To forgive one’s life love for dying, pick the long, feather-like, crimson flowers in early spring, when the desert is in bloom. Boil in river water only. Let cool. Drink at once. Drink when waking, at noon, and at bedtime each day for three full weeks thereafter. If resentment persists, go to your beloved’s grave daily and pray for forgiveness until sound sleep and appetite return.

◊◊◊

My last days

May they pass

slow as black smoke

goes father’s

only prayer

of late

No

No I’m certain

that he stole it

from Adam I’m sure

who first

uttered it

just outside

the Garden

the first night he

spent alone

My   Father’s   Frontal    Lobe—died

unpeacefully of a stroke on June 24,

2009 at Scripps  Memorial Hospital in

San Diego, California.  Born January 20,

1940, the frontal lobe enjoyed a good

life.  The frontal  lobe  loved being  the

boss.  It tried to talk again but someone

put a bag over it.  When the frontal

lobe died, it sucked in its lips like a

window pulled shut.  At the funeral for

his words, my father wouldn’t stop

talking and his love passed through me,

fell onto the ground that wasn’t there. 

I could hear someone stomping their

feet.  The body is as confusing as

language—was his frontal lobe having a

tantrum or dancing?  When I took my

father’s phone away, his words died in

the plastic coffin.  At the funeral for his

words, we argued about my

miscarriage. It’s not really a baby, he

said.  I ran out of words, stomped out

to shake the dead baby awake.  I

thought of the tech who put the wand

down, quietly left the room when she

couldn’t find the heartbeat.  I

understood then that darkness is falling

without an end.  That darkness is not

the absorption of color but the

absorption of language.

My throat is dry [   ] a drowsy numbness pains [   ] my sense as though [   ] obscured by smoke [   ] I drive on roads dividing patchwork farmland, fences [   ] wide-eyed llamas [   ] perpetual surprise [   ] after a dream, I sip water in the dark [   ] I don’t want to sleep [   ] my husband breathing deeply [   ] my children twisting in their beds [   ] smoke rising from the fields [   ] end of harvest razing [   ] I lift the rock, find a family of woodlice [   ] curled away from me [   ] sleeping or pretending to sleep [   ] hemlock lacing the road’s shoulders [   ] my too-dry eyes [   ] the tender babies are paler [   ] than their parents, little ghosts [   ] rolled in on themselves, my children are sleeping [   ] when I lift the blanket [   ] when, after a dream, I smoke in the dark [   ] no bird singing [   ] nothing to ode [   ] the sharp scent of pine, wet soil, beast musk, rain [   ] the dull opiate of things [   ] what will outlive us [   ] I turn on the screen [   ] a panel of men in a void, screaming [   ] cornflowers curling into rust [   ] I breathe in smoke [   ] fists curled shut [   ] the green of marijuana fields [   ] the pungent scent of [   ] bodies curled in sleep [   ] as if sleep were a cure [   ] one minute past, and Lethe-wards [   ] hear that crackling? [   ] pine cones dropping like heavy flames [   ] glaciers splitting [   ] howling ghosts [   ] what earth will be left for [   ] my children cry out in their sleep [   ] dark room filling with the smoke I exhale [   ] hills roiling [   ] the screaming stays while the screen goes dark [   ] I can’t see it disappearing [   ] to thy high requiem [   ] my throat is dry [   ] do I wake or sleep? [   ] I don’t want to wake

For years had anyone needed me

to spell the word commiserate

I’d have disappointed them. I envy

people who are more excited

by etymology than I am, but not

the ones who can explain how

music works—I wonder whether

the critic who wrote

that the Cocteau Twins were the voice

of god still believes it. Why not,

what else would god sound like.

Even though I know better, when I see

the word misericordia I still think

suffering, not forgiveness;

when we commiserate we are united

not in mercy but in misery,

so let’s go ahead and call this abscess

of history the Great Commiseration.

