10. Here on my knees I look for the single animal: you left

                                                   ravaged at the edge of a meadow

9. Is everything accounted for? The fingers dipped

                                     beneath the torso—to keep this body bright

8. Every breath we are desperate to take

                             sounds as if a war lost against a country of promise

7. Discarded halos: the light you remember

                   in your head—you feed on what is crushed between the teeth

6. America declares these dreams I have every night be re-

                                                      dreamed & pressed into names

5. Upended petals of qém’es

                                 abandoned like torn butterfly wings—we’é I pray

4. I pray that nobody

                  ever hears us

3. An eye gone

           bloodshot: I tear through the crisp apple of your throat & find—

2. myself: this—a boy beside a boy. An eyelash

                            fallen at the base of a valley, our dark bones bursting in-

1. to bloom. I stare into your beloved face & enter: yes,

                 yes, this nation, under god, its black sky we lay our nightmares to

0. where I am your animal: my Lamb—now eat

            me alive.

The first deer had large teeth and no horns and

were not afraid.

The first deer did not have enough fear

for the men who needed them

to survive.

A woman decided to let the men eat

a grandmother decided her deer shall have horns

and be afraid

someone’s mother decided the men shall eat

and shall be feared.

*

A man thought wolves should be used

to cull the herd.

And we who had been catching water

dripping through stone

in the homes we dug

out of the earth

we licked our long teeth clean

            and set to work.

She is a wood warbler

hatched

            into madness.          She

emerged

from milky shell   earthen brown blotches

not Rorschach   not robin   but warbler.

Open-mouthed                   swallow of hard-

chipped notes, calls            smothered

inside 

            her smoke-gray chamber of throat.

Dis/appearing between branches          

muted yellow-green

            tail feathers and body dainty   clawed toes

white lines half-circle            her eyes

sense but can’t see

at the center of night     movements        

misfire

misreads the body

                                                responds on its own.

                                                   After Kabir Carter, Bard College, 26 June 2018

Feeling knives the microphone to cauterize flesh        it amplifies 

Crackles the abrasive metal fabric

Blowtorches feedback hold and heel

Throttles and pauses the cord-pull

Lulls to lunge in transmission      back seat pocket

Alones the sound crowd

Accumulates the solitary intention of hooded jacket front punch

Zippers the match stick ignite

Handcuffs the thick slide probe with plastic tie

Zones between foot and huddle

Shrills the retreat from acted upon          or was it repeat

Tools the self animation 

Insomuch as the metal scrim

On denim is able to inhale

Skin-howl    blister   swipe

Caresses and so abrogates as to grip therefore

Larynxes stride and light step

Dry touch enveloping to self anoint

Tag      identify       anatomy     pulse

Whether pleasure or pain              it  collapses

Second human shell the cosmos

Automaton guest or X

Feeling that ligaments today in predation

It houses       it afflicts         it encircles

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

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

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

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

Bangladesh is continually interrogated by floods, you tell me. 

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

Cracked clay riverbeds sound like a cross between square and

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

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

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

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

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

The air is close by the sea and the glow from the pink moon

drapes low over a tamarind tree.

We hold hands, walk across a road rushing with traffic 

to an abandoned building site on the bay, look out across the dark marina.

Sea cows sleep by the side of a splintered dock, a cluster of them 

under the shallow water,

their wide backs covered in algae like mounds of bleached coral.

Every few minutes one floats up for air, 

then drifts back down to the bottom, 

without fully waking.  

They will do this for hours, and for a while we try to match 

our breath to theirs, and with each other’s.

In the morning, sitting in the garden beneath thatch palms, 

we drink black coffee from white ceramic cups.

Lizards killed by feral cats are scattered on the footpath.

I sweep them into a pile with the ones from the night before.   

Waves of heat rise from the asphalt, 

and we sense a transparent gray fuzz lightly covering everything 

as if there were no such thing as empty space, 

that even a jar void of substance holds emptiness as if it were full.

                                  After a stone and sand exhibit in Portland 

A man is leading the animals.

A man is leading the ones that float on water.

A man is leading the winged ones.

A man is leading the ones that swim.

Maybe he’s St. Francis,

the long-robed man who calls the animals to him now.

Maybe he’s Noah,

the one who gathered the animals.

and sailed away with them, they say.

Who was there to witness their leaving?

To sing a song for their journey?

Where are they going?

their faces turned northward,

taking their songs,

taking their maps,

taking their languages.

Are they leaving with joy in their hearts?

Or is sadness eating at their star hearts?

In the wake of their leaving a small wind

stirs the empty hands of the tree branches above us.

What I will remember—

footsteps left like dinosaur tracks

pressed between Sky Woman and Mother Earth.

When they leave,

I will weep.

I will weep.

We did not say much to each other but

we grinned,

            because this love was so good you sucked the

rib bones

and I licked my fingers like a cat.

