Imported, my given name barely sounds
like the Arabic. I barter two selves
on my passport. Border control doesn’t
look up. I, civil, lift my arms, balance.
I correct my presence, my moniker:
pronounced as Zeina, which means adornment,
not Zenia, which stands for adulteress, 
though I never said I’d be loyal. It’s 
terrible, I know, this reading error. 
That a hummingbird flies to a lightbulb
in search of nectar. Isn’t it reckless,
my immigration to the wrong language
now that the banks collapsed? It’s magical
how my daughters’ accent is gone. Haha. 

How my daughters’ accent is gone, haha,
now that the banks collapsed. It’s magical,
my immigration to the wrong language
in search of nectar. Isn’t it reckless,
that a hummingbird flies to a lightbulb?
Terrible, I know, this reading error.
Though I never said I’d be loyal, it’s 
not Zenia, which stands for adulteress. 
Pronounced as Zeina, which means adornment, 
I correct my presence, my moniker.
Look up: I, civil, lift my arms, balance
on my passport. Border control doesn’t like
the Arabic I barter. Two selves,
imported. My given name barely sounds. 

Today my mum said she doesn’t remember
arriving at my house with a dishcloth,
doesn’t remember me telling her
my kitten stayed overnight at the vet,
that I’d be coming over to help with bills.
What she remembers is now.
She knows her memory is a ship
leaving port without permission,
her memory is a cloud she can’t hold.
When she asks, Why is everything so hard?
I say, I don’t think you’re the only one
asking that. When I say, I have trouble 
with loss, she says, We are all leaving.
She adds: I know I won’t be around
much longer. So I ask her 
what she’ll come back as? A pig, she says, 
then laughs. I tell her I can’t imagine 
seeing a pig and having to say, 
Oh, there’s my mom! She smiles 
and says, Then maybe I’ll return 
as a hummingbird. Another conversation 
in the present. Another conversation 
I will remember alone.

Wearied of its own turning,
Distressed with its own busy restlessness,
Yearning to draw the circumferent pain—
The rim that is dizzy with speed—
To the motionless centre, there to rest,
The wheel must strain through agony
On agony contracting, returning
Into the core of steel.
    And at last the wheel has rest, is still,
Shrunk to an adamant core,
Fulfilling its will in fixity.
But the yearning atoms, as they grind
Closer and closer, more and more
Fiercely together, beget
A flaming fire upward leaping,
Billowing out in a burning,
Passionate, fierce desire to find
The infinite calm of the mother’s breast.
And there the flame is a Christ-child sleeping,
Bright, tenderly radiant;
All bitterness lost in the infinite
Peace of the mother’s bosom.
But death comes creeping in a tide
Of slow oblivion, till the flame in fear
Wakes from the sleep of its quiet brightness 
And burns with a darkening passion and pain,
Lest, all forgetting in quiet, it perish.
And as it burns and anguishes it quickens,
Begetting once again the wheel that yearns—
Sick with its speed—for the terrible stillness
Of the adamant core and the steel-hard chain.
And so once more
Shall the wheel revolve, till its anguish cease
In the iron anguish of fixity;
Till once again 
Flame billows out to infinity,
Sinking to a sleep of brightness
In that vast oblivious peace. 

Fully occupied with growing—that’s
the amaryllis. Growing especially
at night: it would take
only a bit more patience than I’ve got
to sit keeping watch with it till daylight;
the naked eye could register every hour’s
increase in height. Like a child against a barn door,
proudly topping each year’s achievement,
steadily up
goes each green stem, smooth, matte,
traces of reddish purple at the base, and almost
imperceptible vertical ridges
running the length of them:
Two robust stems from each bulb,
sometimes with sturdy leaves for company,
elegant sweeps of blade with rounded points.
Aloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.

