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.

You are someone with a penchant for dark

beers and pasts, walk-in closets and porch-step

smokes, who liked to ride it out to the depths 

of the middle of Lake Hopatcong, spark

the flint of your lighter, take longing drags

and talk about hipster coffee and sex

with whipped cream designs—and sometimes, your next

lover—and dive in to put out the fag,

swim to the deck to peel off your cotton

boxers and wring them in your fighter’s fist.

It’s too cold in the fall on the water

we fall in, too naked for falling in

naked and docking unanchored like this.

I remember. You’d kiss me and shiver.

I’m sorry, could you repeat that. I’m hard of hearing.

To the cashier

To the receptionist

To the insistent man asking directions on the street

I’m sorry, I’m hard of hearing. Could you repeat that?

At the business meeting

In the writing workshop

On the phone to make a doctor’s appointment

I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry-I’m-hard-for-the-hearing

Repeat.

           Repeat.

Hello, my name is Sorry

To full rooms of strangers

I’m hard to hear

I vomit apologies everywhere

They fly on bat wings

towards whatever sound beckons

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry

           and repeating

                       and not hearing

Dear (again)

I regret to inform you

I       am

here

                 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.

Did tear along.

Did carry the sour heave

of memory. Did fold my body

upon the pillow’s curve,

did teach myself to pray.

Did pray. Did sleep. Did choir

an echo to swell through time.

Did pocket watch, did compass.

Did whisper a girl from the silence

of ghost. Did travel on the folded map

to the roaring inside. Did see myself

smaller, at least, stranger,

where the hinge of losing had not yet

become loss. Did vein, did hollow

in light, did hold my own chapped hand.

Did hair, did makeup, did press

the pigment on my broken lip.

Did stutter. Did slur. Did shush

my open mouth, the empty glove.

Did grace, did dare, did learn the way

forgiveness is the heaviest thing to bare.

Did grieve. Did grief. Did check the weather,

choose the sweater, did patch the jeans

worn out along the seam. Did purchase,

did pressure, did put the safety on the scissors.

Did shuttle myself away, did haunt, did swallow

a tongue of sweat formed on the belly

of a day-old glass. Did ice, did block,

did measure the doing. Did carry.

Did return. Did slumber, did speak.

Did wash blood from the bitten nail,

the thumb that bruised. Did wash

the dirt-stained face, the dirt-stained

sheets. Did take the pills. Did not

take the pills. Cut the knots

from my own matted hair.

To be apart, I’m told.

To be asunder.

To be a privative, negative, reversing force.

To be reached only by oaths and curses.

To have black sheep sacrificed in my name

because I’m a god, yes,

as we are all gods on occasion.

To be bodied as I am bodied.

To be rich of earth,

which is to be chronically chthonic.

To be where the gems are—

underground.

To be Dīs. To be Dīs. To be Dīs.

To reject any pickaxe disguised as love.

^{English translation from Spanish}

we are fiercer than melted snow;
we are bigger than storage cemeteries;
we are more rabid than mired winds;
we are immenser than rivers in sea;
we are wider than wasted tyrannies;
we are more tender than roots with earth;
we are more tender than rain in moss;
we are more tender than downpour’s tremor;
we are stronger than overworked years;
we are braver than stalking anguish;
we are more beautiful than universal monarchies;
we are more jevos than the dreamt good life;
we are richer than stolen ports;
we are more pirates than federal governments;
we are more justice-seeking than armed gods;
we are more more than the minimum
and more more than the most.
we are insularly sufficient.

we owe no one shame.

we owe no one smallness.

they tell us for a whole centuried
and quintuplentaried life that we are
the smallest of the upper,
that we are much of the less
and too little of the more,
but we are more than what they say,
more than what they imagine
and more than, to this day,
we have imagined.

we are home libraries
gathered in a data strike
that miss their bowels
of historied flesh.

we are a latitude of tied belts,
serpents who shed their punishing skins,
make a tape to measure the globe
and know if the world can
expand by opening chests.

we are that calculation that traces today
and hits rock bottom.

we are the fortaleza without spaniards,
the rib cage that expires the old empire
where before they housed crusades.

we are fatal, meaning,
the death of trenches
and the governments that induce them.

