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

^{for Alison Saar}

Please approach with care these figures in black.

Regard with care the weight they bear,

                      the scars that mark their hearts.

Do you think you can handle these bodies of graphite & coal dust?

This color might rub off. A drop of this red liquid

                      could stain your skin.

This black powder could blow you sky high.

No ordinary pigments blacken our blues.

Would you mop the floor with this bucket of blood?

Would you rinse your soiled laundry in this basin of tears?

Would you suckle hot milk from this cracked vessel?

Would you be baptized in this fountain of funky sweat?

Please approach with care

                      these bodies still waiting to be touched.

We invite you to come closer.

We permit you to touch & be touched.

We hope you will engage with care.

I don’t want to say anything. What is it to be saying? Force speech, rape speech. I have no subjectivity or light subjectivity. Speaking, defunct. Land mass floats. And the forests have been felled. And the antlers, snapped. Morphed lips, already sewn. Most of us are keen to mouth the word, “beast.” Everyone is talking talking talking like dentures, clack clack, but nothing is really said. Or so much chatter static. I am not saying anything either, am waiting and breathing. My body is speaking. Expressing the thingness of the thing. It chats at me, motoring. In the taxi, a tree shaped purple fragrance floats across face.

--

To be a red 
scratch or 
red scotch, 
depending on 
your liking,
calculation 
of the sublime, or 
the sublime itself—

Memory fixed— 
—and 
then splatter.
My mother in 
her pink kitchen 
washes what 
the garden 
and its grey 
chemicals produced. 
Outside, the gate 
ajar, the dog 
run wild-ing. A thing 
called girl splay, 
or wheat heart. 
We could draw 
a chalk line there. 

This is not conceptual. This is a poem. You are a poem. I am. 

The hesitancy.
The undoingness. 

More secrets: humiliation as release. 

The men all say “I want to stretch you out,” feel themselves big in this small corner of the world. How chivalrous, the ache of any obvious sliding down. What would the poem be without wings to block out the light?

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

The snake is 

a sleeve the deer 

puts on, its mouth 

a beaded cuff 

in the haze men 

make of morning 

with each release 

of their fist-gripped 

guns. Is this a dream 

of shame? Is this 

a dream of potential

unmet, of possibility 

undone? School, 

no pants. Brush, 

no teeth. Podium, 

no poems. Open

door, all wall. 

Dear Monster,

none of the guests 

we disinvited arrive. 

In the darkness 

no lion comes.

I hear the sound of the sprinkler outside, not the soft kind we used to run through

but the hard kind that whips in one direction then cranks back and starts again.

Last night we planned to find the white argument of the Milky Way 

but we are twenty years too late. Last night I cut the last stargazer 

lily to wear in my hair. 

This morning, the hardest geography quiz I’ve ever taken: how does one carry

oneself from mountain to lake to desert without leaving anything behind?

Perhaps I ought to have worked harder. 

Perhaps I could have paid more attention.

A mountain I didn’t climb. Music I yearned for but could not achieve.

I travel without maps, free-style my scripture, pretend the sky is an adequate

representation of my spiritual beliefs. 

The sprinkler switches off. The grass will be wet. 

I haven’t even gotten to page 2 of my life and I’m probably more than halfway through,

who knows what kind of creature I will become.

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

one year, i carried the blues around

like a baby. sure, my coffee mugs cupped

amethysts :: water gushed, rose-tinted

and -scented, from the faucets at my touch ::

the air orange with butterflies that never

left me. meanwhile, indigo held fast

to my toes :: lapis lapped my fingertips ::

and a hue the shade of mermaid scales

bolted through my hair like lightning.

my eyelids drooped, fell, heavy with sky.

that year i carried the blues around

left me mean :: while indigo held fast,

the daily news tattooed azure to my back. 

true, festivals of lilies buoyed me. but what 

good could white do? the blues grow like

shadows in late sun :: stretch  creep  run.

there was the first horse

and then the last;

the scheme of horses in between

is immaterial (to say they were muscle

is being kind, they were meat)

but the first horse was the horsehead—

high angular white bones 

and sinew—and the great matter of him broke meaning open

like a disclosure, and there, where he lived, lay the river of the canyon,

all white-tipped like a righteous migration of spines,

and he stilled the water by his will alone 

to better see the startling symmetry of his reflection,

his charge moving him 

somehow faster than the breath’s steady luggage,

across the neckline of the field,

and up and over sugar cane, always

toward starvation: for as terrifying as it is,

forever is a solid,

and from that firstfoal followed his blood

like the flood that begins at the mount 

and streams and cheats and even seems to grow 

by rain that falls by the torso 

but loses itself through the corn husks 

and understory until it is thinner

than the water that comes from a wound

and it settles in the ditch of a cul-de-sac, at rest as a lie.