One morning—and so soon!—the first flower
has opened when you wake. Or you catch it poised
in a single, brief
moment of hesitation.
Next day, another,
shy at first like a foal,
even a third, a fourth,
carried triumphantly at the summit
of those strong columns, and each
a Juno, calm in brilliance,
a maiden giantess in modest splendor.
If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus! If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!

and God said Let there be light
and we stood before the sun
shed the daylight from our selves
and donned dusk

God said Let there be light
and a moth emerged
from my molasses-black chrysalis

God said Let there be light
and we became
our blackest selves

God said Let there be light
and we became our own gods

God said Let there be light
and from the shade we watched
the sky shine her brightest

Let there be light
and day became
seemingly so

Let there be light
and night was never so black

Let there be light
and flesh became skin

and skin became colored

and the light was let in the house

and the cotton rose in the fields

and the master’s tools took shape

and an ocean kept us apart

and the indigo washed the coastline

and blue-black hands worked their fingers to the bone

and the rivers teemed with teeth

and barks ran through the woods

and the days grew darker

and the heavens rose beyond our reach

and God’s absence became apparent

and smoke poured over the mountain’s edge

and the fields filled with fire

and there was light

The autumn leaves
Are too heavy with color.
The slender trees
On the Vulcan Road
Are dressed in scarlet and gold
Like young courtesans
Waiting for their lovers.
But soon
The winter winds
Will strip their bodies bare
And then
The sharp, sleet-stung
Caresses of cold
Will be their only
Love.

Mother gave birth to me in the fall 
in the midst of grieving trees and withering leaves. 
Winter came home right after 
accompanied by winds of solitude. 
My earliest memories revolved around cold weather 
yet I remember meeting with summer  
before ever blowing my first candle. 
I saw these same trees shimmer in full bloom. 
I saw their branches clothed in vivid green. 

Early on,  
I learned not to shed a tear when autumn leaves 
for I know that summer comes home through the shiver. 

Pillowed and hushed on the silent plain,
Wrapped in her mantle of golden grain,

Wearied of pleasuring weeks away,
Summer is lying asleep to-day,—

Where winds come sweet from the wild-rose briers
And the smoke of the far-off prairies fires;

Yellow her hair as the golden rod,
And brown her cheeks as the prairie sod;

Purple her eyes as the mists that dram
At the edge of some laggard sun-drowned stream;

But over their depths the lashes sweep,
For Summer is lying to-day asleep.

The north wind kisses her rosy mouth,
His rival frowns in the far-off south,

And comes caressing her sunburnt cheek,
And Summer awakes for one short week,—

Awakes and gathers her wealth of grain,
Then sleeps and dreams for a year again.

I walk the world with a locked box
Lodged in my chest. Doctor, it hurts
But not as much as it should. In Bucha,

On the roadway of the Street of Apples
A woman lay four weeks straight
Unburied even by snow. They saw her red

Coat and rolled right over, Russians,
Tanked and vigilant in their to and fro. 
Doctor, there’s nothing wrong with me

That isn’t also true of many others. 
At night I sleep under a vast epiphany
That hasn’t descended upon me,

Pinpricks that shine a white writing 
I can’t read. I don’t want to know 
Yet. Instead I ask to stay here, greedy 

For the smell of autumn. Before 
Leaving, I’ve made a miniature of me
To witness the raising of the sea, 

To watch over the unimaginable,
To greet this revelation of a future 
With those new names it will need.  

                                                              Unhappy shepherdess,
Numbed feet and hands and the face
Turbid with fever
You love, and that is no unhappy fate
Not one person but all, does it warm your winter?
Walking with numbed and cut feet
Along the last ridge of migration
On the last coast above the not-to-be-colonized
Ocean, across the streams of the people
Drawing a faint pilgrimage
As if you were drawing a line at the end of the world
Under the columns of ancestral figures:
So many generations in Asia
So many in Europe, so many in America:
To sum the whole. Poor Clare Walker, she already
Imagines what sum she will cast in April.

