Pristine the ash                                   no one has touched yet

before wind sweeps it along                         across the altar

                         dusting chrysanthemum and bees

before it is swept off again                

                                                              the way the body burns

            part by part

particle by particulate

                                                              particularly diverging

                                                              its tiny cinders

                        of moth wings.

After sound                                        there is no sound

                                                              a wolf sanctuary

           void of howling

                        headlights on the winding road

picking up snow

                                     a tuft falling on the heron

                         as her wingtips dip into water.

Evolution:    

                         bat wing

                         whale fin

                         my hand shielding myself from light

as I adjust

                                                              frames along the wall

barefoot on the black bookcase

                                     the heat of my footprint

             disappearing though no hand wipes it.

In taking inventory of what’s left

                         what the dead have cleared in space

             a question

                                      like the body of a boy

curled inside his dog’s bed

                                      a boy filling his own rice bowl

                                      until he doesn’t want to

anymore.

                        I want to be beside him in the dark

to hear his voice again

                                      to stop seeing him on the street

                         in the back row         

                                      of a classroom where I teach.

            Is there no end to this need

mushrooms inching along

                         blades of grass after a field of rain

                                                             the heron fishing

wings spread to lure prey into her shade.

In war they say We’re not the top species because we’re nice

In life I say Let me come closer

                                      even if it kills me.

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight:
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
        All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
        To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Executions have always been public spectacles. It is New Year’s 2009 in Austin and we are listening to Jaguares on the speakers. Alexa doesn’t exist yet so we cannot ask her any questions. It is nearly 3 AM, and we run out of champagne. At Fruitvale Station, a man on his way home on a train falls onto the platform, hands cuffed. Witnesses capture the assassination with a grainy video on a cell phone. I am too drunk, too in love, to react when I hear the news. I do not have Twitter to search for the truth. Rancière said looking is not the same as knowing. I watch protests on the television while I sit motionless in the apartment, long after she left me. Are we what he calls the emancipated spectator, in which spectatorship is “not passivity that’s turned into activity” but, instead, “our normal situation”? Police see their god in their batons, map stains and welts on the continents of bodies. To beat a body attempts to own it. And when the body cannot be owned, it must be extinguished.

God washes clean the souls and hearts of you,

His favored ones, whose backs bend o’er the soil,

Which grudging gives to them requite for toil

In sober graces and in vision true.

God places in your hands the pow’r to do

A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil

The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil

Of Life’s activities. Yet all too few

Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature’s heart;

The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast

Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart

Of war within your hands, but pow’r to start

Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest

To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
    Dark like me—
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
    Black like me.

with the anemone zero.

Drink 12 oz. of coffee in Longmont.

Are you parched?

Is your name Pinky?

What color is the skin of your inner arm, creamy?

Valentine City rebate: a box of chocolates from Safeway.

Yours, yours, yours.

In its entirety.

Don't collude with your inability to give or receive love.

Collude, instead, with the lining of the universe.

Descent, rotation, silk water, brief periods of intense sunlight

striated with rose pink glitter.

The glitter can only get us.

So far.

Here we are at the part with the asphalt, airstream Tupperware,

veins, some nice light stretching.

Call me.

This is a poem for a beloved.

Who never arrived.

(for a.g., you & yours)

the night is silver in its silence

moon-pop echoes of the day

raked up rubble of the hours spent

my, the children slumber

a thousand tomorrows bubbling at their lips

the dream projections lighting up

the clouds’ ample cotton                    relish the silence

as you’ll relish tomorrow

and the honesty of such raucous noise, thick

child feet of our unfeathered breasts, beasts we cherish

hallway run, sprints to smash the mash of food

tumbling, rolling right into these arms

charmed in their amnesia regarding where one

begins or ends

reminding us of the joy

of first step and the storm after the holler:

mama see, mama watch

pitter/patter

                     pitter/patter

thunder on a hardwood, heartbeat

this sole and counted rhythm

every generation a temporal fugitive

running from the death grip

every death ship’s watch, yesterdays

we weren’t meant to make it through

relish the memory ingrained in the sound

how these tiny, tiny feet

grip the floor, say

tomorrow, tomorrow

I make you

tomorrow

                                    For Darlene Wind and James Welch

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. 

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. 

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. 

Of course, I don’t know very much

    About these politics,

But I think that some who run ’em

    Do mighty ugly tricks.

I’ve seen ’em honey-fugle round,

    And talk so awful sweet,

That you’d think them full of kindness,

    As an egg is full of meat.

Now I don’t believe in looking

    Honest people in the face,

And saying when you’re doing wrong,

    That “I haven’t sold my race.”

When we want to school our children,

    If the money isn’t there, 

Whether black or white have took it,

    The loss we all must share.

And this buying up each other

    Is something worse than mean,

Though I thinks a heap of voting,

    I go for voting clean. 

startling semiannual saccharine sensitivity to sentencing in a season of severing and severances to so called civil servants of streachery and separation i sense a series of spectators or investigators wont save us like stolen generators nothing speculative about spectacles we beasts spit and sputter   spits and sputters splitting sutures of your occipital up your occidental skeptical of this spectacular softness of this plexus flex i choose the best for myself   swearing the swivel of the stank of spangled smear with speared wet spirit spent to coalesce in this nonsense that’s the thing about your language is i make it sound so good it doesnt have to make sense they is all what you is where you from  someone tell these oxymorons we is dual citizens former resident aliensss and we have only just begun counting down this society’s days with the efficiency of arabic numerals

like some 14 year old girl waiting for her crush to glance back i 

keep waiting for capitalism to end

but it won’t end

my adult life lover states

on what will end:

Libraries 

Birds 

Retirement 

Recess

Sprinting during recess 

Hispid Hares

Starfish shaped like stars 

Inconvenience

Wrinkles 

Sunken cheeks 

Living corals 

Protests

Anti-Nuclear Proliferation 

Non-Aggression Pacts 

Dragonflies

Mangosteen 

DMZs

Trade Embargos 

Leopards, all kinds 

Sawfins

Rewilding

Infiltration Plot/Dreams 

Oak, Trees.

Partulina Variabilis 

Partulina Splendida

(-------) Violence Prevention Programs

News. News:

Might a few jellyfish survive—

counting till revelations becomes part of—

To show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint,
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,
How did those prospects give my soul delight,
A new creation rushing on my sight?
Still, wond’rous youth! each noble path pursue;
On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:
Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire,
To aid thy pencil and thy verse conspire!
And may the charms of each seraphic theme
Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!
High to the blissful wonders of the skies
Elate thy soul, and raise thy wishful eyes.
Thrice happy, when exalted to survey
That splendid city, crown’d with endless day,
Whose twice six gates on radiant hinges ring:
Celestial Salem blooms in endless spring.
   Calm and serene thy moments glide along,
And may the muse inspire each future song!
Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless’d,
May peace with balmy wings your soul invest!
But when these shades of time are chas’d away,
And darkness ends in everlasting day,
On what seraphic pinions shall we move,
And view the landscapes in the realms above?
There shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow,
And there my muse with heav'nly transport glow;
No more to tell of Damon’s tender sighs,
Or rising radiance of Aurora’s eyes;
For nobler themes demand a nobler strain,
And purer language on th’ ethereal plain.
Cease, gentle Muse! the solemn gloom of night
Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

^{To a Brown Boy}

’Tis a noble gift to be brown, all brown,
     Like the strongest things that make up this earth,
Like the mountains grave and grand,
     Even like the very land,
     Even like the trunks of trees—
     Even oaks, to be like these!
God builds His strength in bronze.

To be brown like thrush and lark!
     Like the subtle wren so dark!
Nay, the king of beasts wears brown;
     Eagles are of this same hue.
I thank God, then, I am brown.
     Brown has mighty things to do.

In some other life, I can hear you

breathing: a pale sound like running

fingers through tangled hair. I dreamt

again of swimming in the quarry

& surfaced here when you called for me

in a voice only my sleeping self could

know. Now the dapple of the aspen

respires on the wall & the shades cut

its song a staff of light. Leave me—

that me—in bed with the woman

who said all the sounds for pleasure

were made with vowels I couldn’t

hear. Keep me instead with this small sun

that sips at the sky blue hem of our sheets

then dips & reappears: a drowsy penny

in the belt of Venus, your aureole nodding

slow & copper as it bobs against cotton

in cornflower or clay. What a waste

the groan of the mattress must be

when you backstroke into me & pull

the night up over our heads. Your eyes

are two moons I float beneath & my lungs

fill with a wet hum your hips return.

It’s Sunday—or so you say with both hands

on my chest—& hot breath is the only hymn

whose refrain we can recall. And then you

reach for me like I could’ve been another

man. You make me sing without a sound.

It’s one thing to be hopeful and to be full 

of feathers is another and it’s a third to 

conflate the two and do fourth things

even survive being thought of? 

Five fingers on fire close into a metaphor

about how we’ll never, never ever, never ever.

The smoke above the hospital is beautiful.

The smoke above the hospital was beautiful.

Above the hospital, the smoke looked 

and seemed, its seams dissolved 

into memory which is a terrible way 

to tell time in the cold. I misread 

the “Creve Coeur Camera” sign 

of the shop beside the supermarket 

as “Cri De Coeur Camera” like it is my job

to misread signs. Something beautiful arrived

in a helicopter, something beautiful left

forever. Here we go again, against,

aghast. Something in us floats, floated, 

our feet dragging through future ruins.

I know, “something” is an ulcer 

on any reaching, making intelligence

but the ulcer wants what it wants, to be 

something after all. For an awful whale,

a moment tries to beach itself, it does,

I learn Tomaž has died 

then it is a magnet of terrible power 

when I know for certain Tomaž has died. 

I convalesce, selfish as a branch punished

mildly by wind—Tomaž lived! and will,

but it’s only the kind of enough

nothing ever is. I feel I am being 

ironed, and it all only burns. I feel 

the subtraction machine subtracting

my maneuvers. I feel the abacus 

in my brain, that accordion, finally.

Finally licked into char. Five. Now any chair 

I steal into for any length of time 

has three unsteady legs. Cri cri cri, etc.

It would be a swell time to have a handle on

any methodology for rising into the sky, 

a really great time to turn into a bird. 

What a time! the sun is out and it is snowing

and I am as close to being a plastic sword

as I ever have been. How I would love 

some toddler coming into their tongues

or some beloved ancient to sentence me. 