Now I’m

            omniscient. I’m going to skip past

the hard

parts that go on for a very long time. Here’s the

future:

            I laugh, because the pleasure was earned

yet vouchsafed,

and I made room for what was dead past and what

yet didn’t

            exist. I was not always kind, but I

was clear.

In the hard shadow of the moon

when the recesses of light have gone 

and the faint red of the hawk’s shoulder has disappeared from the sky

in the growing pulse of the praying mantis

when the city has come into its own new light

it is here where I often remember:

the weaving of ocean vines

the trails of history, cemented by touch

the small ridged blossom of the cowry shell

the indigo dye made radiant by the seller’s basket.

The way the long grass 

emerges at the shore.

Something of that meeting.

These are memories both distant and near

traces of them lived and felt 

laughing in the company of the ones who came

holding the silence of the moment, as we stare 

with wonder, at the bubbling ruptures of a painter’s canvas,

pull, with care, the clinging skin of a stubborn fruit.

I recall these moments 

not from the grand gesture

of a thing once known, 

but from a small place

the place where my child’s hand

is hidden warmly inside my own.

Strict and bound 

as an analog watch, 

Aristotelian narrative 

calls for a probable

necessary sequence. 

It is suicide season.

The calendar taunts 

with year three’s death dance. 

Dialysate swills 

in my abdomen. 

Long arrows of surgery 

nudge under my ribs

            trace my hipbones 

                        garland my navel. 

Along my lower back 

divots of biopsy

freckle into sickles 

when I bend over. 

Driving over the city bridge 

quirk or quark humming

            I might be spared.

My grandmother loved

singing O What a Beautiful City 

as she sorted her pills.

The anesthetic mask

shatters linear discipline:

            Trotting the deep path by mosslight, 

            son is a dark-haired universe 

            in the crook of my right arm. 

            Five pound blood-hum

            prayer and verse ripping 

            my skull pure off.

            Time has me scalped

            kissing the whorls of my brain 

            with frank red lips. 

Rolling up from surgery

I look down to my wrist

where someone has clasped 

my watch on loosely.

I didn’t want to break     my own heart     

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

in a modern philosophy of time     my new thing  

   

nope not today     in a world where transcendent 

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

and efficiency is still the enemy     of poetry and of love

     

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

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

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

   

O ethical imperative     dire as plagiarism nope     

O emotional appropriation     not today     

one form of redress     is if you write me a letter   

  

I will write you back      give and take means 

no hearts broken     if we concede to exist     

as a sudden broken thing     not fearful enemies of love      

we grow fierce as yes     transcendence yes     

on a plane in the sky     or in my mind     

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

if the cotton crop fails

if the wheat crop fails

if Oklahomans wander forever

among the back lots of Hollywood

if the potato crops fail

if the corn crops fail

if the sun corrodes a copper

mirror our faces afloat

above a crib in Guadalajara where the ceiling fan

rends our voices

and the secret lives of aloe roots 

confess to a window in feathers of ice

then the bluebells yawning up in ruts

of mining roads will measure the border wall

in the serene apotheosis of their sepals

and one drop of my blood

will freeze in the eye

of an old fox, and one drop

from your eye thaw

to feed the iris bulbs

three beads from our lungs

inhaled by a prisoner

in the electric chair a queen

in a fairy tale a farmer

planting mines east of her field if

the gears of the clouds say yes

if ants flow up and down the funnels

of evolution

then time will prism into its possibles

and you’ll end up in a bar

in Alabama a cherry in your mouth

watching a hotel key

float toward you

or you’ll wake in a labyrinth

called Monday                called Your Life

called The Things You Prayed For

and your intricate decisions

will lead you out and deeper in

your mirrors dissolving in ghost water

and your indecisions will go on

subtracting numbers from the garden

and building houses in the air

The train axle still rests on the railway tracks

its solid metal wheels lodged in the dirt,

the dandelions and yellow weeds the color

of a yellow sweatshirt, push through the gravel

with the persistence of something not planted,

unplanned. I am trailed by the detritus,

the reminders in mute things,

by the needle oak and the green benches at Weaver,

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

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

Love gone, empties the world of brightness, 

the trees are paper cut-outs propped on stands,

the green fields of Pessoa are dead and brown,

the flowery hue of a buttercup shirt, the squirrels,

in quiet industry, remind me of your hands.

I want to lie down in a field in North Carolina 

and let the June bugs carry me, 

let the stiff grass grow through me 

let the weeds and dandelions feed from this sadness

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

by this steel axle, the one left anchored

in the red earth and creosote of Carrboro Station.

What if the submarine

is praying for a way

it can poison the air,

in which some of them have

leaped for a few seconds,

felt its suffocating

rejected buoyancy.

Something floats above their

known world leading a wake

of uncountable death.

What if they organized

into a rebellion?

Now scientists have found

a group of octopuses

who seem to have a sense

of community, who

live in dwellings made of

gathered pebbles and shells,

who cooperate, who

defend an apparent

border. Perhaps they’ll have

a plan for the planet

in a millennium

or two. After we’re gone.

