, dull 

with emancipation & worth almost me.

Button nicks instead of eyes. Green

patina instead of skin over presidential 

profiles. How to separate these awkward

exhales from the marinating revivals?

The song in the park across the street

dials up something endless about love

& big sunflowers, but I can’t split

this primal reflection from its primary 

leather. Sneakers & skeletons arrhythmic

in their leaving & squeaking: twisting

in somebody else’s garden in the middle

of a cracked city near a river so thick

with its own beat-up history, it’s already

eye level to the flocking blackbirds. 

I know why I fell hard for Hecuba—

shins skinned and lips split to blooming lupine

on her throat’s rough coat, hurled down the whole length

of disaster—I’m sure I’d grown to know

by then to slacken as a sail against

the current and squall of a woman’s woe.

What could I do but chorus my ruddered

howl to hers? When you’re a brown girl raised up

near the river, there’s always a woman

bereft and bank-wrecked, bloodied and bleating

her insistent lament. Ay Llorona—

every crossing is a tomb and a tune,

a wolf-wail and the moon that turns me to

scratch at the tracks of every mud-dirged girl.

Shhh, my grandmother is sleeping,

They doped her up with morphine for her last hours.

Her eyes are black and vacant like a deer’s.

She says she hears my grandfather calling.

A deerfly enters through a tear in the screen,

Must’ve escaped from those there sickly Douglas firs.

Flits from ankle to elbow, then lands on her ear.

Together, they listen to the ancient valley.