How I will love the sound 

of my own final clatter, but 

only if it comes when I am tossed aside 

to signal the end of hostilities.

The violence done to the mind by the weaponized 

word or image is bad. 

We can live with it, though

We can understand it. Or we can try. And we 

can consider ourselves lucky, which we are. 

Nothing can be understood 

about the blunt-force trauma to the head. 

The percussion grenade. 

The helmet-to-helmet hit at an aggregate speed 

of forty miles an hour. 

No concussion protocol comprehends the self’s 

delicate apparatus crumpled in the wide pan of the brain.

The roof collapsing in Aleppo. 

The beam slamming the frontal lobe. 

The drone, the terror by night and day. 

He wanted to remember it all, 

to fix the image cradled inside the image 

of itself, itself, itself

down the facing mirrors of future and past, 

and then he wanted to be left to die there, 

in the ditch where he was cudgeled

down and under— 

ground water seeping into his mouth,

himself becoming ground water.

But he felt a hand reach down and grab him 

by the collar and yank him back up

and set him on his feet. 

And as he steadied himself, he thought,

This compassion he feels for me as his

mirror enemy, image, brother in wrath, 

and that I feel for him, 

this compassion is the compassion that those 

who see themselves in agony feel. 

But there is the other compassion, the one

felt by those who see agony in themselves,

which the deaf master will feel 

when he imagines us poised and ready to recapitulate

our thinking’s frozen violence—

the great deaf master, 

living in the villa of the deaf, 

where he will paint us in silent pastels.

That streetlight looks like the slicked backbone

            of a dead tree in the rain, its green lamp blazing

like the first neon fig glowing in the first garden

            on a continent that split away from Africa

from which floated away Brazil. Why are we not

            more amazed by the constellations, all those flung

stars held together by the thinnest filaments

            of our evolved, image making brains. For instance,

here we are in the middle of another Autumn,

            plummeting through a universe that made us

from its shattering and dust, stooping

            now to pluck an orange leaf from the sidewalk,

a small veined hand we hold in an open palm

            as we walk through the park on a weekend we

invented so we would have time to spare. Time,

            another idea we devised so the days would have

an epilogue, precise, unwavering, a pendulum

            strung above our heads.  When was the sun

enough? The moon with its diminishing face?

            The sea with its nets of fish? The meadow’s

yellow baskets of grain? If I was in charge

            I’d say leave them there on their backs

in the grass, wondering, eating berries

            and rolling toward each other’s naked bodies

for warmth, for something we’ve yet to name,

            when the leaves were turning colors in their dying

and we didn’t know why, or that they would return,

            bud and green. One of a billion

small miracles. This planet will again be stone.

1.

Propped against a tree on a sidewalk next 

to the trash cans, shorn of sheets, its fabric 

a casing for its coils, harborer of secretions 

seeped and dried, its phosphorous surface 

glitters abandoned skin flakes in moonlight, 

shingles from roof sides of humans. Mucous

trails pearlescent from a snail crawled up

the trunk of the tree upon which this bed 

formerly slept on now leans. Loved upon?

Perhaps. Dreamt on most definitely. Hands

on skin most definitely, the stains it harbors

are the trails of dreams, the shotguns aimed

at baby carriages, molars boring holes into 

the palm upon which they are cast like dice,

and the mystery of love as scratchy and fine

smelling as the needle tree that carried you

off with its scent of resin: it’s a hideous thing.

2.

Sheet marks on the face won’t disappear into

the water filling the basin. Under the eyes dark 

lakes before the resinous reflection of window

cast into mirror by interior lights set against

the night. Do you wonder if I dream of your 

shattering? Marks on the face don’t melt into 

the water. It would be strange to dream that 

hard for a stranger, even for you who became 

strange within an hour. Yet, I am waking from 

the press of your face against my face. Carried 

off over the shoulder, hauled through doorways, 

receiving your murder, once this mattress was 

bent at its middle, sagged profuse as a gaping 

blouse, and bore stains of which I was never 

aware while asleep. You knew. You were there 

too. You will dream of congress between us. 

I withdraw my hand. I refuse. Haul me away.

then i am sprawling in through me

then i am fastened into myself

into my points and my pulls

then i am spinning in rev, in stare

it is a stun and a shunning of this life

it is a slutting of this life

it is a spawning of this moment

i am a promise awake with knowing

a pull in a thread

sprawling

a sputtering

a stuttering

a slant

a song

a rising

a falling

a driving to the edge & waiting

a waiting for the edge to fall

an edging closer to the fall

a wanting the fall to crush

and now i am in the fall

i am the fall

i thank the desire

i kiss the desire

i hold the desire

i thumb the desire

i bite the desire

i thrust the desire

i grind the desire

i rub the desire

it is without oars

& sitting

lulling

circling in a pond

it is the wind tracing

the feet of the kicking beneath that surface

the earth beneath sucking & sucking

that filling of the mouth

that shattering of time

i am bringing myself to a standstill

i am allowing the water to spread

i am afloat in the desire

the desire of me

of you

i am pinning myself to the surface

waiting for the moon to fall

longing for the pierce of stars

tonguing the night

brushing away the darkness

til there is light

around

beneath

inside

til my eyes

open

to the white

of the sky

<sup>Mudslide in Rio de Janeiro state...: in the early hours of Saturday, following two days of heavy downpour. A boulder slid down a slope and hit a group of houses in the city of Niterói. Volunteers joined rescuers in silence so that any survivors could be heard.

                       —BBC News, November 11, 2018</sup>

It's as if the marrow of the earth mistook us

for part of itself, our limbs its own settling

form, like we have sunk into chairs and taken as us

our tight-tucked legs, our bellies. Or known the settling

head of our daughter to sternum as an uncleaved us,

one sleeping self inside a woken self. The settling

mud around, its heave, seems simple now: is softening us

into dense dark shape, and we are settling

our gauges too: voice from volume, sediment, shadow, us

from the spaces we lived. Silence settling

who we thought we were, was us,

into this all-consuming lack. Nothing settling

a choke around the circumference of light, drawing us

in. We no longer know if our eyes are open, only settling:

(where our daughter sank her pillow—her hair—and us

somewhere too), though we're yielding there to this, settling

aphotic loss, how we once lived what we could bear: us,

her, no more. Now there is weight so true, a settling

so whole, we could die in its lightness: it exiles us

to formless terror—no blanket, no bed, but settling.

If we could remember that once a throat was us

inside a body. Only: here, or here, inside this settling,

a hint of shade, almost like memory: the sound of us. 

If we could just know again our mouths. We 

could part the earth with our voices, ask to be heard.

And the weaver said, Speak to us of Clothes.
     And he answered:
     Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
     And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
     Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment,
     For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.

     Some of you say, “It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.”
     And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,
     But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
     And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
     Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.
     And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?
     And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Because the cathedral leaked yellow light

onto cobblestones like a slit carton of milk.

Because boxes of red wine emptied

down the throat’s swiveling street.

Because the music of my footsteps

like notes of ash.

Because he curved like a question mark

puncturing a flap of heaven.

Because litros tucked in brown paper bags,

two packs of Chesterfields a day, 

at the breakfast table, 

on the lip of a balcony.

Because I woke in a shrine   

of my own stickiness.

Because his lips were aperitif.

Because my father kissed his forehead 

outside the mosque,

the taste of rum and rose petals. 

Because oranges bulging in coat pockets.

Because the condom held against the light,

swirling cities of children we would never conceive.

Because it broke,

the cartography of longing pulsed onto soft thigh.

Because the long walk home chaperoned by stray dogs,

the drunk’s grief of the Guadalquivir,

blue cough and jasmine rotting in my hair.

Because I passed out in the bar bathroom

and mistook the toilet for my mother’s legs.

Because the shard of glass in the singer’s throat.

Because he cried when he was happy.

Because the thief looked me in the eyes and didn’t take the purse.

Because the petroglyphs of our hands wounded the white walls,

how we made the world small,

siphoning god’s breath 

to sweeten the blood-flavored noon.

My two hunting dogs have names, but I rarely use them. As 

I go, they go: I lead; they follow, the blue-eyed one first, then

the one whose coloring—her coat, not her eyes—I sometimes 

call never-again-o-never-this-way-henceforth. Hope, ambition: 

these are not their names, though the way they run might suggest 

otherwise. Like steam off night-soaked wooden fencing when 

the sun first hits it, they rise each morning at my command. Late 

in the Iliad, Priam the king of Troy predicts his own murder—

correctly, except it won’t be by spear, as he imagines, but by 

sword thrust. He can see his corpse, sees the dogs he’s fed and 

trained so patiently pulling the corpse apart. After that, he says,

When they’re full, they’ll lie in the doorway, they’ll lap my blood. 

I say: Why shouldn’t they? Everywhere, the same people who 

mistake obedience for loyalty think somehow loyalty weighs more 

than hunger, when it doesn’t. At night, when it’s time for bed, 

we sleep together, the three of us: muscled animal, muscled animal, 

muscled animal. The dogs settle to either side of me as if each 

were the slightly folded wing of a beast from fable, part power, part 

recognition. We breathe in a loose kind of unison. Our breathing 

ripples the way oblivion does—routinely, across history’s face.