Hold on, they said, but she was tiny and let
the kite go flying above tears and treetops.
The kite had a will of its own, and its will
was wind which carried it the way love carries
surrender and forgiveness. I was right behind
and watched until hope was a speck and gone.
I’d have let it swoop me up the way a bird
of prey lifts a rabbit or a mouse, not afraid
to rub my nose in sky and roll about in deep
fields of snow far above cirrostratus.
Not afraid to let bliss devour me whole.
Or grief, if I must live my forever in orbit
with the Wolf Moon as it prowls night
after night howling for the wilderness we lost.

^{translated from the Spanish by William George Williams}

Lord, I ask a garden in a quiet spot
where there may be a brook with a good flow,
an humble little house covered with bell-flowers,
and a wife and a son who shall resemble Thee.

I should wish to live many years, free from hates,
and make my verses, as the rivers
that moisten the earth, fresh and pure.
Lord, give me a path with trees and birds.

I wish that you would never take my mother,
for I should wish to tend to her as a child
and put her to sleep with kisses, when somewhat old
she may need the sun.

I wish to sleep well, to have a few books,
an affectionate dog that will spring upon my knees,
a flock of goats, all things rustic,
and to live off the soil tilled by my own hand.

To go into the field and flourish with it;
to seat myself at evening under the rustic eaves,
to drink in the fresh mountain perfumed air
and speak to my little one of humble things.

At night to relate him some simple tale,
teach him to laugh with the laughter of water
and put him to sleep thinking that he may later on
keep that freshness of the moist grass.

And afterward, the next day, rise with dawn
admiring life, bathe in the brook,
milk my goats in the happiness of the garden
and add a strophe to the poem of the world.

Señor, yo pido un huerto 

Señor, yo pido un huerto en un rincón tranquilo
donde haya una quebrada con aguas abundantes
una casita humilde cubierta de campánulas,
y una mujer y un hijo que sean como Vos.

Yo quisiera vivir muchos años, sin odios,
y hacer como los ríos que humedecen la tierra
mis versos y mis actos frescos y de puros.
Señor, dadme un sendero con árboles y pájaros.

Yo deseo que nunca os llevéis a mi madre,
porque a mi me gustara cuidarla cual a un niño
y dormirla con besos, cuando ya viejecita 
necesite del sol.

Quiero tener buen sueño, algunos pocos libros
un perro cariñoso que me salte a las piernas,
un rebaño de cabras, toda cosa silvestre,
y vivir de la tierra labrada por mis manos.

Salir a la campiña, y florecer en ella;
sentarme por la tarde, bajo el rústico alero,
a beber aire fresco y olorosa a montaña,
y hablarle a mi pequeño de las cosas humildes

Por la noche contarle algún cuento sencillo,
enseñarle a reír con la risa del agua
y dormirle pensando en que pueda, a la tarde,
guardar esa frescura de la hierba embebida;

y luego, al otro día, levantarme a la aurora
admirando la vida, bañarme en la quebrada,
ordeñar a mis cabras en la dicha del huerto,
y agregar una estrofa al poema del mundo.

^{translated from the German by Pierre Joris}

Aspen tree, your leaves gaze white into the dark.
My mother’s hair ne’er turned white.

Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine.
My fair-haired mother did not come home.

Rain cloud, do you dally by the well?
My quiet mother weeps for all.

Round star, you coil the golden loop.
My mother’s heart was seared by lead.

Oaken door, who ripped you off your hinges?
My gentle mother cannot return.

Espenbaum

Espenbaum, dein Laub blickt weiß ins Dunkel.
Meiner Mutter Haar ward nimmer weiß.

Löwenzahn, so grün ist die Ukraine.
Meine blonde Mutter kam nicht heim.

Regenwolke, säumst du an den Brunnen?
Meine leise Mutter weint für alle.

Runder Stern, du schlingst die goldne Schleife.
Meiner Mutter Herz ward wund von Blei.

Eichne Tür, wer hob dich aus den Angeln?
Meine sanfte Mutter kann nicht kommen.