Desire is never one way. Black

          snakes crawl through your throat. The divine longs

for human proximity to divinity. The divine longs

            for touch. You have not wanted

a body. And you have

            wanted. A careless

tongue can make chatter

but unrequited love

          can make an avalanche.

Your teeth chatter and you know

            somewhere a funeral parade is moving, one ant

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

          awaiting dawn. Heaven is too much a metaphor

to be of use to a lover weeping for

a false love. Every shaman needs a healer

and every God a devotee they can admire.

When God comes back from the pilgrimage, you are more

          plump. Everyone can see your wisdoms

sprouting. This time — dangerous. Even women

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

shards of their half-spoken dreams. But you have

                          invented an embrace. In the first worship,

you make the one devoted to devotion devoted to you.

You bring the mountain

into your lips. Without

prayer, your mouth blooms.

rooftopping myself into       the arms of the hottest June

Seattle can give       I remind myself that I’m a seed

of desert        drought my first     language        other landscaped 

languages may thrill           but will remain

foreign                     wearing my body bold      I try to stop  

myself from giving it

the side-eye when there is no one to witness my slip of a dress and

where my arms stretch     into marks               lines mapping where

I’m coming from                        and going       I study

my scarred   topography    roughed bumped skin and fat each line 

a curve           manifesting me      visible                      I’m reminded 

of my adolescent ache for dissipation                no whiteness—  

I slathered my grainy arms with     doctor prescribed chemicals

stayed out    of the sun                and waited     for my skin to peel

an unspooling of 

thread into    momentary ocean

but between burning and

unraveling of 

scars 

gathered compliments  for my new delicate dermis

this here is always uneasy           terrain

a whipped up regret                   the family nose too thick for desirability

that teenage mirror             would not reveal the good side of bone 

or       fat     or the brown of this expanse I call                      body

each day since       is worked reflection a tending         to my own geography— 

a sharp bloom of prickly spine. 

Forget each slight, each head that turned

Toward something more intriguing—

Red flash of wing beyond the window,

The woman brightly chiming

About the suffering of the world. Forget

The way your best friend told the story



Of that heroic road trip, forgetting that you drove

From Tulsa to Poughkeepsie while he

Slumped dozing under headphones. Forget



The honors handed out, the lists of winners.

Forget the certificates, bright trophies you

Could have, should have, maybe won.



Remind yourself you never wanted them.

When the spotlight briefly shone on you,

You stepped back into darkness,



Let the empty stage receive the light,

The black floor suddenly less black—

Scuff-marks, dust, blue tape—the cone



Of light so perfect, slicing silently that perfect

Silent darkness, and you, hidden in that wider dark,

Your refusal a kind of gratitude at last.

I see my dead father's face in your face.

My furled eyebrow, these puffed cheeks

weep into a pillow of inherited hands.

Tío, I still don't know what to do

with this buffalo body. I crush tea cups

every time I raise them to my pursed lips.

How do I tenderize the meat on my bones?

This morning, I dry heaved a vat of foam

into a toilet in Tampa and found no art in it.

Who tells us we deserve to die?

Tío, you, the one with a brown beret,

who saw the hydrogen bomb blow

from an aircraft carrier at Bikini Island,

the one with Hep C and a quiet wife,

I don't know if you're still alive,

but I pray this world has softened

you with its firm kneading hands,

that you are still able to ride you bike

up Homsy to the liquor store on Cedar

and can still reach the oranges in the yard.

Tío, mi tío, when you wet the bed,

is it still my tia's job to change the sheets?

From the kitchen, I see the twelve foot spear

over the maguey. I see its fresh blooms

and know it is about to die. I wonder

if it is better to disappear into Aztlán

or Mazatlán or Mazapan the way you did

or stay in Prather or Marysville and slowly fade

into a sofa chair and reruns of Bonanza.

Is there honor in being shot and skinned? like Ruben?

Hacked up in a hospital for lymphoma research? 

Poked and drained with the swollen face of a failed liver?

How many more fists will be raised until we can no longer,

or better yet, don't have to? I'm tired of thinking these things.

Come back, Tio, or whatever. My mom saved you a plate.

The street dump came by and I got rid of Grandpa's clothes.

I found your mesh t-shirt here and I've been wearing it.

The people believed in a future

        with her face—

                                Concealed

                   her seeds

                           stars’ dull hatchets

                   behind the black bark of the moon

        and the whole forest grew

                             when they uttered

the ancestors’ old notion

          that those who have been buried

                   with a little honey

          after marshaling a mournful sound

                              thrown in circular waves to the west

can appropriate similar words

          for Creek, like        

                              Rattle-wing—

                    the flower which expresses the fruit.

It is easy to erase it—a touch of the delete key on this keyboard. Barely moving my finger. Versus how much intention it took to use the eraser on a pencil, to flip the pencil around my thumb and scrub out the lead etched on the paper.

Stone and rain laugh at me. The amount of time it takes to get marks out of stone (gouges, rough edges, grooves) by rubbing them with water.