          after Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary”

they work their fingers 

to the soul their bones 

to their marrow 

they toil in blankness 

inside the dead yellow 

rectangle of warehouse 

windows work fingers 

to knots of fires  

the young the ancients

the boneless the broken

the warehouse does too 

to the bone of the good 

bones of the building

every splinter spoken for

she works to the centrifuge 

of time the calendar a thorn 

into the sole dollar of working 

without pause work their mortal 

coils into frayed threads until 

just tatter they worked their bones 

to the soul until there was no 

soul left to send worked until 

they were dead gone

to heaven or back home 

for the dream to have USA 

without USA to export

USA to the parts under 

the leather sole of the boss 

they work in dreams of working 

under less than ideal conditions 

instead of just not ideal 

conditions work for the 

shrinking pension and never 

dental for the illusion 

of the doctor medicating them 

for work-related disease 

until they die leaving no empire

only more dreams that their babies

should work less who instead

work more for less 

so they continue to work 

for them and their kin 

they workballoon payment 

in the form of a heart attack 

if only that’ll be me someday

the hopeless worker said on 

the thirteenth of never 

hollering into the canyon 

of perpetual time 

four bankruptcies later

three-fifths into a life 

that she had planned 

on expecting happiness 

in any form it took 

excluding the knock-off

cubed life she lived in debt

working to the millionth

of the cent her body cost

the machine’s owner

Yolanda Berta Zoila 

Chavela Lucia Esperanza

Naya Carmela Celia Rocio

once worked here

their work disappearing

into dream-emptied pockets

into the landfill of work

the work to make their bodies

into love for our own

your shape is in the robe    worn or not

a roominess of you folds into its cloth

a sachet in the drawer from which the air

of the place was taken   fixed of    you’re here

the smell has temperature and space

the wider warmth that buttered popcorn tastes

and not you    it folds into a time’s clot

a sachet in a drawer   personage of its own still you

                                 *

I have to wear a bus to Rikers Island with

opaque tears up to my neck to get in       to see you

in your two inch thick glass robe I have to imagine

you naked under   to place my hand saying

I miss you against you where I can’t touch and love

has to break across insulating space       still warm

I have to stand my day in the folding up put away

given you as time   with you. I smell I need you on my clothes

                                 *

I smell gunfire folded in      to every turn

the city’s track laps into its hands on race

then files away not guilty    I smell the drawers

of the records they keep   folded away    from stands taken

away  distance doesn’t dissipate

the space between the bullet holes in you in me   folded

you are the map I have to sleep with in my pocket to be sure

I know how to get out of here

                                 *

your shape is in the robe    the sharp creases

of its fold when you wore it   blocked into

the counterpoint around you   that even

folded stood you out to me   that they couldn’t

see you   that one day   they would shoot

always folded into the robe you wore

gun or not   phone mistaken or empty handed   innocent

or not   there is this fold on itself  we sleep in

           in the fabric

           of this country’s culture

Your ride home complains      the grocery store is freezing

they’d rather wait outside       the burly guy

with the walrus stache asks whether you want your Italian

with the works              You’re not sure what that means

So you ask and he tells you    laboriously surprised

and also do you want tomato              thanks

you lean on the counter and focus     on condensation

the chill on your palm and forearm    and under the glass

the meats in trays and butcher paper beds

some sausages            sad stacked-up tongue

a leathery souse or loaf            so out of it

that when he wants to know if that’s your order

and calls out loud         Is that your order ma’am

you startle and then apologize            for taking up his time

but he called you ma’am          so you don’t mind

My old lover was Catholic and lied to me about the smallest things. Now he's dying and I'm trying to forgive everyone standing in line ahead of me at the grocery store. I keep painting objects intuitively. I keep saying I've never been in love. It's not quite true but I keep describing the same things differently, as sailboats through the locks of reversed rivers or as streaks of red across the sky, visible only in one eye. The sensation of decision-making won't stay put. I forget who I am and wake up exhausted. I had a teacher once who died, it was as if she removed herself into the forest. I scatter leaves to read them like pages as if she's speaking. She was in love. I don't know if I'm worried I will or won't ever give up my fictional autonomy. I'm choosing between two trees with two hollows. One begins breaking as I step inside, as I try to sleep. The other is already inhabited by a rooster. I pluck a feather and run to the pawn shop. How much is this worth? Can I buy it back for my Sunday best, for the suit I never wear? Maybe if I go to the church I don't believe in I'll meet a man I can. I'll wear my Jewish star and pray for his belief to convince me that I too want someone to hold my stare.

             or better

when the training dedicated

            to what lines my eyes cast

braids me to that skein

            then I know I’m a thing

that can take itself away

            maybe etched with the man

on a horse leaping

            into the lithographed

German windmill’s open bay

            refined, involutely resolved

to curving inward

            while touching the outside,

screaming isn’t looking

            like when my mother died

of being a woman,

            poor and eventually

American, the nerve I had

            to fold time

in my mouth as if to call

            back an escape line

from a life

            and who would think

to hide in a windmill

            and the horse

amenable?

            I really was

looking at that print

            thinking without rancor

of what fraction of hateable men

            I’ve known

and been

            who work so hard

at fleeing into private chambers

            only to find

some uninvited thought of me

            eyes closed, whispering

exactly there, spectral

            and unwanted as I am,

It’s just easier for me

            if you’re not around

                      After Iqbal

Brother on the threshing floor, body like wheat,

and the red dirt that binds us, that nothing will release us

from. The fig tree, the date palm, the treacherous murder

unleashed into us now, the call blazing from vanity’s lungs,

jutting us to a future of mindless rain, wayward blizzards

of sand and snow. We were born to ward off this desolation

that grinds mountains into floss, bores into our books

for a whim that ordains blood, our blood

and others, our sisters, mothers. Without such fear

who will we be? What will we do without

this aching chord, without the bright morning that tore

the silver’s towers? Fire and the parched red dirt

that binds, the water stolen from our wells,

a black magic dredging the lower rungs of earth.

We dream of clover. The soft scent of young lambs

is the first letter of our alphabet, and the prophets

who tighten ropes around their waists to stifle hunger's

pangs, supplicant brows seeking light from earth’s core.

What will we do without the angel’s voice, a tide

sending us heavenward, a harmattan ushering us into the hell

of its lows. How can we live without such turbulent hope?

How can we accept the certainty of our quiet graves?

How can we stop waiting to witness the Lord’s face?

And what will we do without the hardened gaze?

The girls walk past, hair fluttering like commas

between poems of musk, a dream of touch like water

gently falling on smooth, warm stone.

What will we do without the anemones’ mournful dirge

stroking the dagger’s spine and the gelding’s nightmares.

Our hatred for our scoured hands, our love of the moment

when the sun drops only for our eyes? Who else will hear

birdsong as prayer, who will cleanse himself with the stroke

of sand? Who keeps the earth rotating with praise

of your name? And what will this spinning,

hurtling mean without our voices shouldering it

toward some ripe, sweetened pause?

What will you do, dear God, without us? How

will you fare, alone again in the empty vast, in the dark

of your creation, without us giving you your name?

When I get to where I’m going

I want the death of my children explained to me.

                                                       —Lucille Clifton

They meet over tea and potato chips.

Brown and buttermilk women,

hipped and hardened,

legs uncrossed but proper

still in their smiles;

smiles that carry a sadness in faint creases.

A sadness they will never be without.

One asks the other,

“What do they call a woman who has lost a child?”

The other sighs between sips of lukewarm tea.

There is no name for us.

“No name? But there has to be a name for us.

We must have something to call ourselves.”

Surely, history by now and all the women

who carry their babies’ ghosts on their backs,

mothers who wake up screaming,

women wide awake in their nightmares,

mothers still expected to be mothers and human,

women who stand under hot showers weeping,

mothers who wish they could drown standing up,

women who can still smell them—hear them,

the scent and symphony of their children,

deep down in the good earth.

“Surely, history has not forgotten to name us?”

No woman wants to bear

whatever could be the name for this grief.

Even if she must bear the grief for all her days,

it would be far too painful to be called by that name.

“I’ve lost two, you know.”

Me too.

“I was angry at God, you know.”

Me too.

“I stopped praying but only for a little while,

and then I had no choice. I had to pray again.

I had to call out to something that was no longer there.

I had to believe God knew where it was.”

“I fear death no longer. It has taken everything.

But should I be? Should I be afraid of what death has taken?

That it took and left no name?”

The other who sighs between sips of lukewarm tea

leans over and kisses the cheek of the one still with questions.

She whispers …

No, you don’t have to be afraid.

Death is no more scary than the lives we have lived

without our babies, bound to this grief

with no name.

                                “There’s a lot of waiting in the drama of experience.” 

                                                     Lyn Hejinian, Oxota 

No signal from the interface except for a frozen half-bitten fruit. 

Other than that, no logos. An hour is spent explaining 

to the group what I’ve forgotten, to do with the mistranslation 

of a verb that means driftingbut can imply deviance.

The next hour goes by trying to remember, in the back of my mind, 

the name of the artist who makes paintings on inkjets.      

Why I’d think of him escapes me. Now my gaze circles the yoga bun 

of the tall woman in front of me. I didn’t pay $20 to contemplate 

the back of her head. It’s killing me. The pillars and plaster 

saints with their tonsures floating amid electronic sound waves. 

At such volume they could crumble. The virgin safe in a dimly lit 

niche as the tapping on my skull and the clamor of bones or killer 

bees assaults the repurposed church. This is what I sought, while 

in another recess I keep hearing Violeta’s “Volver a los diecisiete” 

and seventeen-year-olds marching against the nonsense of arming 

teachers. If I were an instrument. A bassoon. In the source language

we don’t say “spread the word.” Pasa la voz is our idiom, easily 

mistaken for a fleeting voice. From the back row all I see is fingers 

gliding in sync with her vocalizations. How fitting a last name 

like halo. Lucky for us here time is measure and inexplicable 

substance. That’s when I decide to stop fighting the city. Use it in my 

favor. Speak to strangers. Demolish the construct in the performance.

I ask the new migrant if he regrets leaving Russia.

We have dispensed already with my ancestry.

He says no. For a time, he was depressed. He found

with every return he missed what he left behind.

A constant state of this. Better to love by far

where you are. He taps the steering wheel of his car,

the hum of the engine an imperceptible tremble

in us. When he isn’t driving, he works tending

to new trees. I’ve seen these saplings popping

up all over the suburbs, tickling the bellies

of bridges, the new rooted darlings of the State.

The council spent a quarter mil on them &

someone, he—Lilian—must ensure the dirt

holds. Gentrification is climate-friendly now.

I laugh and he laughs, and we eat the distance

between histories. He checks on his buds daily.

Are they okay? They are okay. They do not need

him, but he speaks, and they listen or at least

shake a leaf. What a world where you can live off

land by loving it. If only we cared for each other

this way. The council cares for their investment.

The late greenery, that is, not Lilian, who shares

his ride on the side. I wonder what it would cost 

to have men be tender to me regularly, 

to be folded into his burly, to be left on the side

of the road as he drove away, exhausted. Even

my dreams of tenderness involve being used

& I’m not sure who to blame: colonialism,

capitalism, patriarchy, queerness or poetry?

Sorry, this is a commercial for the Kia Sportage

now. This is a commercial for Lilian’s thighs.

He didn’t ask for this and neither did I—how

language drapes us together, how stories tongue

each other in the back seat and the sky blurs

out of frame. There are too many agonies

to discuss here, and I am nearly returned.

He has taken me all the way back, around

the future flowering, back to where I am not,

to the homes I keep investing in as harms.