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
                 Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
       the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
       recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
       Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
       of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
       what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
       We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

^{translated from the Vietnamese by Phương Anh}

^{Bundoora, February 05, 2016, one afternoon full of birds’ sound}

the afternoon has seeped in well under the roof
you hear
bitterly inundates the sunset’s shatter
the wing-clouds.lost in thoughts
the rocky banks.ease at heart
the roaring waves bathe the sunset melancholia

let’s go home, dear
the evening breaks the shadow under the rain
trees & leaves
whistle green 
mountains & forests
so magnificent.tomorrow

the closing afternoon closes my eyes
drops of birds’ coo.amber pearls overflow
lonesome soul.pensive wind as still as still-life.

let’s 
go home.dear
the yin-yang song has mossed the roof!

Chiều tĩnh vật,

^{Bundoora 05 tháng hai 2016, một chiều rộn tiếng chim …}

chiều đã ngấm sâu dưới mái
cm nghe không
ngập đắng tiếng hoàng hôn giập vỡ
những cánh mây.lơ lãng
những kè đá.cam lòng
những sóng gào tầm tã nỗi tà dương …

về thôi.em
đêm gẫy bóng dưới mưa
cây & lá
hồi còi lam lục diệp
núi & rừng
đẹp tha thiết quá.ngày mai

chiều đã khép nâu trong mắt
giọt chim gù. Hổ phách ngước tràn ly
hồn mông quạnh.gió trầm tư tĩnh vật …

về 
thôi.em
khúc âm dương đã rêu mờ mái ngói!

I do not know the ocean’s song, 
    Or what the brooklets say; 
At eve I sit and listen long, 
    I cannot learn their lay. 
But as I linger by the sea, 
    And that sweet song comes unto me, 
It seems, my love, it sings of thee.

I do not know why poppies grow, 
    Amid the wheat and rye, 
The lilies bloom as white as snow, 
    I cannot tell you why. 
But all the flowers of the spring, 
    The bees that hum, the birds that sing, 
A thought of you they seem to bring.

I cannot tell why silvery Mars, 
    Moves through the heav’ns at night; 
I cannot tell you why the stars, 
    Adorn the vault with light. 
But what sublimity I see, 
    Upon the mount, the hill, the lea, 
It brings, my love, a thought of thee.

I do not know what in your eyes, 
    That caused my heart to glow, 
And why my spirit longs and cries, 
    I vow, I do not know. 
But when you first came in my sight, 
    My slumbering soul awoke in light, 
And since the day I’ve known no night.

I’d never seen them up this close before
or ever known the awkward reckoning 
of our collapsing distance. Their hatred 
of what I am blooms wreckage on their skin,
their arms and faces blare in crimson while
they wave their placards with my breath
misspelled. I never thought that I would find
myself the object of foreboding thick 
enough to make a white man bare his teeth,
all Lucky Struck and rotting, just to hiss
a tightening noose in my direction, or spot 
a mother in a boxy robe of dimming flowers, 
hair all done up high and gelled, wrapped 
’round Velcro rollers. She sidearms rocks 
at the window by my head—I refuse to flinch. 
She calls me monkey. I smile at her beyond 
and through the spidered cracking of the glass.

It really drives them crazy when you smile 
my father said this morning, while I scrubbed
my pimpled cheeks and picked my badass ’fro 
to sky. Don’t let on that you’re mad or scared.
I can’t say that I really understood the strategy 
of being less of myself—pretending deafness, 
unremembering my fists. I know he was thinking
of those long ago students in Greensboro, stiff 
in their counter seats at Woolworth’s while 
keening white boys leered and drenched their 
heads with flour, ketchup, sugar, mustard,
spit. Perhaps there was a lesson to be learned.
But this is Boston, ten whole years from then,
and maybe I don’t want to be a martyr because 
to me it looks like nothing much has changed. 
I’m stiff in my seat on this bus while seething 
white folks scan the ground for stones, for shards 
of glass, for ways to break the skin that vexes 
them. I know that this is not the South, and yet 
it is. I know God said they know not what 
they do—but yeah, they do. I know that I am 
not a fool, and yet I feel like one. Like the coon 
they expect to see—smiling and swallowing. 