we are high-and-mighty on the coast
and humble in the mountains.
we gather coffee and plant it
in the buildings we build,
the children we raise,
and the exponential applications
we complete.

and in all things we are independent,
even in the most colonized hole of our porous fear;
even in the panadería most packed with papers that cover ads;
even in the corrosive act of saying we are only an island;
even that we have done looking each other in the face,
gathering cement blocks,
arming the neighbor’s storage rooms;
even from afar, it has been us
who has gone to the post office
and sent cans and batteries.

don’t fear what you already know.
we’ve spent a lifetime fearing ourselves
while getting robbed by strangers.
look at us. look closely.
don’t you see we are
beauty? 

la independencia (de puerto rico)

somos más fieros que la nieve derretida;
somos más grandes que un cementerio de vagones;
somos más rabiosos que los vientos atascados;
somos más inmensos que los ríos en el mar;
somos más amplios que las tiranías gastadas;
somos más tiernos que las raíces con la tierra;
somos más tiernos que la lluvia en el musgo;
somos más tiernos que el temblor del aguacero;
somos más fuertes que los años fajones;
somos más bravos que la angustia acosadora;
somos más bellos que las monarquías universales;
somos más jevos que la buena vida soñada;
somos más ricos que los puertos robados;
somos más piratas que los gobiernos federales;
somos más justicieros que los dioses armados;
somos más más que lo más mínimo
y más más que lo más mejor.
somos insularmente suficientes.

no le debemos a nadie la vergüenza.

no le debemos a nadie la pequeñez.

nos dicen por toda una vida siglada
y quintuplegada que somos
el menor de las mayores,
que somos mucho de lo menos
y muy poco de lo más,
pero somos más que lo que dicen,
más de lo que se imaginan
y más de lo que hasta hoy
nos hemos imaginado.

somos las bibliotecas de las casas
juntadas en una huelga de datos
que añoran sus entrañas
de carne historiada.

somos una latitud de correas atadas,
sierpes que mudaron su piel de castigo
por una cinta de medir el globo
para saber si el mundo puede
expandirse abriendo pechos.

somos ese cálculo que traza hoy
y toca fondo.

somos la fortaleza sin españoles,
la caja torácica que expira el viejo imperio
donde antes se almacenaban cruzadas.

somos fatales, es decir,
la muerte de las trincheras
y los gobiernos que las inducen.

somos altaneros en la costa
y humildes en la cordillera.
recogemos café y lo sembramos
en los edificios que construimos,
los niños que cuidamos,
las solicitudes exponenciales
que completamos.

y en todo somos independientes,
hasta en el hueco más colonizado del temor poroso;
hasta en la panadería más llena de periódicos de anuncios;
hasta en el acto corrosivo de decir que somos isla solamente;
hasta eso lo hemos hecho mirándonos las caras,
juntando los bloques de cemento,
armando los almacenes de los vecinos;
hasta en la lejanía, hemos sido nosotros,
nosotros los que llegamos al correo
y enviamos latas y baterías.

no temas lo que ya conoces.
llevamos una vida temiéndonos
mientras nos roban extraños.
míranos bien.
¿no ves que somos
hermosura?

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.

                                       after Hieronymus Bosch

There’s no there there, no here here—

a timetable shows the missing trains, the fruit bowl longs for oranges.

We went ahead to lurch behind, booked

a passage so circuitous it carves

new dimensions in the tabletops. They’ve posted

soldiers in the laundromats and everything you want

Irradiates to dust. I wanted

to become a different human, left myself here

among the daisies, tied the horse to a newell post

and let him nibble all the oranges.

Sweet tongue to the fruit, sweet agronome—carve

statues out of butter to venerate the cows—your books

with all their fractured mirrors, diminish me, bookend

this life with the twin ghosts of hollowness and want.

Among all the things we might have carved

into trees or out of marble, not a single effigy captures the here

of our simplicity, the rolling hips of fields, the slutty orange

of trees that turn on you each fall. Whereas a fence is made of posts

the country’s made of crosses and we post

death threats on the clothesline flapping with the sheets. I thought a good book

could solve it all, the proper smile. Yet tyranny wears orange

trappings, a mine fire, a deposition. I want

something to put my body in, I want to feel the here-

and-now draw its tongue along my neck, carve

a cuneiform instruction manual in my shoulder blades, make me a carved

idol for this new century of cosmic meltdown. Write this on a Post-it

note and affix it to the future: “Here

lies the history of America, one big comic book

of medical interventions.” There’s a way to want

that’s simple as our minds. There’s an orange

sun fatter than the sky, an orange

demon on a blitzkrieg mission to barbeque oblivion. Carve

me a corner I might hole up in, give way to what you want

and want for nothing. All we have are postage

stamps from foreign places, an attic full of musty yarn. Strike a matchbook

to it all, flee the scene and we were never there.