I should fill them with trees. Let the boughs

cover the remembered boy, cowering

under a mother, her raised weapon

not the cane but the shattering within,

let the green tear through the wall

paper, let life replace memory. Lilian, I left

you that day, and in the leaving, a love

followed. Isn’t that a wonder and a wound?

Tell me which it is, I confess I mistake the two.

I walk up the stairs to my old brick apartment

where the peach tree reaches for the railing,

a few blushing fruits poking through the bars,

eager to brush my leg, to say linger, halt.

I want to stop, to hold it for real, just once

but I must wait until I am safe.

translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce

There’s no cloth hawker in the bazaar 
willing to make dirty deals 
with the health inspector 
neither will they confess the link 
between those bolts of flyaway fabric 
and ancient birds 
(lo a sage appeared 
drilled fire from sticks 
transformed the stinking food 
and the people were happy) 
after the ban on cooking smoke 
glug glug swallow 
the secret of seawater and its fish 
tile cities built up and pulled down 
at four in the afternoon 
a routine inspection 
into the cleanliness of laughter 
a hand spread wide in the dark is 
splattered with light 
a carambola tree sprouts branches from stumps 
its remaining fruits sour and shriveled to stardust 
swaying in the void 
the sky so dull 
and the city official 
at the newly-sterilized entrance 
frantically gouging 
a spy hole onto the blankness

布鳥

棚內沒有一個布販
願意和衛生幫進行
骯髒的交易
他們也不會供認一匹匹
時時想要起飛的布帛
和遠古鳥類的關係
（有聖人作      鑽燧取火       以化腥臊       而民悅之）
炊煙被禁止後
骨都骨都吞下
海水和魚的秘密
四方城築起又被推毁
下午四點
循例要檢查
笑聲的潔淨度
暗黑的手張開了是
頭上漏下來的光點
一再節外生枝的楊桃樹
剩下幾顆縮得很小的酸澀的星屑
在虛晃
天空悶極
而城管員
在他剛剛消毒好的大門上
用力開鑿
一個空空的洞眼

The cow swings her head in a deep drowsy half-circle to and over

Flank and shoulder, lunging

At flies; then fragrantly plunging

Down at the web-washed grass and the golden clover,

Wrenching sideways to get the full tingle; with one warm nudge,

One somnolent wide smudge

Sacred to kine,

Crushing a murmurous of late lush August to wine!

The sky is even water-tone behind suave poplar trees—

Color of glass; the cows

Occasionally arouse

That color, disturb the pellucid cool poplar frieze

With beauty of motion slow and succinct like some grave privilege

Fulfilled. They taste the edge

Of August, they need

No more: they have rose vapors, flushed silence, pulpy milkweed.

Shame             forces                        what we denied         into luminosity.

In dream       my father     tells me               my mother’s grieving      

prevents          momentum.



He’s projecting thoughts to a screen          for me to read.      

I’m at his private film      of captivity.



He’s watching us.    We’re hunched over          heaving the sorrow vomit.



Father stands before me

time without fear    suspended    and apart

unafraid of anything   one way or another.



“When did they cut it?”                                                       he wants to know 

pushing the thought into space                   between my eyes.

Raising his pant leg    where the mortician



smoothed and stretched the salvage skin     Father used    for padding 

his below-knee amputation                         

hovering   inches above the ground                                   glints in his eyes.

He doesn’t remember the amputation                                     

in the bending.



Father shows me his whole leg.                    Scars



mended and smooth.

He is an uncut body again.  Like before the bending place.

Only the graft scars on his thighs remain.



He projects: “I feel my leg here Margo  my foot still itches here” Father

points: “in this empty space”     he twirls his fingers       a    slow    spiral.



I nod to him:               “I see.  I’ll remember this for you.”

^{for Daniel; after Pablo}

It was five o’clock when paper handkerchiefs descended

over the ocean’s surge—

              one ocean varnished by oil in the morning, fish under the surge’s blades.

My country, you whimpered under fog. I awoke to the tender

sound of seashells on the radio.

I knelt by myself and listened. Your flat skeleton, large skeleton,

would group at your back.

Come, you murmured over canned goods. Come. I will tell you

everything—

clay seeps onto roots, roots drawn by salt, roots crowned

by trees. The cords unravel from the flesh of trees, unravel

by the storm shutters. Come.

See the roads brim with red poppy, roads tracked

by green serpents

                                                                       ((a la víbora, víbora / de la mar, de la mar)) 

I tendered nine eggs before the ignorant lion 

of exile, who nodded.

At five in the morning, everything seemed to be made of lime—

one torso shrouded by magnolia, one torso under vulgar peal 

of grey morgues, and the fish.

light that day | bright | & the air hot | & meeting bones

of those I would never know en the panteón

speaking Sinaloan Spanish | which has always

been the accent I’ve understood most

despite hearing it least in my life

sígueme he sd | follow me

we must walk | roads unpaved lined

with stones & dust | so much dust

| polvo | of airborne bones &

saguaro ancestors watching us

their shadows trailing us |

as sr Nalo led us past a dried

creek & just over a small hill

& there | a house with no doors

& there attached to this home

the walls of another | walls covered

in hot black plastic | secured with rope

there | the walls of Francisco’s home

what was left of Francisco’s home

now a storage space for another family’s home

aquí el vivió | sr Nalo sd | he lived here |

Rosario after decades of waiting | left this home

& lived with her children | Francisco’s children

from his first family | closer to the center

of el rancho Tetaroba | how los Alvarez

of Arizona dwindled to less people

over one hundred years &

how los Alvarez of Tetaroba

increased & lived in all parts of Mexico

touch these walls | de color colorado

they were the same yr grandfather felt

you feel the heat | they breathe hot

touch these walls | paredes en la frente y la mente

they were the same yr grandfather felt

you feel the heat | they breathe hot

I pocketed a piece of this wall

& later when drunk | way drunk after

getting to know mis primos better

over chelas | I stumbled into the hotel

hot tears in my eyes | dad I sd |

I kept this for you | for all of us

but always for you to keep him

& to remember | always remember

what he did |

| climbing down the drainage of red

rock | sweet minted plants |

Robert | my father | father of five

all born in Arizona | Robert

stops to catch his breath then rips

bamboo from root | clouded

red dust clumps dropping |

this is where he was born

& now we know why | now

we know why & now we can see why

Translated by Jacob Rogers

I, wearing heron symmetrically opposed over my chest,
swore to the five emperors that there was no such thing as balance, that if herons upheld
the rivers on all Chinese porcelain it was
simply due to
a locking mechanism in their joints.

they awarded me for risking everything in my defense.
I wrote to you a few years later. I said:
Rostock, sixth of July,
it’s awful of me to interrupt, but I just
need you to understand how certain kinds of wounds can be useful.
I’m finishing up an essay
on pre-modern explanations for bird migration,
and all the species seen since Aristotle’s time as either moon travelers
or sailors that very rarely return.

I even studied a pamphlet from 1703
that argues for the communion of swallows,
that they gather in wetlands
and follow a specific choreography to perch on top of the rushes
until they sink.
they spend winters underwater, in the hypnotic calm of the muck,
and that’s why they emerge so klein damp in spring.

but in 1822 (I carefully attached the photograph),
an arrow pierced the neck of a stork in central Africa
and the bird began its flight bearing both weapon and wound.
when it reached Germany, someone identified the origin of the projectile,
and went on to form a scientific hypothesis.

I don’t remember much more of the letter, except:
pain and brightness are distributed in equal parts,
and lightness only exists because of past excess.
Since it’s the migratory season (I concluded)
I hope you don’t mind if I bypass the formula for farewells—

Atlantic in between us,
every anemone is fluttering along with the currents.

"Historia apócrifa do descubrimento das migracións ou O sacrificio das Pfeilstörchen"

eu, que levo garzas simetricamente opostas sobre o peito,
xurei ante os cinco emperadores que o equilibrio non existía, que se as garzas sostiñan
os ríos de toda a porcelana chinesa era
tan só
por un mecanismo de bloqueo na articulación.

premiáronme por arriscar todo na defensa.
uns anos despois escribinche. dicía:
Rostock, seis de xullo,
que atroz interromperte; verás,
necesito que entendas a utilidade de certo tipo de feridas.
estou rematando un ensaio
sobre as explicacións pre-modernas da migración das aves,
e as especies tratadas, desde Aristóteles, como viaxeiras á lúa
ou mariñeiras que raramente volven.

estudei incluso un panfleto de 1703
que defende a comuñón das andoriñas,
a súa reunión en pantanos
e a coreografía que respectan para pousarse nos xuncos
até afundilos.
invernan baixo as augas, na calma hipnótica dos lameiros,
e por iso emerxen tan klein mollado en primavera.

pero en 1822 (adxuntei coidadosamente a fotografía),
unha frecha atravesa o pescozo dunha cegoña en África central
e a ave emprende o voo cargado coa arma e coa ferida.
cando chega a Alemaña, alguén identifica a orixe do proxectil
e confirma, así, unha hipótese científica.

pouco máis lembro da carta, salvo:
a partes iguais se distribúe a dor e a luz,
e ao final, a lixeireza existe porque existiu o exceso.
Sendo o tempo das migracións (concluía)
permíteme evitar a fórmula de despedida,

Atlántico por medio,
ondean coas correntes todas as anemones.

 I

small victories                                  small wars

a famous person

played chess in the woods

whatever repeats                  whatever

input we have          a disappearing

that knows how to proceed                                    

local realities            made up

exclusively                 of their own grammar         

but only if their grammar

is voluntary               

victorious feelings                 without victory         

sam calls                     our teams are playing         

we are getting older             can only hope           

for a beautiful result

II

                                            activity

is a truth that conveys

no information                              a local

threat                                               a distant                    

possibility                                       autoplay                    

tabs on tabs on tabs

I buy the hat              that my bitmoji had

in a threat of forests             a savant

of anger                      a savant of nothing

to be angry about

a hierarchy                of satisfactions

the next activity                   

the best distraction              

it’s never too late                  to stay the same  

III

                           very few things

are not

                           warnings

                           cultural

                                      touchstones             

                                      parlor

tricks

the body reacts

                           to what reacts

                           to it

a sort of           

            leverage

             a kind

                       of loyalty

I have that precious and irreplaceable luxury of failure, of risk, of surrender

                —Jeff Buckley

If something happens to me, then you’ll be free!

And I want you to be free: how does that Presley

Song go? I want to be free, free, free, yeah

Free—I want to be free… like a bird in a tree.