The difference

between affliction and affection

is a flick, a lick—but check

again, what lurks in the letters

is “lie,” and what kind of luck

is that. As the years pile up

our friends become more vocal

about their various damages:

Won’t you let me monetize

your affliction, says my friend

the corporation. When I try to enter

the name of any city

it autocorrects to Forever:

I’m spending a week in Forever,

Forever was hotter than ever

this year, Forever’s expensive

but oh the museums,

and all of its misery’s ours.

Bliss—right now:

beneath a blue jade

vine’s beaded bangs,

my sonar function

asleep, the I unstressed,

a syllable glided over.

(Except wherever

in the line it’s placed,

the I is stressed.)

Behind me, a lipstick palm.

In front of me, the early

stages of sunrise,

the world before

highlighter’s applied.

I thought I could stop

time by taking apart

the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.

Nothing can keep. Nothing

is kept. Only kept track of. I felt

passing seconds

accumulate like dead calves

in a thunderstorm

of the mind no longer a mind

but a page torn

from the dictionary with the definition of self

effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving

on as if nothing happened.

Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed.

Went to work. Went home.

There were parties. Ecstasy.

Hennessy. Dancing

around each other. Bluntness. Blunts

rolled to keep

thought after thought

from roiling

like wind across water—

coercing shapelessness into shape.

I put on my best face.

I was glamour. I was grammar.

Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.

I, too, had been taken apart.

I didn’t want to be

fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless

like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.

        for Jericho, with thanks to Carl Phillips

I like men who are cruel to me;

men who know how I will end;

men who, when they touch me,

fasten their shadows to my neck

then get out my face when certain

they haven’t much use for being seen.

I like men to be cruel to me.

Any men who build their bodies into

widths of doors I only walk through

once will do. There’s a difference

between entrances and exits I don’t

have much use for now. I’ve seen

what’s left behind after a hawk

has seized a smaller bird midair.

The feathers lay circled in prattle

with rotting crab apples, grasses passing

between the entrances and exits

of clover. The raptor, somewhere

over it, over it. Cruelty where?

The hell would grief go in a goshawk?

It’s enough to risk the open field,

its rotten crab apples, grasses passing

out like lock-kneed mourners in sun.

There I was, scoping, scavenging

the damage to drag mystery out of

a simple read: two animals wanted

life enough to risk the open field

and one of them took what it hunted.

Each one tells me he wants me

vulnerable. I already wrote that book.

The body text cleaved to the spine,

simple to read as two animals wanting

to see inside each other and one

pulling back a wing to offer—See?

Here—the fastest way in or out

and you knew how it would end.

You cleaved the body text to the spine

cause you read closely. You clock damage.

It was a door you walked through once

before pivoting toward a newer image of risk.

The way that the sea fails

to drown itself everyday. And entendre alludes all those not listening.

The way unfertilized chicken eggs fail to have imagination,

           dozened out in their cardboard trays,

by which I mean they will never break

           open

from the inside. The way my imagination (née anxiety) has

           bad brakes and a need

to stop sometimes. The way I didn’t believe

it when he told me we were going to crash into the car idling

           at a red light

ahead of us. To know our future like that seemed unlikely.

           But to have time to tell me?

—Nearly impossible. I may have broken

           several ribs that day

but I will never know for sure. I’m okay,

I guessed aloud to the paramedic. It doesn’t matter

           if you’re broken if you’re broke,

I moaned in bed that night, after several glasses

           of cheap red. I thought it would make a good blues

refrain. I made myself

           laugh and so I made myself hurt—

MEMOIRS BY EMILIA PHILLIPS, goes the joke.

A friend of mine competes in beard and mustache tournaments,

           even though she can’t grow one herself—

Once, she donned a Santa Claus made entirely out of hot-glued tampons.

It was as white as the spots in memories I doubt.

           The first woman

I kissed who had never kissed a woman before

couldn’t get over how soft my face is,

           even the scar. Once,

a famous poet said what’s this and touched my face

           without asking—

his thumb like a cat’s tongue on the old wound.

He must have thought he was giving

me a blessing.