And everyone still sitting on the bus is silent—
fascinated by the spew of phlegm and venom 
smearing the windows, the way no matter how 
they sing our names it sounds like nigger—
nigger screeched so wide, so thousand times 
and so on-key. When they let me go I just might 
wear that new name home to show my father. 

^{translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings}

in the thick halo of insects, the lamp resembles
a mature dandelion
the girl as pale as bandages incessantly conjures spells
I can’t make out the words
I am still there where there is roaring and how......
ling
unbridled nature has undone me thoroughly
I lay like a stunned fish in the lord’s hand
and a thought about water fills a warm sea
bordering the land’s illuminated wounds
that the worms, animals and feathered messengers
visited while searching for sustenance
and instead of my arm a bamboo shoot hangs out
gathering strength
and in my hand someone has placed
the globe of this complicated world
exhaling: live
I don’t have enough strength to close my eyes in shame
or scream get away from me, I’m alone
alone I’m alone, give me back my hand
how now to overcome the grand piano’s mouth of silence
and toss a baby up to the sun
the bamboo will only be good for a flute
but I lack enough breath even for that
a tall girl with a gaze like the Mother of God
murmurs seeds of words upon the tiles
the mocking moon peeks through a hole burnt
in the tulle: time to go
and now in the cottony silence, a yellow
melody of resurrection pushes its way through
like a ylang-ylang flower 
and a damaged airplane like a lost petal
returns to the sky
and the little boy with my hands embroiders the collected sounds
I exhale so loudly that the dandelion’s
circle of insects dissipates
dawn ...

A secret came a week ago though I already
knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.
The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds
are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.
I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation
and now they’re roosting within me, recalling
how I had watched them at night
in fall and spring passing across earth moons,
little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing
on their way north or south. Now in my dreams
I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying
me rather than me carrying them. Next winter
I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado
and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching
on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye
and I’ll return my dreams to earth.

^{New Year on my mountain}

mama says: long noodles, long life,
so I slurp them loud, drink gingery
broth—polka-dot beads of sweat
forming as my nose hovers over
the soup’s steam. circles for luck.

circles on my dress. papa says:
make a lot of noise! so the children
bang on pots & pans to hush
yesterday’s demons. later, in the cold,

the family plods up the hill to wonder
at the fireworks, sky like a warzone lit
with spraying flames from Roman Candles—
fire on the ground from Watusi whips snaking
& coiling, sizzling our feet.

I feel it all in my chest—
a drumming,
a warning, a spell.

back in the yard, granny doles out rice
& meat, pineapple liquor, glass bottles
of Sprite. but I am snoring by midnight,
my sisters & I still swathed in red chiffon.

by morning, I cry because I missed it.
I cry because they say I’m not alone.
I cry because home is a warning,
its pulse a whiff of flint in the dark.

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.

Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.

The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark. 

The world asks, as it asks daily: 
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains. 
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain, 
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain, 
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, 
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea, 
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. 
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking

That August, he worried if one lamb 
Could carry the family well past the last few snows.

Who, though, speaks crow at that age. 
A year later, and he would’ve known to sleep

In the barn the night before leading her to slaughter. 
He would’ve fed her dried apricot slices,

Her favorite, by hand. He would’ve read
To her from the book on clouds he had found,

The wind picking up, dawn coming fast. 
The thaw, closer than those with no time for art.

As winter enters this land of rivers and lakes,
    the snow is more than a foot in depth.
Even though my hat is made of bamboo
    and my coat is woven from straw,
This body’s warmth is also a debt
    we owe to our great king.

        (Lenox)

There was a bush with scarlet berries,
   And there were hemlocks heaped with snow,
With a sound like surf on long sea-beaches
   They took the wind and let it go.