And here by the river alone, by the Mississippi,

There’s one last song I’m gonna wade into. See,

I was raised to sing wherever I was in a house

And now, it seems, I have no house. How does

That Tom Waits song go? Wherever I lay my

Head, that’s where I call home. I say

I have no house, but that’s really a big lie.

I’m renting down here. I can sing in this place,

So maybe I’ll buy. That is, if I don’t die

First. Why so grim, you ask? There’s joy,

I suppose, in my voice somewhere. So they say.

I don’t hear it, myself. And that’s because

I get myself all hung up in the blue, or weigh

Myself down in the freighted churn, heavy currents

That I hope to God will carry me to our unchained redeemer,              

            Jesus.

My last thought is... that I had no last thought.

I’m just singing along. Whole lotta love! But… But… 

The Hallelujah is what you can’t put into a poem.

Now I have no house but the waves (the river has waves).

I’ve left no notes: only some sketches for an album

Of tunes that was, I guess, intended to save

Me from going down, or out, or into the hurling rain—

From the pain that I worked so hard to earn.

Where it came from, where I come from, doesn’t concern

You, but please listen to these wild thoughts I’ve hung

On staves, that are fit to garland the graves

Nobody thinks to visit, in places I confess I never

Went to except in a nightmare, and in the posthumous release

            Of this song.

^{with gratitude to Wanda Coleman & Terrance Hayes}

We have the same ankles, hips, nipples, knees—
our bodies bore the forks/tenedors
we use to eat. What do we eat? Darkness
from cathedral floors,

the heart’s woe in abundance. Please let us
go through the world touching what we want,
knock things over. Slap & kick & punch
until we get something right. ¿Verdad?

Isn’t it true, my father always asks.
Your father is the ghost of mine & vice
versa. & when did our pasts
stop recognizing themselves? It was always like

us to first person: yo. To disrupt a hurricane’s
path with our own inwardness.
C’mon huracán, you watery migraine,
prove us wrong for once. This sadness

lasts/esta tristeza perdura. Say it both ways
so language doesn’t bite back, but stays.

                                          ^{for Kristen}

Breakfast rained on again,

and I’m lifted up the stairs

on the breath of what

the dark of the day

might promise in its

perfect silence. The light

in my daughter’s room

has been on all night

like every night,

but the sun shifting

changes the shape

of the space from

a square into an unfolding

universe. I had always

imagined a different type

of fatherhood before

fatherhood found me, but if you

asked me to describe it now,

I don’t think I could

find the words. Try to find

a way to describe living

a few different ways at once.

For a while I imagined

there would be more attempts

at trying out what I’m still

trying to see in the room

that’s gone power out,

but the weeds in the yard

grow too quickly to be left

alone for long. I had forgotten

the strangeness of a humid

February. I had forgotten

all that makes up the memories

that need me to exist. It was

easier to carve out a place

before I had words to describe

it. Now looking back feels

like looking forward. I am 

drawing a self-portrait

and trying to remove the self.

One for tree, two for woods,        

                                                            I-Goo wrote the characters           

                               

                                               out for me. Dehiscent & reminiscent:

what wood made

                                               Ng Ng’s hope-chest

that she immigrated with

                                                                     —cargo from Guangzho

to Phoenix? In Spanish, Nana tells me

                                                           hope & waiting are one word.

                                        _____

In her own hand, she keeps

                                         a list of dichos—for your poems, she says.

Estan mas cerca los dientes

                      que los parentes, she recites her mother

& mother’s mother. It rhymes, she says.

                                                         

                                   Dee-say—the verb with its sound turned

down looks like dice

                                              to throw & dice, to cut. Shift after shift,

she inspected the die of integrated circuits

                                       beneath an assembly line of microscopes—            

the connections over time

                                                        getting smaller & smaller.

                                          _____

                                                                        

                                                To enter words in order to see

                                                                             —Cecilia Vicuña

In the classroom, we learn iambic words

                                          that leaf on the board with diacritics—

about, aloft, aggrieved. What over years

          accrues within one’s words? What immanent

                                                                        sprung with what rhythm?

Agave—a lie in the lion, the maenad made mad

by Dionysus awoke to find her son

                                    dead by her hand. The figure is gaslit

even if anachronistic. Data & river banks—

           memory’s figure is often riparian.  I hear Llorona’s agony

echo in the succulent. What’s the circuit in cerca to short

          or rewire the far & close—to map

                                                   Ng Ng & I-Goo to Nana’s carpool?

                                         ______

I read a sprig of evergreen, a symbol

                                               of everlasting, is sometimes packed

with a new bride’s trousseau. It was thirteen years

                                             

before Yeh Yeh could bring

                                                Ng Ng & I-Goo over. Evergreen

                     

& Empire were names of corner-stores

                                             

where they first worked—

                                             stores on corners of Nana’s barrio.

Chinito, Chinito! Toca la malaca—

                                                             she might have sung in ’49

after hearing Don Tosti’s  

                                    recording—an l where the r would be

in the Spanish rattle filled with beans or seed or as

                                                                         the song suggests

change in the laundryman’s till.

                                         ______

I have read diviners

                       use stems of yarrow when consulting

                                                                                    the I-Ching.

What happens to the woods in a maiden name?

Two hyphens make a dash—

                                                the long signal in the binary code.

                                             

Attentive antennae: a monocot

—seed to single leaf—the agave store years

                                             for the stalk. My two grandmothers:

                                                         

one’s name keeps a pasture,

                       the other a forest. If they spoke to one another,

                     

it was with short, forced words

                                    like first strokes when sawing—

                                             

                                              trying to set the teeth into the grain.

& 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. 

Vain to fish 
with unbaited hook, 
the proverb says. I fished that way,

at 9, after Sunday School at Trinity Presbyterian, as God said 
(my schizophrenic, periodically 
catatonic uncle and preacher said) 
thou shalt not kill, so I would kill 
neither lake bass nor earthworm, thought the Lord 
was watching that rowboat and testing 
me, like Job or Abraham, to see if I’d break 
some covenant we’d made 
I couldn’t remember making,

dreaded that like Joan of Arc I’d be summoned 
someday in my backyard, under the pecan tree’s 
velvet greenfuzzed litter, to leave 
Alexander III 3rd grade to go 
and raise an Army 
to end the napalm flamethrow jungleburn 
Walter Cronkite told me about

so for hours in the rowboat with my father 
who’d left his own war without ever going to combat 
to Travel Mental Troop to psychiatric 
discharge after six months and told his family 
he’d been the sole survivor 
of a kamikaze-bombed carrier,

my unbaited hook would twitch along the lake bottom’s 
algae slime, my earthworm snuck back into bucket-writhe. 
He couldn’t know I was deceiving him for the Lord, 
humiliated on my behalf 
that hour after hour I got 
not even a line-tug. It 
humiliated me to disappoint that Pacific hero. 
And this is how we did it, outings 
of Father and Son; fishing 
for each other, with unbaited hooks.

Then came Oscar, the time of the guns, 

And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,

      Unless guns sprang up

      And spoke their language.

The how of running the world was all in guns.

The law of a God keeping sea and land apart,

The law of a child sucking milk,

The law of stars held together,

      They slept and worked in the heads of men

      Making twenty-mile guns, sixty-mile guns,

      Speaking their language

      Of no land for a man, no land for a country

      Unless… guns… unless… guns.

There was a child wanted the moon shot off the sky,

      asking a long gun to get the moon,

      to conquer the insults of the moon,

      to conquer something, anything,

      to put it over and run up the flag,

To show them the running of the world was all in guns.

There was a child wanted the moon shot off the day.

They dreamed… in the time of the guns… of guns.

xxxix

The hard edge of historical light, it waits up for us

all night. Here’s one brutal but apparently

necessary historical bargain: I said that the energy

between you and the person next

to you is truer than it is real. This is not a randomly

existing fact. It’s a collectively and intelligently and menacingly

cultivated feature of our lives. Fugitive fact.

This puts you both—puts

us all—in peril, yes, but protects that energy between us.

If it were the other way, if that living thing between

us had become more—even as—real as it is

true we’d be more protected than we are

but that thing, that sacred being

-between would be endangered. The intelligence

of collective action knows, somehow, that that

kind of security is far more dangerous—the kind of danger

people become to themselves, then to each other,

the kind they become to each other, then to themselves—

than the peril in which we stand now. That’s a hard

historical edge to stand near, real talk, that’s the broken

back of a mother—black—skipped across a wit-quick crack in the sidewalk. 

We drank coffee and got ready,

listened to 93.3 during our commute

to take our mind off how

every day we die on tv. Every day

down the block, kids in surgical masks

spraypaint Magneto was Right on street signs

and new storefronts waiting to redeem

spa resort passes and avocado toast dreams

until they, too, are forced out of business.

Or not. People can surprise you

like beating cancer or criminal charges,

the 2016 election, the high cost

of middle shelf liquor with a decent view.

If you want to succeed, let them see you

coming, our mothers once said before asking

if we wanted the switch or the belt.

But a whooping beats sitting

at the rooftop bar looking over the steepled skyline

and feeling the pang of worlds we’d rather be,

with two empty seats right beside us

that stay empty for the next two hours

surrounded by people drinking & eating

standing up—the wind threatening

to blow their hats off their sunburned heads.

Somewhere right now

there are two people looking for those seats.

We keep hoping they’ll find them—

find us. Let’s have another drink,

watch the muted news above

a row of decent bourbon,

  

wait to hear, to see

if they make it to us or turn up on tv.

To be able to see every side of every question;

To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;

To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,

To use great feelings and passions of the human family

For base designs, for cunning ends,

To wear a mask like the Greek actors—

Your eight-page paper—behind which you huddle,

Bawling through the megaphone of big type:

“This is I, the giant.” 

Thereby also living the life of a sneak-thief,

Poisoned with the anonymous words

Of your clandestine soul.

To scratch dirt over scandal for money,

And exhume it to the winds for revenge,

Or to sell papers,

Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,

To win at any cost, save your own life.

To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,

As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track

And derails the express train.

To be an editor, as I was.

Then to lie here close by the river over the place

Where the sewage flows from the village,

And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,

And abortions are hidden.

When I told them it must be like dropping your kid            

off at school their first day, all my parent friends

nodded and smiled uncomfortably, meaning              

what would I know. I won’t be taking solace                 

in the many firsts ahead. Here among the gray,

spotted and brown heads of the seniors,

their soft flesh and angles, their obedience as they

sit as uprightly as they are able at white, parallel

tables, nobody cries, and very few speak.                 