They had their lightning thrones they had

their cages. They had their lamb pens and lamb

ties not just for lambs but for their own. As soon

as I understood the name of my skin sack

I was handed the chain. Was told by virtue

of my snow-lit skin I was Courtier

of the Chain. And could be Lord Chancellor

if I played my cards right. Dominion. We worked

the word over and over. We practiced with butterscotch

and Jolly Ranchers in the gold Honda. In the mile-long

yellow chariot that ferried us to the Coliseum.

So sweet. No need to bite down for the whole world

to hear you. No need to work your jaws

like an animal. To make yourself into an animal.

But also. Useful to think like an animal. To know

what that smelled like. That fear. My little skin

sack and really such a weakling who wept

over the stupidest things. Particularly

when waiting for the long yellow chariot.

I want to go home. To where? That was the rub.

No more home for me. If there ever was one.

I pitied myself. Little skin sack with the young wolves

circling in their gladiator suits. Heart refusing

to harden. But. The taste of hatred::

the sweet promise of that possible release.

In the annals of my light scroll when and if the

Light takes me back, it will be impossible to deny.

After the kicks and taunts. After hours eating

Salisbury steak over the toilet in the girls’

restroom. After the turnaway the plague

game, bottles of piss and spit thrown from passing

chariots as I made my way to the fairgrounds

on foot? They made a wager and let a lamb sack out

before me. And battered it. And battered it.

But all the while looking at me. Who laughed

along with them. My relief inexhaustible

as my desolation the next day when, having

shown myself to lamb and wolf entirely,

I was given my true calling. Which was exile

from every realm.

Satan turns on his wheel of light,

hovering inside the Senate.

A beauty confesses to the power of air,

a roaring socket of need.

The humans bear forth from their jelly,

six rose-lipped mannequins.

—Who among these is most loved?

We will be forthright in our character analysis.

We will stenograph on bright, bright branches.

Even as someone might bribe us:

with a basket of fruit to our hearth;

with a length of black thread to our dead;

with a boy with that thread in his heart;

with a boy with a snail in his heart;

with a boy with toys in his heart, who are bowing.

In my numb mind, a little leather jacket,

the sleeve no bigger than a thumb drive.

In that diminished instance,  

I light a cigarette. I put on lipstick.

 

I’m a version of a self. I speak the truth.

As if speaking French. Haltingly.

Fast forward and it’s me asking air

to save me from the synaptic patterns

 

that dictate who I am alongside what I do

when under duress. I wear a red dress.

A coral neck scarf. A hand (not mine)

covers my mouth. Nature is never fair.

 

Someone sucks the air out of the room.

I am saying no more except to say

that the scale is tilted toward

accident. The accidental. The absolute is.

Cut from a mail bag

without a return address,

this land whispers its name

from a waterfall’s hairline,

pressed flat under bent knee.

Lifting your head

to look past coming night—

                    

                           knives whistle.

You scribble an address

to a place where weeds

door the passage back.

Stone in throat,

your hand reaches

to clutch a leaf,

as you turn

toward the rising moon—

                             dove-winged

The sun rises in shades of tuna

I can only hear

One song

See the trucks moving

Like ribbon around me

It's me and this machine

Somewhere are the bodies

I’ve put my mouth on

When I am old

And held in

I hope words

Will be lusterless

I want to be

Buffed so hard that even

The highway

Can’t scratch

When I get to school

One kid reads a piece

About how he wants to give

Relationship Advice

For a living

He says that a cheater

Will always cheat, and of course,

He wants to find a way

To make us learn this

The other day when locking

My house I had

A vision of a field

Behind it were three

Smaller fields

I can leave many times

And still not be

Gone

Crows assemble in the bare elm above our house.

Restless, staring: like souls

who want back in life.

            —And who wouldn’t want again

            the hot bath after hard work,

            with soft canyons of splitting foam;

            or the glass of spring water

            cold at the mouth?

            To be startled by beauty—drops of bright

            blood on the snow.

            To be radiant.

All morning the crows watch me in the garden

putting in the early onions.

Their bodies look oiled.

Back in, back in,

they shake the wooden rattles. 

                             David Teng Olsen, Mural, 2017

 

At sunset, this October,

            I picked some Nippon daisies, 

the last flower to flower,

            a verb named for its noun.