I wake in the golden belly of this abode

and sense some diurnal grace at work.

I take my body to the fall, to bathe

and anoint my genitals with shea.

I have made my journey to the cold hills

to commune with my people there.

I come for the second beautiful harvest

and have waited long to look into its eye.

The harvest hosts libations, the meal

and my desire—so I drink the deep

heady liquid of its languid stare, under

the hum of many voices: burgeoning

friendships and reunion in the low light.

I break into the soft weirdness of injera

and dip my fingers into the meat stew,

to celebrate the glory of the kings.

The clear splendor of the serving boy,

his slow blink as of a camel, does not

distract me—here to reap but seduced

by the second beautiful harvest.

A tryst.

That ends

in a nightly dose.

A contradiction,

emptiness

refused by starlight,

the dark

enflamed with error.

Tell me again

what crime you are

so guilty of?

The hot tub,

26 Seconal—

the moon

like ejaculate.

Delicate.

Poor

Barlow,

you felt

so alone;

you were

the only queer.

January 1, 1951.

In the semantics of

your translation

you intend, in Náhuatl

a long while,

to abandon

your cadaver.

There.

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?

Our world goes nowhere except its own elsewhere

What kind of sentence is that? 

No one is responding, but everyone is vibrating with address

All of us stationed before the same absence

Like glass sheets; we see right through us to the air

Real life is Elsewhere

It is right Here

The bald child 

Is a failed clairvoyant

But he can peer through walls to teeth and other things: soap

Mathias kisses Lucy’s Head

Someone shoots my book, shoots it straight through

I allow a relation 

Between addiction and adore

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.

Were it possible, I would be naked. Of the nude philosophy:

consider the globalization of the expensive american sound. 

Should we worry? We should work. I believe you’re right.

I distrust the word “white.” It’s sanctified propaganda. 

Repetition is my language of origin, the highest technology. Anyway

the body is only mine provisionally. For reasons that I’m not sure of,

I am convinced that before becoming music, music was only a word. 

I prefer to destroy the composer, renew the concept.

Extraordinary limitation playing freedom.

“...style...”

Grind me Nautica, Vic Tayback.

Line chef para Alice arm hair,

fore-sausage & anchor tat,

snatch, a silvered chest, V-

neck, sleep hard Weezy—

Zebra-Jive-Turkey.

As in how do you do that?

Glimpse, a tad, pecking

the surface glaze, or Dove

Men+Care. iNot be puppy breath,

tan streak down the cheek, scar,

or Bowie’s bass: VANILLA ICE 

tricks a pompadour. Jim Carrey

a detour, when slips the tongue.

Airborne pellet in seltzer fizz. ED— 

father had a junk business...barrels 

of jimmied pistols...they wouldn’t fire 

...but they were good for kids.

we are

prayer in the long boat

                                               a rhizomatic scream

                                               surrounded by the dark dagger

                                                                        of the ocean

                         scripture

                         in its entirety

                         is anticipation of the lilt

                                                   and yet

there is no word

for the rhythm

             we endure

             across this dirtless moment

                                                    antibird, we sing like birds

                                                    textured and untrained

             rugged the love

             that claps

in the chasm of our black palms

i decided i was a ball of clay

                                                                                             spherical temperamental

                                                                                             poetic

i was a thing to be held and not known 

a grid of interconnected variables 

saying, me, me, me, me, me

 

what goes around, goes around again 

pote/ port/ pot

soil a skyline scored in                                                     slip

there are so many ways to situate oneself as

vast sagging field                                                              giving shape

to

meshwork of soldered ideas cylinder

 

 

it doesn’t matter

and yet what you hand down, over, hand out 

is just one-way to live

 

in stressed and unstressed shifts i

am one edge away from disappearing

an expanding idea, a space where more space          is making space is

this sympathy vs. empathy?

 

 

such landslide

where is this all going?

all this                                                                                 orbiting round to become

                                                                                             a dinnerplate turned in 

                                                                                            on itself

It was at first fire

Then volcanoes 

Now the latest fear keeping 

My daughter’s door open

Through the night

Is that of being afraid

Is there a narrator in this show 

She asks as the authority  

Of the voiceover in the cartoon

Loses what I imagine as credibility 

In her six-year-old mind

It’s a creation myth

The one she’s watching

Because it was intentional 

For months before her conception 

I was afraid of having sex

As though there’s an answer 

That would eclipse this 

New-found complication

How can I not be scared 

Of being scared she asks

Never trust the authority 

Of the narrator I want 

To tell her but I’d be lying