When I seat dad beside her, one senior tells me

she’s ninety-four, presenting one hand, four

fingers in the air, just as she might have ninety

years ago with a stranger like me, now long gone.



                       Dad never liked me to talk:

Lower your voice, he’d say. If I was louder:

Put on your boxing gloves. Or: You’ll catch

more flies with honey than vinegar, as if some day

I’d need the flies. I stopped talking, started writing

instead. I work full-time and dad wants to die,

so I dropped him at the Champion Avenue

Low-income Senior & Child Care Services Center,

a newish building, municipal and nondescript,

in a neighborhood that’s been razed and rebuilt so often

it’s got no discernible character left. There was bingo,

men playing poker in a corner. Red sauce and cheese

on white bread pizza for lunch. Dad, a big talker,

was an instant hit, but refused to return. What

is the name of that animal, someone asked me.

Where is Philip, asked someone else, over and over.

As if firsts and lasts were one and the same.

after Tina Takemoto

I will paint us together

in lemon and burnt shoyu.

I will squeeze us out of

flour, water, yeast

while you dress

behind the thin curtain

while you flatten

lapel, collar, slacks

in our tightly ironed

tar paper life.

Your tie clip, carved from

ancient wood and not

the real topaz you deserve.

Outside, we shuffle in dust

flap powder

from between our feathers.

I used to be a swamp.

In this government aviary

dust storms can’t be predicted

unlike the government

which splits atoms

the way it did your chest.

Spilled you

on the ancient sea bed.

The mountains blow

their alien breath in you

while sleek muscle men

cactus across my humid eyes.

They don’t stop

to light my cigarette

or palm a slice of

fresh, warm bread.

Now bluebirds trill

from my cuffs

and it’s time to clock out.

Beyond the perfect

frame of this prison city

desert peaks buzz

the rich, rich song

of my hunger.

People always tell me, “Don’t put the cart

before the horse,” which is curious

because I don’t have a horse.

Is this some new advancement in public shaming—

repeatedly drawing one’s attention

to that which one is currently not, and never

has been, in possession of?

If ever, I happen to obtain a Clydesdale,

then I’ll align, absolutely, it to its proper position

in relation to the cart, but I can’t

do that because all I have is the cart. 

One solitary cart—a little grief wagon that goes

precisely nowhere—along with, apparently, one

invisible horse, which does not pull,

does not haul, does not in any fashion

budge, impel or tow my disaster buggy

up the hill or down the road.

I’m not asking for much.  A more tender world

with less hatred strutting the streets.

Perhaps a downtick in state-sanctioned violence

against civilians.  Wind through the trees.

Water under the bridge. Kindness.

LOL, says the world. These things take time, says

the Office of Disappointment. Change cannot

be rushed, says the roundtable of my smartest friends.

Then, together, they say, The cart!

They say, The horse!

They say, Haven’t we told you already?

So my invisible horse remains

standing where it previously stood:

between hotdog stands and hallelujahs,

between the Nasdaq and the moon’s adumbral visage,

between the status quo and The Great Filter,

and I can see that it’s not his fault—being

invisible and not existing—

how he’s the product of both my imagination

and society’s failure of imagination.

Watch how I press my hand against his translucent flank.

How I hold two sugar cubes to his hypothetical mouth.

How I say I want to believe in him,

speaking softly into his missing ear.

More than anything, I need this boy

so close to my ears, his questions

electric as honeybees in an acreage

of goldenrod and aster. And time where

we are, slow sugar in the veins

of white pine, rubbery mushrooms

cloistered at their feet. His tawny

listening at the water’s edge, shy

antlers in pooling green light, while

we consider fox prints etched in clay.

I need little black boys to be able to be

little black boys, whole salt water galaxies

in cotton and loudness—not fixed

in stunned suspension, episodes on hot

asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence

of apology. I need this kid to stay mighty

and coltish, thundering alongside

other black kids, their wrestle and whoop,

the brightness of it—I need for the world

to bear it. And until it will, may the trees

kneel closer, while we sit in mineral hush,

together. May the boy whose dark eyes

are an echo of my father’s dark eyes,

and his father’s dark eyes, reach

with cupped hands into the braided

current. The boy, restless and lanky, the boy

for whom each moment endlessly opens,

for the attention he invests in the beetle’s

lacquered armor, each furrowed seed

or heartbeat, the boy who once told me

the world gives you second chances, the boy

tugging my arm, saying look, saying now.

                                     for Yehuda Amichai

You threw off your exile
by clothing yourself in praise,
Yehuda, saying, my nation
is alive, Amichai, in me,

inhabiting your own body, 
your mother-beloved skin.
I’m hairy like you, and afraid,
like you, I’m half-animal

and half-angel, uncertain 
where my tenderness ends
and cruelty begins. We
did what we had to do,

you wrote, which in translation
reads:                                    .
Yehuda, I want your clarity—
to love you, not close the gates

of my heart like a nation
trying to make itself a home
but winding up with a state. 
Psalmist, you spoke so tenderly

of peace, but the war persists. 
All I have for you is this poem:
a man photographs the sudden
undulating hills. Behind him, 

a woman he loves now dreams
that their bed’s legs grow roots
beneath, overnight, and spreads
a canopy of branches that shoot

pink blooms open and open,
now green with shushing leaves 
that shelter and shadow the rucked
bedsheets, the branches burdened

with red apples, apples like eyes
ready to be praised
                                      and plucked.  

                                                   After Kabir Carter, Bard College, 26 June 2018

Feeling knives the microphone to cauterize flesh        it amplifies 

Crackles the abrasive metal fabric

Blowtorches feedback hold and heel

Throttles and pauses the cord-pull

Lulls to lunge in transmission      back seat pocket

Alones the sound crowd

Accumulates the solitary intention of hooded jacket front punch

Zippers the match stick ignite

Handcuffs the thick slide probe with plastic tie

Zones between foot and huddle

Shrills the retreat from acted upon          or was it repeat

Tools the self animation 

Insomuch as the metal scrim

On denim is able to inhale

Skin-howl    blister   swipe

Caresses and so abrogates as to grip therefore

Larynxes stride and light step

Dry touch enveloping to self anoint

Tag      identify       anatomy     pulse

Whether pleasure or pain              it  collapses

Second human shell the cosmos

Automaton guest or X

Feeling that ligaments today in predation

It houses       it afflicts         it encircles

Haven’t taken it to the head for a minute on another

three day bender. Slept past sunrise. And then another. 

The bed has softened over the years, the stoop steps chipped.

Shanties clog memory: was it your most recent love, or another? 

Bangladesh is continually interrogated by floods, you tell me. 

Your reflection a mist; the mist a shadow; the shadow some other. 

Cracked clay riverbeds sound like a cross between square and

sawtooth waves. Always, we want the frequency to be another.

Late last night the house made a drawing of itself: bones, skin, 

and a hat. It preferred famine over feast. Liar. It consumed another. 

Dear Sound Wave, while sobriety arpeggiates, is reshaped by blurring

filters don’t think too much of any of us. This dissonance becomes another. 

Strict and bound 

as an analog watch, 

Aristotelian narrative 

calls for a probable

necessary sequence. 

It is suicide season.

The calendar taunts 

with year three’s death dance. 

Dialysate swills 

in my abdomen. 

Long arrows of surgery 

nudge under my ribs

            trace my hipbones 

                        garland my navel. 

Along my lower back 

divots of biopsy

freckle into sickles 

when I bend over. 

Driving over the city bridge 

quirk or quark humming

            I might be spared.

My grandmother loved

singing O What a Beautiful City 

as she sorted her pills.

The anesthetic mask

shatters linear discipline:

            Trotting the deep path by mosslight, 

            son is a dark-haired universe 

            in the crook of my right arm. 

            Five pound blood-hum

            prayer and verse ripping 

            my skull pure off.

            Time has me scalped

            kissing the whorls of my brain 

            with frank red lips. 

Rolling up from surgery

I look down to my wrist

where someone has clasped 

my watch on loosely.

I didn’t want to break     my own heart     

oh no you didn’t      exist as a point on a plane     

in a modern philosophy of time     my new thing  

   

nope not today     in a world where transcendent 

incompetence is easy to spot     if that’s what you want to see     

and efficiency is still the enemy     of poetry and of love

     

oh no you didn’t write     poems on forgetting     fearsome leave-taking     

or crypto-amnesia     that act of forgetting     to cite fierce attachment     

nope     today is a day to be free     to transcend pedestrian realities  

   

O ethical imperative     dire as plagiarism nope     

O emotional appropriation     not today     

one form of redress     is if you write me a letter   

  

I will write you back      give and take means 

no hearts broken     if we concede to exist     

as a sudden broken thing     not fearful enemies of love      

we grow fierce as yes     transcendence yes     

on a plane in the sky     or in my mind     

no you didn’t forget     nor did I     nope not today

The train axle still rests on the railway tracks

its solid metal wheels lodged in the dirt,

the dandelions and yellow weeds the color

of a yellow sweatshirt, push through the gravel

with the persistence of something not planted,

unplanned. I am trailed by the detritus,

the reminders in mute things,

by the needle oak and the green benches at Weaver,

and the railway car, now a bar, and the parking lot

where once I stopped you, and here I sit in silence.

Love gone, empties the world of brightness, 

the trees are paper cut-outs propped on stands,

the green fields of Pessoa are dead and brown,

the flowery hue of a buttercup shirt, the squirrels,

in quiet industry, remind me of your hands.

I want to lie down in a field in North Carolina 

and let the June bugs carry me, 

let the stiff grass grow through me 

let the weeds and dandelions feed from this sadness

and grow tall again, uncut, like the ones that still live

by this steel axle, the one left anchored

in the red earth and creosote of Carrboro Station.

What if the submarine

is praying for a way

it can poison the air,

in which some of them have

leaped for a few seconds,

felt its suffocating

rejected buoyancy.

Something floats above their

known world leading a wake

of uncountable death.

What if they organized

into a rebellion?

Now scientists have found

a group of octopuses

who seem to have a sense

of community, who

live in dwellings made of

gathered pebbles and shells,

who cooperate, who

defend an apparent

border. Perhaps they’ll have

a plan for the planet

in a millennium

or two. After we’re gone.

Desire is never one way. Black

          snakes crawl through your throat. The divine longs

for human proximity to divinity. The divine longs

            for touch. You have not wanted

a body. And you have

            wanted. A careless

tongue can make chatter

but unrequited love

          can make an avalanche.