 

The weather was all indoors.

            A Page solo plus Michelangelo 

enameled in cerulean, tangles

            of what looked like instant ramen,

 

a heavy barge in the surf offshore,

            a spindly zeppelin down, the scene 

split by an architectural birch

            crisscrossed by laser blasts.

 

Dave added the sky one day,

            then blew our heads apart

by denying it had ever been a sky.

            A spider creature was our sons.

 

Their hair entangled meant

            they would now never be apart,

not their whole lives wandering

            in a world itself worryingly

 

wandering who knows where.

            Look, there’s a friendly bloom; 

Look, a vivisectionist, a severed wrist. 

            These thoughts our house had had about us.

This morning—jeweled mannequins

In glass in a frame. Shadows. Bergdorf’s, Saks

5th Avenue. A dress of Coco Chanel an opera

A ballet A world away—

                                                      Past—

Lower East Side. I hear louder & louder

Faster, faster Delancey, Mott Street, rising

Above the hum the spinning the throbbing of

The bobbin-winder. Sweatshop din. Women

From Hong Kong, Mong Kok, choked in demonic

Heat. The fiber-dust-heat. 12 hours seated: 

In shirt-waist-dust. No break no ventilation

& Stooped over her Singer, Mother

                                                       —I never saw her

—There.  Her satin-scented hands

The faint scent of ginger & almond—

Fingers quickly—feeding

                                    —the machine—fingers

Cutting up garments, fragments How

Could it have been each piece, pennies

To the tick of the clock?

                                                      I am 9—

Before there are words to know

What it means to be 9.  Happy & did not know

What being happy meant.  Or innocence—

Standing there, Midtown, outside

Harold’s Broadway & 14^th—where she

Did take me. Couture wool scraps. Ribbons.

Bullion fringes. Faux suede

                                                         Fabric— fleshy—

Appliqués. Mother’s eyes in the window

Flashing: looking in. Always constructing—

The same French coat, draping it over Jackie O’s

Shoulder; would it look runway-stunning

On me? On her shoulder too why not

—On hers? Denim In 12 metallic versions

I clutched My mother’s arm clutched them all the

Beaded Trimmings—

Followed her inside where eyes

                                                          Wide: dilated—lives—

Yards & yards piled high: bolts of

Dupioni, silk-shantung. Charmeuse.

I caressed them with my fingers. 

After my mother, fumbled into their folds

Fibers creases—infinite

                                        Dresses: of vermilion,

Gold. The palpable—

Hem—of the city Gum San Gold

Mountain America I was a child &

                                                          Everything! was there—

Mother’s taffeta dresses: hand-sewn

& Sewn—for me. Had I known, consigned

To the stars. And then even not

That, nothing better than those dresses that dressed

—Her wounds. What did I know? Only that her signature

Begins in the looping style: tiny embroidered ladybugs or

Butterflies swooping down

                                              From another—realm

I think I saw heaven—where she

Was, & for awhile & in her dreams: There-then

                                                                —As in : moments: silences

Precisely—

Sewn. Threaded: each seam, each

Crease. The recesses. Over & over the way

—A breath—is held; is

                                   —A sharp pain—stitched

                                                            —Unstitched—

                          for my ancestor

                          in the Pennsylvania 25th Colored Infantry

                          aboard the Suwanee

First a penny-sized hole in the hull

                     then eager saltwater rushing over

    us and clouds swirling and clotting

            the moonlight—no time to stop and look upon it

as the hole becomes an iron mouth,

    makes strange sounds, peels and tears

                        open iron as iron should not open—

muffled and heavy         us becoming underwater

                     we confused the metal echo and thunder

         as the same death knell from God’s mouth—

we been done           floated all this way down 

           in dark blue used

      uniforms, how far from slavers’ dried-out fields

in Virginia, Pennsylvania—wherever

                                         we came from now we   

         barely and only

                    see and hear an ocean

                                        whipped into storm

not horror, not glory, but storm

                   not fear, not power, but focus

             on the work of breathing, living as the storm

rocks us and our insides upside down        turns

                   hard tack into empty nausea—

                 so close to death I thought I saw the blaze-

            sick fields of Berryville again, the curling fingers

                             of tobacco, hurt fruit and flower—

                      but no, but         no.