I want so many things for us, post my hopes on a telephone pole like lost puppies

but the book is here, our names carved from its narrative—all lost, all devastation.

Peel and pith the orange holds its essence in its skin. Peel and pith its bitterness, too.

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—

Like when, seventeen, I’d slide into your Beetle and you’d head

out of town, summer daylight, and parked among the furrows

of some field, you’d reach for the wool blanket. I knew you’d

maneuver then into the cramped quarters between passenger seat

and glove box, blanket over your head and my lap, where you’d

sweat and sweat until I cried out. Or further back, first winter

of our courtship, nearing curfew, when we’d “watched” Predator again

from the Braden’s lovers’ row, you’d slow to a halt at the last stop sign

before my house. I knew we’d linger under the streetlamp’s acid glow,

and you’d ask if I had to go home. Yes, I’d say, I better, soon—but I

knew you wouldn’t hit the gas, not for the longest time, three minutes,

five, and snow falling and the silent streets carless, I’d lift my top,

you’d unzip my jeans and treat the expanse of soft skin between shirt hem

and underwear like sex itself, your worshipful mouth, my whole body lit

from within and without. Or even further back, how I knew by the first

electric touch of our fingers in that dark theater, like a secret handshake—

I know you, I need you, like an exchange of life force between two

aliens from planets never before joined across the cold, airless terror

of space, that it was on, that it was on and on and on, forever.

         after Lucie Brock-Broido

winter crossing

bleak annulled

dulcimer damaged

choir miraculous

air &

monstrous ravishing

animal fallen

calls nightsky

ghost spectacle

again lynch

light loved

flint bliss

starfish tissue

shrouds lukewarm

sheathes everything

fanatic vanishing

chucking rocks at the wasps’ nest,

their gathered hum then sudden sting

at the nape of my neck. Oh, how I paid—

still pay—for the recklessness

of boys. Little Bretts. Little Jeffs.

Little knives to my breast. 

How lucky they were to never 

be held down, to never see

their voices crawl the air like fire!

How desperately I yearned to be them,

to storm the halls in macho gospel:

matching blue jackets, blood-filled

posture and made-you-flinch. 

How different would I be, 

how much bigger, if I had been

given room enough to be 

a country's golden terror? 

so whenever I hear a voice calling,

            I turn my head.

Unmake the bed

            open the window

When I returned from Paris

            burning behind me

        

I selected a single letter

            to tattoo upon my chest.

In the wind, my name sounds like a vowel.

            Everyone keeps asking what the baby will call me.

I find myself worrying about my nipples,

            how their textures will change.

It does not take long to recite the list of names

            of those who stay in touch.

I’m losing language in my sleep.

            I open my mouth, and words are plucked

from my tongue. Before I was broken,

            I planned to inherit the garden.

A guitar, dice, the scent of pipe smoke.

            We folded our legs beneath our dresses

and perched on the grass delicately.

            Back in the days when we knew our own names.

The exoskeleton dries by the radiator. What is the usefulness of shells, as in putting them up to one’s ear to detect the poem? Isn’t it infringeable that we carry our mating rituals into teleology? Isn’t it lately that our mates don’t often insert parts? The problem, as if splashed onto canvas in a never-drying medium, isn’t it that we can be hurt from without as if by wifi, by rumor? By cell tower? By stork? Thanks for caring. The storks along the beach stand on one leg, and then slowly generously fly away, including me, like a teacher who warns against trying to make absent things present. What do all these little knobs on the console do? This one flies us straight into battle with a petroleum coating. This one parodies the last erotic feeling. This one entices us to have babies with the reader, sitting lax on a conveyor belt that suddenly falls off at the end into someplace decent. In your guest room, draped with necklaces, we feel thinner than a Mobius strip, real wolf fur rug inside and out, real antler chandelier. In your guest room we peel an alien tangerine.

