^{Forbes, July 20, 2020}

The sky is so clean    we can see 
all the gods we’ve negotiated with     Coyotes 
swagger through the neighborhood

unchallenged    Roosters say nothing

The same ambulance lurks on 
our street without sirens every few nights 
and leaves with something 

broken: the veteran four houses south 
who shouts commands each morning while twirling 
his parade rifle     the battered wife 
in the green house across the street     bodies

Lights strobe 
through our blinds     First responders are here again 
When the street becomes dark 
we are brave     We peek out the window

to see Mars’s faraway red glow or to count the dead 
stars

I once saw Jazell Barbie Royale
Do Whitney Houston so well
I got upset with myself for sneaking 
Past the cashier 
After having been patted down. Security frisks you 
For nothing. They don’t believe in trouble. They don’t 
Imagine a gun or a blade, though
Sometimes they make you walk all the way back 
To the car with the weed you didn’t tuck well.
No one’s at fault. That’s how they say it
Where I’m from. Everyone’s got a job. 
I should have paid. Our women
Need to perform for the tips they couldn’t earn
After the state shut down for good reason 
And too late. We lost so many friends. 
My buddy Janir swears 
He still can’t smell his lip balm. Our women need us 
To call them beautiful 
Because they are. They’ve done what they must
To prove it, and how often does any woman get
To hear the truth? Jazell is so pretty.
Whitney Houston is dead. No one wore a mask.
It wasn’t safe, so it wasn’t really free.
If you don’t watch me, I’ll get by you. I’ll take
What I’ve been missing. My mother says 
That’s not how she raised me. I spent 
A year and a half sure she’d die.
The women who lip sync for us could die.
People like to murder them, 
And almost everyone else wonders
If they should be dead. Who got dressed looking 
For safety today? Who got patted down?  My mother 
Says what we do is sin. But all we do 
Is party. Even when I’m broke, I can 
Entertain. You’re going to miss me some day. 
You’re going to forget the words to your favorite song. 
You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.

The hard ways of that summer,
palpitations that knocked my body down
and held it level with the water
mouth skimming breath for months

a tired I didn’t know existed,
one that tied my bones to the
ground with heavy quick fingers,
one that bound my brain in gauze.

I couldn’t leave the house for months then,

so being able to walk now past the end of my block,
to stand long enough to wash the dishes,
able to read more than subtitles, to write any words at all—

these are blessings I didn’t expect.

daughter I can’t see    daughter once of padlocked diary stickered with hearts
sewing machine given by my mother    of bundled yarn

embroidery hoop    she cross-stitches in blue Fuck this shit
of springform pan    daughter of 3-layer chocolate cakes

with meticulous design    daughter wishing for a separate life
for space from me    as she should at 17

yet she is sick    and I can’t touch her    and how I wish
I had a baby monitor    as I go to sleep each night not knowing

and outside winter is turning    the squirrels are brash and ravenous
like last spring    will this one be furiously green    are all seasons now

exaggerated versions of themselves    this winter such pure dark
Are you writing about this?    my girl snapchats me from the basement

among our dirty laundry    boxes of baby sleepers    stringed
Christmas lights    I picture her lying on the floor

curled in blankets    with the stuffed hedgehog she took down
for comfort when she found out she tested positive    and all

I wish is that I could place my palm over her forehead
check for fever    set a cool washcloth on her face    hold her

on my lap    spin a pink bulb of  Tylenol between her lips

So powerful, the free opera streams. So powerful, 
the Navy ship treading to Manhattan, 

my students inventing words: afterwhen, leitmarsh— 
one renames herself Golden Bird. And I am 

thinking of you, lost friend—you in the new 
Pacific mountains and the wrought-iron herb 

garden, you for whom love is grief and truth 
a weapon you hand the enemy—barbed like 

the spores of a virus, infectious and exponential. 
Will I ever touch you again? A biologist calls me 

asking for meaning. I write in my garage
until a neighbor pulls down the door. Who am I 

to exist? By what right? We’re all going to catch it 
eventually, you say, and I want to take your head 

in my hands. I was supposed to be wiser. But this 
notion of deserving—to live, to breathe easy. 