Your teeth chatter and you know

            somewhere a funeral parade is moving, one ant

after another marching. Your snake shed its skins as the curve of a               pilgrimage

          awaiting dawn. Heaven is too much a metaphor

to be of use to a lover weeping for

a false love. Every shaman needs a healer

and every God a devotee they can admire.

When God comes back from the pilgrimage, you are more

          plump. Everyone can see your wisdoms

sprouting. This time — dangerous. Even women

          will cast stones. Watch the people’s hands: they carry

shards of their half-spoken dreams. But you have

                          invented an embrace. In the first worship,

you make the one devoted to devotion devoted to you.

You bring the mountain

into your lips. Without

prayer, your mouth blooms.

The morning is clouded and the birds are hunched,

More cold than hungry, more numb than loud,

This crisp, Arizona shore, where desert meets

The coming edge of the winter world.

It is a cold news in stark announcement,

The myriad stars making bright the black,

As if the sky itself had been snowed upon.

But the stars—all those stars,

Where does the sure noise of their hard work go?

These plugs sparking the motor of an otherwise quiet sky,

Their flickering work everywhere in a white vastness:

We should hear the stars as a great roar

Gathered from the moving of their billion parts, this great

Hot rod skid of the Milky Way across the asphalt night,

The assembled, moving glints and far-floating embers

Risen from the hearth-fires of so many other worlds.

Where does the noise of it all go

If not into the ears, then hearts of the birds all around us,

Their hearts beating so fast and their equally fast

Wings and high songs,

And the bees, too, with their lumbering hum,

And the wasps and moths, the bats, and the dragonflies—

None of them sure if any of this is going to work,

This universe—we humans oblivious,

Drinking coffee, not quite awake, calm and moving

Into the slippers of our Monday mornings,

Shivering because, we think,

It’s a little cold out there.

<sup>By which a strip of land became a hole in time

            —Durs Grünbein</sup>

Grandfather I cannot find,

flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,

what country do you belong to:

where is your body buried,

where did your soul go

when the road led nowhere?

Grandfather I’ll never know,

the moment father last saw you

rips open a wormhole

that has no end: the hours

became years, the years

forever: and on the other side

lies a memory of a memory

or a dream of a dream of a dream

of another life, where what happened

never happened, what cannot come true

comes true: and neither erases

the other, or the other others,

world after world, to infinity—

If only I could cross the border

and find you there,

find you anywhere,

as if you could tell me who he is, or was, 

or might have become: 

no bloodshot eyes, or broken

bottles, or praying with cracked lips

because the past is past and was is not is—

Grandfather, stranger,

give me back my father—

or not back, not back, give me the father

I might have had:                                 

there, in the country that no longer exists,

on the other side of the war—

I’m wondering about you, chevra kadisha,

the “holy society,” who will prepare my body,

once I’m no longer in it, for the earth.

Will you know me already, or see me for the first time

as you wash and shroud me, as my father was washed

and dressed in simple white tachrichim, for those

about to stand before God. Perhaps by then I’ll know

if I believe in God. I like the democratic

nature of the shroud, an equalizing garment. You

may see a body that surprises you. You may not have seen

a man’s body like this one before you, which I hope is very old,

wrinkled, and (since I’m wishing) fit, muscled

as much as an old man can be. You’ll see scars.

Ragged dog bit forearm, elbow my father picked gravel

from over the sink, then flushed with foaming iodine,

and the long double horizons on my chest, which trunked my body

like a tree. If I am unexpected, let me not seem

grotesque to you, as I have to many people, perhaps

even my own parents, and others whose highest

kindness was to say nothing. Please let me return to dust

in peace, as the others did, and recite those beautiful psalms,

remembering, as you go about your holy ritual,

how frightening it is to be naked before another,

at the mercy of a stranger’s eyes, without even any breath.

No more the scarlet maples flash and burn

       Their beacon-fires from hilltop and from plain;

The meadow-grasses and the woodland fern

       In the bleak woods lie withered once again.

The trees stand bare, and bare each stony scar

       Upon the cliffs; half frozen glide the rills;

The steel-blue river like a scimitar

       Lies cold and curved between the dusky hills.

Over the upland farm I take my walk,

       And miss the flaunting flocks of golden-rod;

Each autumn flower a dry and leafless stalk,

       Each mossy field a track of frozen sod.

I hear no more the robin’s summer song

       Through the gray network of the wintry woods;

Only the cawing crows that all day long

       Clamor about the windy solitudes.

Like agate stones upon earth’s frozen breast,

       The little pools of ice lie round and still;

While sullen clouds shut downward east and west

       In marble ridges stretched from hill to hill.

Come once again, O southern wind,—once more

       Come with thy wet wings flapping at my pane;

Ere snow-drifts pile their mounds about my door,

       One parting dream of summer bring again.

Ah, no! I hear the windows rattle fast;

       I see the first flakes of the gathering snow,

That dance and whirl before the northern blast.

       No countermand the march of days can know.

December drops no weak, relenting tear,

       By our fond summer sympathies ensnared;

Nor from the perfect circle of the year

       Can even winter’s crystal gems be spared.

Oh let me go I’m weary here

And fevers scorch my brain,

I long to feel my native air

Breathe o’er each burning vein.



I long once more to see

My home among the distant hills,

To breathe amid the melody

Of murmering brooks and rills.



My home is where eternal snow

Round threat’ning craters sleep,

Where streamlets murmer soft and low

And playful cascades leap.



Tis where glad scenes shall meet

My weary, longing eye;

Where rocks and Alpine forests greet

The bright cerulean sky.



Your scenes are bright I know,

But there my mother pray’d,

Her cot is lowly, but I go

To die beneath its shade.



For, Oh I know she’ll cling

‘Round me her treasur’d long,

My sisters too will sing

Each lov’d familiar song.



They’ll soothe my fever’d brow,

As in departed hours,

And spread around my dying couch

The brightest, fairest flowers.



Then let me go I’m weary here

And fevers scorch my brain,

I long to feel my native air,

Breathe o’er each burning vein.

A knock at the door: it’s the boundary technician—

Dr. Transducer glides out of the blue

and into your pulse, come



to recalibrate your peaks and valleys.

Gloved in hiss, he unfolds the bolts

of your voltage, fiddles



your knobs and bones, bones

your spectral entrails—and deduces your output’s

plagued with fits of hysteretic



backlash. Whatever you utter

is noise shaped, a dizzy signal. The doctor’s

got the fix, and it’s a doozy:



he cleaves you to a graven

waveform erasure. He tunes you to a frequency

that lacks you out



then blows. The door swings

and bangs you shut, clouds pressed to the roof

of your mouth.

In a strait, some things are useful.

Others, true, she turns to ash. 

Thrust, thus—

her head thick with arrogance, 

infection and futility.

It could be how a young wife went,

strewn with net-veined willow 

and mountain aven— 

trespass, and wreckage. 

She could write about the year 

she turned to heat and haze, 

to laze: immurmurat-, 

imauraaqtuŋa. Of cannula

and silver nitrate. Of petiolus 

and achene, about to begin again. 

Of greens as they green. Of a man 

aged, eskered. Of a confined gleam— 

to hereby dissolve and hold for naught

the soil / gravel / silt groaning 

as the tools of our penultimate glacier,

 

a glacier I might pronounce like grief. 

One does wish for words to thaw 

in the mouth, but find instead a tongue,

welt. Erosional or depositional, raised 

& visible, rift into language & grit—  

They were calm because it had never happened before,

because they thought it had, it must have, when designed, 

a tunnel to fit the child but not the adult. Then how 

if a child crawled there and curled and closed her mouth, 

how to get the child out? Send another in. Send in 

someone small. They were calm because everyone 

finds reasons to be calm when there is wind or sun or 

this coat at the base of the slide, it must be the child’s,

Come out. It’s fine. Come on, now. Come out. 

They were wrong. All of them were wrong. Some thought:

a saw! Some thought: calm down! They were getting 

somewhere with their thoughts. Part of the crowd grew 

angry with the other part for making a crowd,

so one crawled up into the tube until his chest stopped 

like his breath and he saw something wrong: 

the sun made blue in the tube. Something about the sun 

and black streaks from shoes. The crowd saw the half of him

left out kick then kick wild, so they pulled the other 

half out. They sat him up and someone groaned, 

someone said Enough, now, come on. Sweetheart, enough. 

Come out. Then another crawled inside, left her coat 

by the slide, passed the streaks, saw the blue, smelled the plastic

in her mouth that comes from plastic having caught

the sun at noon, the burning soon night-cooled,

a thousand black-streak tallies to mark the cycle of shoes then 

wider shoes of older children pressed inside by two 

to touch and make the space between them small—

this one heard a sound. Someone’s calling me she thought.

I’m found. So she crawled back. Remembered all. 

Moved aside. Another tried. Lost. Another tried. 

Old Time has turned another page
      Of eternity and truth;
He reads with a warning voice to age,
      And whispers a lesson to youth.
A year has fled o’er heart and head
      Since last the yule log burnt;
And we have a task to closely ask,
      What the bosom and brain have learnt?
Oh! let us hope that our sands have run
      With wisdom’s precious grains;
Oh! may we find that our hands have done
      Some work of glorious pains.
Then a welcome and cheer to the merry new year,
      While the holly gleams above us;
With a pardon for the foes who hate,
      And a prayer for those who love us.

We may have seen some loved ones pass
      To the land of hallow’d rest;
We may miss the glow of an honest brow
      And the warmth of a friendly breast:
But if we nursed them while on earth,
      With hearts all true and kind,
Will their spirits blame the sinless mirth
      Of those true hearts left behind?
No, no! it were not well or wise
      To mourn with endless pain;
There’s a better world beyond the skies,
      Where the good shall meet again.
Then a welcome and cheer to the merry new year, 
      While the holly gleams above us;
With a pardon for the foes who hate,
      And a prayer for those who love us.

Have our days rolled on serenely free
      From sorrow’s dim alloy?
Do we still possess the gifts that bless
      And fill our souls with joy?
Are the creatures dear still clinging near?
      Do we hear loved voices come?
Do we gaze on eyes whose glances shed
      A halo round our home?
Oh, if we do, let thanks be pour’d
      To Him who hath spared and given,
And forget not o’er the festive board
      The mercies held from heaven.
Then a welcome and cheer to the merry new year,
      While the holly gleams above us;
With a pardon for the foes who hate,
      And a prayer for those who love us.