             I say no to death now. I’m nobody’s slave

                                    now. I’m alive     and not alone,

one of those      who escaped and made    myself

                 a soldier a weapon a stone in David’s sling

       riding the air above the deep. I grow more dangerous

to those who want me. I ain’t going back

                                 to anywhere I been before.

                 I grab a bucket. You grab a bucket. We the 25th

       Pennsylvania Colored Infantry, newly formed

                            and too alive and close to free

          to sink below this midnight water. 36 hours—chaos

shoveling-lifting-throwing       ocean back into ocean

                         to reach land and war in the Carolinas. 

       I stole my body back       from death and going down

                        more than once. I steal my breath

           tonight and every night      I will not drown. 

The dive starts

on the board….

                                                                    

something Steve

often said,

or Rub some dirt

in it, Princess,

when in his lesser

inscrutable mood;                         

Steve of the hair gel,

and whistle, a man

who was her

                                                          

diving coach,

who never seemed

to like her much.

Which was odd,

given, objectively,

her admirable discipline,

and natural gifts,

the years and years                                                          

of practice, and the long                                                          

row of golden

trophies she won

                                                                    

for his team. The girl

she was then,

confused, partly

feral, like the outdoor

cat you feed,

when you remember

to, but won’t allow

to come inside….

She’s thinking of Steve

now, many years

later, while swimming

naked in her wealthy

landlord’s pool. Or

“grotto,” to call it

properly, an ugly,

Italian word for

something lovely,

ringed, as it is,

with red hibiscus;                                                  

white lights

in the mimosa trees                                                                  

draping their blurry

pearls along

the water’s skin.

It’s 3 am,

which seemed

the safest time for

this experiment,

in which she’s turned

her strange and aging

body loose. Once,

a man she loved

observed, You’re

the kind of woman

who feels embarrassed

just standing in 

a room alone,

a comment, like him,

two parts ill spirited,

and one perceptive.

But this night she’s

dropped her robe,                                                            

come here to be

the kind of woman

who swims naked                                                             

without asking

for permission, risking

a stray neighbor

getting the full gander,

buoyed by saltwater;

all the tough and sag

of her softened by

this moonlight’s near-

sighted courtesy.

Look at her: how

the woman is floating,

while trying to recall

the exact last

moment of her girlhood—

where she was,

what she was doing—

when she finally

learned what she’d                                               

been taught: to hate

this fleshy sack

of boring anecdotes                                                          

and moles she’s lived

inside so long,

nemesis without                                                                           

a zipper for escape.

A pearl is the oyster’s

autobiography,

Fellini said. How  

clean and weightless

the dive returns

to the woman now;

climbing the high

metal ladder, then

launching herself,

no fear, no notion

of self-preservation,

the arc of her

trajectory pretty

as any arrow’s

in St. Sebastian’s

side. How keen                                                                              

that girl, and sleek,

tumbling more

gorgeous than two                                                            

hawks courting

in a dead drop.                                                                             

Floating, the woman

remembers this again,

how pristine she was

in pike, or tucked

tighter than a socialite, or

twisting in reverse

like a barber’s pole,

her body flying

toward its pivot,

which is, in those seconds,

the Infinite,

before each

possible outcome

tears itself away

(the woman climbing

from the water now)

like the silvery tissue

swaddling a costly

gift.

for Tarfia and Fita

             The rabbit has a funny set of tools. He jumps.

             or kicks. muffled and punching up. In pose

             the rabbit knows, each side of his face to whom.

             he should belong. He hobbles and eyes. This

             is the dumb bun allegiance. This bunny, even dry and fluff

             is aware, be vicious. will bite down your finger stalk.

             will nick you good in the cheery web of your palm.

             Those claws are good for traction. and defense.

             This bunny, forgive him. There is no ease. His lack

             of neck is all the senses about a stillness.

             stuck in a calm. until household numbers upend

             his floor. until the family upsets the nest

             and traipses off. Then stuck in a bunny panic.