I had the passion 

but not the stamina

nor the discipline, 

no one knew how

to discipline me so 

they just let me be,

Let me play along,

let me think I was

somebody, I could

be somebody, even

without the no-how.

Never cared one bit 

when my bow didn’t

match the rest of the 

orchestra, I could get 

their notes right but 

always a little beyond,

sawing my bow across

the strings, cuttin it up

even if I wasn’t valuable

even if I lacked respect

for rules of European

thought and composure.

A crescendo of trying

to be somebody,

a decrescendo of trying 

to belong, I played along

o yes, I play along. 

Before the wick rejects

the flame; before the glass salts

the waters, or the rental en route

to your funeral stalls, I worry

the dog isn’t getting enough sun,

& it is midnight but we step out

anyway onto summer’s chow

tongue. Clouds extend the glare

of lightning far off. Before phlox

heads drop, the dog sinks

the anthill gathered full & quick

at the ceiba’s trunk. Nothing swarms

his leg or the river he pisses

into the heart like a god, no arthropod

island, no insect bridge of grappled

spurs. Before sunrise, I turn

a burner high in anticipation, olive oil

dollop ready to smother the pan,

when a moth plummets to the blushing

element. Wings immediately

charred. Let me tell you,

more than once in a parked car

I’ve held the searing buckle

to my chest—before drivethrus,

before driveways, drivel down

philtrum; before the beach, crushing

indistinguishable mounds

in bare feet, a horse conch’s crown

tearing skin. Even anaphora

can’t coax the future. You said, Ay mija,

are you crying again? before dusk

revealed the hook in the pelican’s beak.

He runs the gun down my sternum 

wrists pressed against my breasts

the ink sharp from the lip of the gun’s hum.

Exhale only when he loosens. Carrie captures

all of this on film. Photos failing to 

snap my ancestors guiding his hand

down my chest.

I ask him about Rihanna,

and he tells me his friend was pressured

into doing it. She makes a new tattoo appointment

once she returns to America, to cover up 

the indigenous ink she received here

and I’m reminded of my own unworthiness

that I sometimes throw in the backseat 

of my pride. She didn’t deserve that tatau. 

I get that. 

I plan to get my malu one day, but I just don’t feel 

like I deserve it yet, I tell him

as his body is still pressed against mine,

his precision below my chin, steady and solemn.

I find it interesting, he says, when people say 

they don’t feel like they     ‘deserve’ their malu.

To me, your malu feels like your birthright   no? 

I swallow without speaking. 

My breath held captive 

in his indigenous hands.

Between each buzz of the gun’s mouth 

on my indigenous skin. 

^{for CJ Rosenquist}

               In the current, secretly intentional, house

          there is: cope

     with condition itself (cannot be

underestimated). There is

               Barrier. There is encountering

          Barrier. There is struggle

     to negotiate Barrier, while being

watched. There is kindly-meant offer

               to help (almost always

          appreciated). There is kindly-meant, but

     no-asking first “help”

that often involves non-consensual

               touch. There is hyper-visibility     of Body

          and in-visibility of person-

     hood (a neat paradox

conjured by inaccessibility). There

               is: don’t observably feel anything,

          about any piece, which equals choke

     down snake of shame, muscle

grown in the jungle of un-

               intentionality. There is, during all:

          cheerfully, patiently, what is apparently un-

     fruitfully educate, while “performing”

Disability in public.

Go ten clicks, repeat. But

when the roof, walls, windows,

when the floor, floorboards, foundation,

when the cup of land

that holds house is

love, is welcome, when the nakedly

intentional shelter

is access, for body,

disability, and/or Black, Brown,

Trans, Nonbinary,

Queer, Muslim, fat,

elder, child, carbon-based

and breathing, valued simply

for being, and never demand

for government document,

there is no Barrier,

no encounter of

it, no being watched,

only aid, consent,

no shame, never blame.

Visibility, right-sized, equals

neighbor, not snake,

repeat of this life is clean

skate on frozen lake.

Imagine, the beloved who needs

assistance vacuuming saliva

from her mouth always

has a willing hand

holding hose, back-up

heart, whose intention is

set on weatherproof

interdependence.

This is the house,

the land, the world

of access, of welcome,

of here, you belong here.