The hills were shining in their samite,
   Fold after fold they flowed away;
“Let come what may,” your eyes were saying,
   “At least we two have had to-day.”

The point of a pen opens a hole 
into a soul’s dereliction. This search 

for the right word bores through stone. 
Sunlight takes no measure of what is clung to. 

A man can place the half-dome 
of a tomato, slice into flesh, 

and cut an island of loss. Migrant, 
punished by spice and the scent of cooking, 

you wake up on a cold day in another country 
and put your faith in hot rice and braised goat, 

and the persistent aftertaste of a lost home.
Gospels are made of less than this. 

But outside it is morning. A summer breeze 
burns down to the water and the ocean begins. 

The only citizenship I have was given to me 
by the Brooklyn trees. The trees of heaven, now ghost trees; 
the trees of Canarsie: little-leaf lindens, silver maples, Norway 
maples, and their little ship of seeds like ships on the Atlantic. 
Or their paired tinted samaras which have wings and 
thus love to spiral and flutter down to the soil in the autumn 
gardens where I sometimes sit and try to listen 
to the labor of aquifers underground, the groan of seeds. 
My sister who died and is now underground must be one of 
those seeds. The white seeds, milky and deciduous, grow up to 
feed Carolina wrens, Buteo hawks and laughing gulls, these 
birds of Brooklyn are my companions when I sleep and dream 
that I’m singing in my sister’s voice, or that I’m a bird of 
paradise, high and mauve above a mountain, 
gliding over a blue marina, and in that dream I have on my 
head a crown of fuchsia, and on my feet the bronze 
hooves of white horses, the animals of grief. 
Once, in the slice of the dark, returning 
from the day’s labor, with rose apples in my knapsack, and 
suddenly remembering something funny my sister had once 
said, I laughed in the dark and blessed myself. Then flush with 
images of how we used to climb trees together as children, and 
knowing that I’m invisible in this city of gilded harbors
anyway, I thought, though I did not do it, I thought I might 
climb the bark and silk of this maple tree
I saw and jostle with black ants and vine dust, and go higher 
and higher, as in my childhood until I reached the dome of the 
tree. And from that high up, look toward the ports and islands 
and tidal estuaries of the city and see them as silver 
constellations held together by a finger of darkness; 
Or toward the leafy cloud of the Botanical Garden 
where goldenrods, asters and canna lilies sleep in midnight sap 
and await resurrection by light. Perhaps, my sister is only 
asleep. Or toward the bay of the Hudson, near the Little Red 
Lighthouse, where the Atlantic meets the shore, and see my 
ancestors rise as mist from the ocean. 
I thought I might look from my tree and see the mossy acres of 
Hart Island, that burial ground of strangers and citizens, 
where all those we’ve lost are under the white dwarf stars of 
headstones. The spectral multitude. As if while we slept, the 
graves, on their own, began to spread 
from plot to plot, multiplying all over the face of the earth. 
It is not true that I praise the dead. I merely ask them to teach 
me their song.

I followed here the heart  
I built for you. Here it is, blue 

as the preening peacock’s crest, bruise  
renewed again and again. Blue as

children made vapor, families ground 
to grist raining on the accordion 

chest of the sea. I followed here my own  
forgetting of the fireflies that blink 

like prayers in belligerent grasses; my 
dreams of mattering, as in, appearing—

a noun in your syntax. That stone  
you strike for water. Is this not

the Dream? To take more than  
bodies have to give, then eat without

discord? I want you to know I have 
always understood my place. That 

the only feeling more beautiful than  
your fear is your want. Look, 

how your flowers light the world.

Dear President,

I’m a Hispanic immigrant
You know me
You’ve heard me.

But you don’t

You know my story
You know where I’m from
You know what I look for
You know what I want.

But you don’t

Like thousands of people
Like thousands of stories
I’m a Hispanic immigrant
But you don’t know me.