You crawled back into your motel in a border town near the demarcation line between the nation-state of the living and the underworld. Sleepless, you peered out the window. You could see the neon lights garlanding the Gates of Horn and Ivory. The lights spelled out “OPEN 24 HOURS A DAY” in blinking red cursive. You laughed. Of course, death is the only border crossing still open to all. You watched the illumination from the street pour onto the wall above your bed: a red lasso that looped on the wall, as if the wall had begun to bleed extravagantly. Below, traffic packed the road in both directions. From the two open gates, dreams sailed into the living world from over the deserts. Some dreams true, some false. You recognized some of these dreams (Race, Nation, Gender) and could not tell from which gate they had emerged. Sleepless, you saw the line of pilgrims queued up to enter the underworld. The line seems longer lately, new refugees to the afterlife.

Oh with gratitude, friends, I’m alive and thinking

about this dated metaphor. 36 and doing it again,

feeling new when I’m not. Forgive it, revise it. Oh I

felt less closeted than doored, an “or,” embellished

at the teeth on either end with an outcome. Factual,

I have decorated each door from the other side and

never just gathering the knob in my hand. Flattened

diadems collaged, I thought, cosmic radar for all our

later gazing, museum tablet on and on, behind glass,

canonic laser algebra, deathbed shooting star. Who’s

to say? That seemed like the magic a secret believer

could ask from it. Oh seems. And how it follows you

out. Come on get in I’m in this junker again and

writing “FOR SALE” in backwards letters onto the

window and adding whatever still makes noise from

inside its own made up case: dated doored gazing

deathbed window. Oh and pursing my lips wherever

your eye falls! Oh and oh and, I’m alive! Soon enough

the lethal hand of god reaches into all of us to pull out

something, a heart a rib. Come outpace me if you

can—already I have unlearned the name Adam,

unrehearsed any story of man and woman. Decorated

my body from the other side of that outcome.

                 Missing one hundred.

for many leagues, i slept under

surface. couldn’t learn enough

to stay, couldn’t hurt along

midriff, scrum and scrub. see myself

rushing into tomorrow’s wet

world. thin trees almost ferns with quiet mouth

desire. took to cold high plain, only wind and a murdered boy.

started running at the first sign

of breath but there’s only

three yesterday heads speak in these fields.

so much to circle. always asking

to let me repair small chord between us.

you started lagging each step, dragging

the water, stirring up dirt. he still

refuses all nourishment, says everything bad.

an odd man rushes past, asking if

near swamp, still looking for signs

we’ve seen two girls on horseback.

not tired, he says, refusing to go to sleep.

we’ve seen very little all day, close to the whistling ground.

in this family, we don’t count sheep because we eat them.

we shake our heads no

under black light, we’re all deep stream, counting down cows.

as the man points to the tracks, they couldn’t have gone far.

         Still fresh, still fresh. 

After Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (Uffizi, 1620)

Because I know what rough work it is to fight off

a man. And though, yes, I learned tenebroso from

Caravaggio, I found the dark on my own. Know too



well if Judith was alone, she’d never be able to claw

her way free. How she and Abra would have to muster

all their strength to keep him still long enough

to labor through muscle and bone. Look at the old

masters try their best to imagine a woman wielding

a sword. Plaited hair just so. She’s disinterested

or dainty, no heft or sweat. As if she were serving

tea—all model and pose. No, my Judith knows

to roll her sleeves up outside the tent. Clenches

a fistful of hair as anchor for what must be done.

Watch the blood arc its way to wrist and breast.

I have thought it all through, you see. The folds

of flesh gathered at each woman’s wrist, the shadows

on his left arm betraying the sword’s cold hilt.

To defeat a man, he must be removed from his body

by the candlelight he meant as seduction. She’s been

to his bed before and takes no pleasure in this.

Some say they know her thoughts by the meat of her

brow. Let them think what they want. I have but one job:

to keep you looking, though I’ve snatched the breath

from your throat. Even the lead white sheets want

to recoil. Forget the blood, forget poor dead Caravaggio.

He only signed one canvas. Lost himself in his own

carbon black backdrop. To call my work imperfect

would simply be a lie. So I drench my brush in

a palette of bone black—femur and horn transformed

by their own long burning—and make one last

insistence. Between this violence and the sleeping

enemies outside, my name rises. Some darknesses

refuse to fade. Ego Artemitia. I made this—I.

Hushed whispers in an undisclosed room

            Take it out of the girl

a child, boyish in nature             their smallness magnified.

Outcasted—the soft bodied animal you are

determined unruly animalia,

                                                   what survives inflation & inertia?

The body is a set of complex feedback systems

nothing is as it appears

                                                   the coexistence of a beard & breasts

                                                   evidence of the body’s willfully defiant nature

The body’s resilience amid the promise of perish:

                                              somehow the child survives their own hand

                                              the day’s weary edge inverted toward grace

A child, boyish in their nature           & barrel shaped

            survives sedimented against the residue

            of dunes, soil, leaf litter,       & the bodies of a lesser

What couldn’t be excised

            your boyish nature

            your untamed phylum,         your small heart pulsing loud

                                                        notes against the night.

When my daughter whines I tell her to say what you want in a nice voice.

My nice voice is reserved for meetings with a view, my palm outstretched saying here. Are our problems. Legacies rolling out like multicolored marbles. Don’t focus so much on the ‘doom and gloom’ they keep saying. We don’t want to depress. Everyone. This is only our survival. We rely heavily on foreign aid I am instructed to say. I am instructed to point out the need for funds to build islands, move families from weto after weto, my mouth a shovel to spade the concrete with but I am just pointing out neediness. So needy. These small. Underdeveloped countries. I feel myself shrinking in the back of the taxi when a diplomat compliments me. How brave for admitting it so openly. The allure of global negotiations dulls. Like the back of a worn spoon.

I lose myself easily in a kemem. Kemem defined as feast. As celebration. A baby’s breath endures their first year so we pack hundreds of close bodies under tents, lined up for plates I pass to my cousin, assembly line style. Our gloved hands pluck out barbeque chicken, fried fish, scoop potato salad, dew-like droplets of bōb and mā. Someone yells for another container of jajimi. The speaker warbles a keyboarded song. A child inevitably cries. Mine dances in the middle of the party. A pair elbow each other to rip hanging beach balls from their strings. The MC shouts Boke ajiri ne nejim jen maan. The children are obstructing our view. Someone wheels a grandma onto the dance floor. The dances begin here

is a nice

celebration

of survival.

I clean its latex length three times a day

                      With kindliest touch,

           Swipe an alcohol swatch

From the tender skin at the tip of him

                      Down the lumen

            To the drainage bag I change

Each day and flush with vinegar.

                       When I vowed for worse

            Unwitting did I wed this

Something-other-than-a-husband, jumble

                       Of exposed plumbing

            And euphemism. Fumble

I through my nurse’s functions, upended

                        From the spare bed

            By his every midnight sound.

Unsought inside our grand romantic

                       Intimacy

           Another intimacy

Opens—ruthless and indecent, consuming

                        All our hiddenmosts.

            In a body, immodest

Such hunger we sometimes call tumor;

                       In a marriage

           It’s cherish.  From the Latin for cost.

Brown love is getting the pat down but not the secondary screening

and waiting after you clear to make sure the Sikh man or

the Black woman or the hijabis behind you get through



Brown love is asking the Punjabi guy working at the starbucks knockoff

if all the tea sizes are still the same price

and he says no,

it hasn’t been like that for at least four years,

but he slips you an extra tea bag without talking about it.



Brown love is the unsmiling aunty

at the disabled immigration line

barking

anything to declare? No? No? Have a good day.

and your rice, semolina, kari karo seeds and jaggary all get through

even though they are definitely from countries

where there are insects that could eat america to the ground



Brown love is texting your cousin on whatsapp asking

if she’s ever had a hard time bringing weed tincture in her carry on 



brown love is a balm

in this airport of life



where, if we can scrape up enough money

we all end up

because we all came from somewhere

and we want to go there

or we can’t go to there but we want to go to the place we went after that

where our mom still lives even though we fight

or our chosen sis is still in her rent controlled perfect apartment

where we get the luxury of things being like how we remember

we want to go to the place we used to live

and even if gentrification snatched the bakery

with the 75 cent coffee where everyone hung out all night

we can still walk the block where it was

and remember



and the thing about brown love is, nobody smiles.

nobody is friendly. nobody winks. nobody can get away with that

they’re all silently working their terrible 9 dollar an hour

food service jobs where tip jars aren’t allowed

or TSA sucks but it’s the job you can get out of the military

and nobody can get away with being outwardly loving

but we do what we can



brown love is the woman who lets your 1 pound over the 50 pound limit bag go

the angry woman who looks like your cousin

who is so tired on the american airlines customer service line

she tags your bag for checked luggage

and doesn’t say anything about a credit card, she just yells Next!

Brown love is your tired cousin who prays you all the way home

from when you get on the subway to when you land and get on another.

This is what we have

we do what we can.

Yesterday, at Shepherd and Gray, the parking lot was

filled with birds, black birds, actually grackles. It was a grackle

lot; instead of a bumper on a car, there were ten grackles, instead

of a sunroof, fifty grackles sat high, their bodies shimmers

under cheap strip mall lights as shoppers delayed their spending

to pull out phones and take shots, such spectators we were,

like that summer in July, when I was left again

to wonder who was the child and who the adult,

that Sunday evening that hung in the air like bug spray

when my father, the one who fed me and gave me his last name,

stood two stories on our family porch, every neighbor,

in all manner of dress, drawn from their homes, in the street watching.

Let me tell you how he spread his arms wide, like the man

he was before Vietnam, or before the schizophrenia.

Let me tell you how a child learns the alphabet by counting,

how she learns only 2 letters separate the words hero and heroin,

how he stood high on the ledge of a porch the child never much

liked because there was a crack in its wooden center as if the world

was waiting to open its jaws to swallow her body whole.

Let me tell you how that July evening didn’t hold death,

but instead was the preface to death. The point being he jumped.

Some will say there are worse songs to sing, others might believe it

a tragedy, but who are we to question the Gods when a man

unconcerned with the inconvenience of his presence shows up

in a parking lot winged as an army of himself? Eventually, lights

went dark in the shops and each watcher retraced their steps back home

to find their families, to rejoice over food, to laugh and settle the night;

and the birds, steadfast they stood, not quite ready for flight—