             We each stab at gratitude. In our nubbing, none

             of us do well. We jump. We kangaroo. We soft seeming,

             scatter and gnaw. Maybe the only way forward

             is to sleep all day. one eye open. under the sink.

             Like the rabbit, we could sit in our shit.

             Chew at the leaf of others’ dinner. Make

             of each tile on the floor a good spot to piss. No,

             it doesn’t get much better. And like the rabbit

             we do not jump well from heights. We linger the dark

             until it is safe to come out. To offer a nose.

             a cheek for touch. the top of a crown. Nothing

             makes us happier than another rabbit.

A.k.a.



          the other gold.



                    Now that’s the stuff,



                               shredded or melted



                                         or powdered



                                                 or canned.



                                                             Behold



                                         the pinnacle of man



                     in a cheeto puff!



Now that’s the stuff



                      you’ve been primed for:



                                             fatty & salty & crunchy



          and poof—gone. There’s the proof.



Though your grandmother



                        never even had one. You can’t



                                    have just one. You



                                              inhale them puff—



                                                                     after puff—



                                                                after puff—



                               You’re a chain smoker. Tongue



                      coated & coaxed



but not saturated or satiated.



                       It’s like pure flavor,



                                   but sadder. Each pink ping



                                                       in your pinball-mouth



                                                                expertly played



                             by the makers who have studied you,



                               the human animal, and culled



                    from the rind



         your Eve in the shape



                                 of a cheese curl.



                                              Girl,



                                come curl in the dim light of the TV.



                           Veg out on the verge of no urge



                  of anything.



         Long ago we beached ourselves,



                                 climbed up the trees then



                                          down the trees,



                                                knuckled across the dirt



                               & grasses & thorns & Berber carpet.



                                           Now is the age of sitting,



                                   so sit.



           And I must say,



                       crouched on the couch like that,



                             you resemble no animal.



                                    Smug in your Snuggie and snug



                                                     in your sloth, you look



                                           nothing like a sloth.



           And you are not an anteater,



                                   an anteater eats ants



                                                   without fear



                                       of diabetes. Though breathing,



                 one could say, resembles a chronic disease. 



                                                                                            What’s real



                             cheese and what is cheese product?



                              It’s difficult to say



               but being alive today



                                      is real-



                                                real-



                                                       really



                                like a book you can’t put down, a stone



                       that plummets from a great height. Life’s



                      a “page-turner” alright.



               But don’t worry



                                      if you miss the finale



                                                of your favorite show, you can



                                                   catch in on queue. Make room



                                      for me and I’ll binge on this,



                                                            the final season with you.

I dreamt        the spirit of the codfish:



          in rafters of the mind;



fly out into the winter’s



           blue night;



 mirth off alder       tendrils sashay;



 while I set up



             my winter tent;



 four panels long—beams suspend



 I sit & pull blubber strips             aged in a poke bag;



 I’m shadowing the sun                    as a new moon icicle



 time melts    when white                     hawks come.

This morning I love everyone,

even Jerome, the neighbor I hate,

and the sun. And the sun

has pre-warmed my bucket seat 

for the drive up Arsenal Street 

with the hot car effect, 

a phenomenon climatologists

use to explain global warming

to senators and kids.

I love the limited edition

Swingline gold stapler

in the oil change lounge

which can, like a poem,

affix anything to anything

on paper. One sheet of paper,

for instance, for that cloud of gnats,

one for this lady’s pit mix

wagging his tail so violently

I fear he’ll hurt his hips. 

One sheet for glittered lip balm,

for eye contact, Bitcoin extortion

and the imperfect tense. 

Sheets for each unfulfilled wish

I left in a penny in a mall fountain.

Sun spills into the lounge 

through the window decal

in geometric Tetris wedges.

I have a sheet for Tetris,

its random sequence of pieces

falling toward me in this well

like color coded aspects of the life

I neglected to live, for the pleasure

of making line after line

disappear. The gold stapler

has twenty-sheet capacity

so I straighten my stack

on the reception counter

and staple the day together

with an echoing chunk.