Afterwhen I find my soul again, afterwhen I know 
what to say. Oh you, oh dear one, oh precious careful 

salve. You for whom love is a demand, whose name
is an incantation—you whose name I cannot say at all. 

The letter planes are all grounded. And in this long 
sabbath month, what words do we utter but prayer? 

^{—after Jericho Brown}

A poem can spasm, stretch, but it can let salve in. 
There aren’t enough pages for the longing.

           There aren’t enough pages for the longing 
           drenched in medicine bottles and ice packs.

Drenched in medicine bottles and ice packs, 
our aches sing beyond joints and stethoscopes in denial.

           Those who sing beyond joints and stethoscopes in 
           denial, how do the symptoms stack your days? 

Let’s name the stacks of dangerous symptoms: 
News coverage, the state, strangers who say the pandemic is over.

           News coverage, the state, strangers who say the pandemic is over 
           as I dream about a world that celebrates all of us.

As I dream about a world that celebrates all of us fully, 
Let’s allow poems to stretch. Let the salve in.

Earth put a roaring halt 
to our empty rabid existence 
ceasing marathon plastic productions 
disintegrating worldwide stock markets 
shuttering ubiquitous greed

Earth put a roaring halt 
to our multimillion-dollar-games 
sunk crude oil markets to asunder 
stopped our titillating trophy hunts 
our eating bloody meat in hoards 
our cruel trampling of the land 
put an end to our soiling of the skies 
our tarnishing the homes where water-beasts are born

In one thunderous clap the Planet hurled 
an instant standstill to our haywire 
to our decapitation of mountain tops 
our butchering of tree-communities 
to our murdering sprees of elephant 
and whale, tiger infants 
and elders, mothers and girls

Throughout passing days of sirens 
our existence is halted 
a new plague set into motion 
our mass die-off 
launched. 

the way that soap loves an airborne virus. 
Wants nothing more than to whisk it all away. Half fragile 
as water, half hydrophobic wildchild. Doing it daily

as thirst trap. Posing in the fat of fruit. in the lipid 
of a milking cow. It’s unfair to say

it’s afraid of anything. Hunting virus by riding hydro. 
Mobbing the scene in micelle. Trailing pond for a bond. 
Shooting its shot near the nearest swarm of greasy tail. How 
good it is at pulling every germ. Every dirty little frag. 
Every bacterial bevvy. 
                                         Loving it all 
to its silky death. to its silty bottom. to its graywater demise. 
How it hungers the virus until neither function. Melting its thick 
heart and ripping it all away.

Little soap bar playa. Little Dionysian pump of cupidity.

                           Oh, to desire virus 
                           to death. To take it dizzy 
and broken down through the falls. 
Slow soaping the sick

from our living, 
wet hands.

Everyone assumes we know how to love. Where did
you first learn (or did you ever)? In this blooming

a message: the bird which heals itself
is bandaged by an unseen hand. I asked

the earth to distill into one bone, into
the nadir of a mountain. I found buried there

my fear transformed into a jackrabbit
bounding away from me, an upside-down

heart moving across the Ouija board of this valley
reminding me that time is a floating island,

a menagerie of stars and crystals growing from children’s
play lab kits and nautilus lisps—I asked: child

or no child—and the apple gave me the gift
of four seeds, perfect wisdom if not

wooden—what is the difference between
earth and terra? The landscape unfolds, unspools

like a soft plume. The chrysalis is a crossroads.
A fat grub born every minute. The air fat

with feathers in this ceremony of eternal candles.
La luna changes her mind often—child or no child

—blooming a new face, unraveled ligature
unbound and unbothered.

    The forest drifts in through the window, rising up the slope

        from narrow water carving low points lower.

Once with you, a wading bird we watched,

      waiting to see how close it would

come. Now that trail is gated by the threat of breath, too many

        people too close, path sated and spilling over.

         I am hungry for the touch of ferns,

for happenstance and a lost world of

coincidence I once felt standing all around me,

like a stand of trees in the city