I left pinolillo y cacao helado
Fritangas los viernes en la noche
Nacatamal los fines de semana
A mi abuela en la casa

Al perrito que quedó solo y llorando
A mi Nicaragua

Mi Nicaragua y su rica cultura
Sus hermosas playas y volcanes ardientes
Su gente amorosa y hermosa

I left my Nicaragua hoping
That my future would look brighter here

I left hoping

Y todo por el
“American Dream”

El American Dream que se va desvaneciendo
The longer I stay
Because the longer I stay
I realize
I am not heard
I am not seen
And I am not wanted here

“Permanent residency or citizenship”
Is the first requisite for any scholarship

Because I have to be one of them
I have to be an American
I have to speak English
In order to have real opportunities

Because while I’m still Hispanic
While I’m still an immigrant
There’s no American Dream

¿Y el sueño americano?

With no scholarships
How do I pay ten thousand dollars per year?
How can my immigrant parents with immigrants’ jobs pay ten thousand dollars per year for each of their children? Or even one?

Where’s the American Dream for them?

There isn’t one
Cause they can’t speak English
And they have to be American

The American Dream
That promised we could study, work, live
Fades away

And if there are so many stories like mine?
If there are so many people like me
If they decide to take away my identity and label me as just another immigrant
If presidents, Americans, put all of us into one group
If they assume that they know each one of our stories and each one of our needs
If they think their system is fair
If they think that they’re helping us
If they think they know what’s best for us
If they know immigrants so well
Then how are we still not seen?
How are we still so overlooked?
How are we still so overworked?

Working for a government that does not want us in their country
That is the American Dream.

and the boy
 
                          played
 
             with
the   mother’s

 
 
                                                    fluvial hair

           
 
                                     black

 
 
             her
 
     mosaic-frame

 
 
                                                    burnt umber

the daughter                   just

 
 
                        out of
 
                                       arms reach

 
 
                                                gone already

they found the boy in time to save him. many years
from  now  someone will tell him the awful truth of
all that was lost.               the bruises on their  backs.
shoulders. waists. how two women. mother.  sister.
carried him.   gave him their water.   on that day he
will learn   all there is  to  know  of brown  and gold

of

                          flesh

                                                                 and

             sand

The briar patch where I was born is flowering.
A stone path leads to the brook.
Hummingbirds find the greensward’s stargazer lilies,
their sepals open like the intimate eye of belief.

Yes. I would.
I would repeat this life.

1.   
She was no taller than the children, 
who would eventually be able to look down  
upon the oiled braids tied with black cloth, 
and greased strings threading her earlobes. 
If she’d worn jewelry, it would have been to a church. 
Still, we couldn’t imagine her in those churches, except 
to see her brother off, laid in land the Methodists owned.   
Or for her wedding—but that had been a small gathering 
at the wooden shack whose dark rooms promised adventure. 
In one corner, the iron bed surfaced in daylight, pulling  
all the worn contents of the room toward it, then sank again  
in evening, like our astral bodies dragged by an undertow.   
Grandmama, little pirate, burying the children  
under quilts and old coats, weighting our slumber with 
leftover clothes of the stubborn dead, seeding our dreams with  
haints hiding under the house, pacing the yard, perching in trees.

2.    
The green truck poised over roiling traffic  
beneath the bridge’s guardrail,  
father dead drunk, wedged behind the wheel. 
Whispers as we feigned sleep—hurt deciphered from garbled cries. 
Grandmama and mama’s prayers that brought him back  
despite ours.

         From above, stolen 
land here is brown, green, mauve:  
          as if a child’s hand drew a frog’s palm, 
          colored it so. Slender fingers, meaty 
          ends— 
here again buildings bend but do not fall, bear  
shadows almost black, interrupted by a splinter  
of silver country road here or there.

         When my elders passed I lost 
more than their poise or laughter or mischief 
or their small cruelties or care—long muscle 
of history, sliver of my very first breath.

         To leave, to arrive— 
 to catch a self at home.