So what if I don’t love you.
My problems don’t even happen to me

But to three girls grandstanding by the Potomac.
Respectively: your mother, her mother and her mother.
Three bitches in front of a trashcan.
Desirous of psychotherapy and a split lip courtesy of me.
Because I didn’t ask to be born here.
Didn’t ask to learn the language.
And don’t know how to save you.

Am I frightening you?
I’m frightening you.

Good and good and good and good.

At least she’s pretending to be,

in sisterly solidarity.

It’s not a joke, but the whole

world’s taking it badly. Meanwhile

I sit here pretending to be a flame 

in a thrown bottle. I pretend

that curved horns grow out of my ears 

when I hear of injustices. And 

meanwhile like the faint cigar 

lights of the darkened 

lounges where world leaders 

fraternize, the moon’s light glows

then fades. Her labor proves to be, 

well, laborious. Mine was too,

although this poem burst forth 

from my brain like a boot

or a god: furious.

yes, the business folk rush thru midtown.
they talk math that equates to foreclosures. 
yes, the trash has to be taken out
& dinner chewed. when i was a child, 
i saw a house on our block burn. the smoke
was a serpent coiling up getting thicker &
then it was gone. the firemen left the house a puddle,
but what about the smoke? it was easy, then, 
to forget what i couldn’t see. such is life:
the dishes keep piling up. why stop
just because there’s a warm breeze in January.
there are bills to pay and bills about to come due.
smoke thins into air, the serpent i saw as a kid 
never disappeared. it’s not even hiding. 
most folks don’t know the sound of smoke. 
though they hear it. though smoke gets mistaken 
for silence. most folks think they’re saying nothing 
when they’re saying the most.

^{for David Fagen
Corporal, U.S. Army (1898-1899); Captain, Philippine Republican Army (1899-1901)}

Our worst enemy is General May:
rainy season, the lieutenant means, monsoon
much like Tampa’s summer storms. Roads become marsh;
not just flooding but fever, a fire
that hollows me out. We throw lifelines
to overturned ferries; casualties grow long.

Incessant drizzle. Letters take too long
to reach home. I prefer carousal, cards: dismay
in officers’ faces when I cross the line.
The guardhouse my second home. My fines soon
add up: a month’s pay. Most of it earned, so far,
by killing time, not ladrones: we march

to summits, spy gugus drilling below; march
back down to find the enemy long
gone—only grinning farmers left. Hellfire
spits the lieutenant, scanning ridges, amazed
to have been rolled by shoeless bandits again. Soon
he’ll snap, like the officers in Samar who lined

up boys young as ten—sympathizers, aligned
with insurgents. (So said General Smith.) Marshaled
them, blindfolded, to clearings. Too soon
for them to swell the soil; long
rest for short lives. Their will bewilders me—
faced with Gatlings, Krags, methodical shellfire

they ambush hand to hand. Bolos; sniper fire
in enfilades. Harass our lines
then beat back to boondocks, a maze
of jungle, cordilleras, rice fields, marsh.
Land surely rich with poetry—tulang
in their tongue—land like home: typhoon

cousin to hurricane. When the monsoon
shifts, so do I—I snap, desert for foreign fires.
Rope can kill black soldiers but not disease, lungs
like ours grittier, the C.O.s say; we’re maligned
but nicknamed “Immunes.” My old unit marches,
black against brown. Under white. As if to make

the Far East a second South. I captain a line
for the Filipino side: a turncoat, merging
nations. Our flag has no color. Soon it may.

Her temple smeared across my walls,

I bowed beneath her stream.

Two arcs of piss & bloody vomit

shot inside the MRI machine.

The half-moon rolled back and she

emerged beneath me. My: too much

brown, too much blush, too many

lashes to heal, rattled loose in a split

mouth like crack rocks. She spewed

a bloody history: my people, her father,

some agony at the West Midlands Area

Conservative Society. When she groaned

Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack,

I tempered the pain—oxycodone

for one, high grade the other, ditched

my beeper in her cradle. Switched scrubs

for straps & animal skins in the back seat

of an Audi TT. I saged my hair with a blunt.

Danced away her ruin beneath a black

girl’s melody.

^{For Uncle Paul N’nem}

hell nah over my dead—i paid mine. I checked
Black & subtraction knows what it did. made Black
a box to check. subtraction doesn’t know how even
a sigh seasons the roux & the second breath my mother
was always trying to catch. american. emergency.
subtraction doesn’t know Black’s many bodies & body’s
of water. though subtraction does. sunken. gifting the sea’s
new strange stones. subtraction reopened the barbershops &
bowling alleys. insists church. sent us home with inhalers &
half-assed sentences: in god - we - the people - vs - degradation
vs - a new packaged deliverance. homicide. hallelujah.
i’ll be damned. i’ll be back before i’ll be buried. i been Black
& ain’t slept since. subtraction needs my blood to water
their weapons to subtract my blood. do you see the necessity
for dreaming? or else the need to stay awake. to watch. worried.
the hand. invisible. make a peace sign. then a pistol.

     There’s nothing left except to try.
     —Mrs. Whatsit in A Wrinkle in Time

I tried, believe me, I did, but my cheap Caribou jeans
and Buster Brown polos couldn’t match the prestige
of Levi’s, Nikes, Lacoste worn by my fifth-grade classmates
who visited Magic Kingdom every summer. There was
Claudia with her button-y nose and perfect smile;
blonde and green-eyed Caroline. Despite her rumpled clothes,
she looked like a queen. And then Federico, who pulled
my braids and boasted about meeting Mickey Mouse. I said
mice are dirty, they poop everywhere, will make you sick.
You’d know, he sneered—I wished him gone. Abuela told me
about giving mal de ojo to a woman who spoke ill of her.
The woman got sick, almost died. One day Federico fell,
pierced his knee on a sharp piece of metal. I whispered in his ear
as he wailed: I don’t need to go to Magic Kingdom. Magic is in my blood.

Aquí tenemos lo que quiere, Corazón;
The market ladies touch my arm, Cielo,

Pase adelante. A tomato pulses in her palm.
My heart, my mother’s heart, still they argue.

If the phone calls, flowers & fruit I sent
In my stead could ever be enough. She said, Don’t come.

I didn’t argue. I shouldn’t have listened to my mother’s
Words, but the blade. How the scorpion tail of her voice

Speared its own pain. Every day, another flower
For the altar, the blanket of condolences. New Year’s,

After the call, I stayed in bed, Cielo, the sun could not
Shine without my mother. Pull the curtain.

The stage must be hidden from us. Terror
Of the spotlight & audience roar; she fell

To her knees on the white tile. Mirela, Corazón,
Her body collapsed on the tiles; I was not there

To press the crease of worry from her brow
As I’d done for my father. Cielo, how the unsaid

Presses down on our human bodies. I was not there.
She would’ve fallen through my hands. Knock it out

With reason, but the heart does not negotiate, there is only
El ir y venir, Corazón, el llevar y traer. Where was I as she felt

The burst in her chest, the memory ripe. Fireworks
Crack & singe, beating the black dome over a beach.

The rupture marks her final place, the broken white tile.
The pounding drives it in. Contra martillo y clavo, no ganas.

You cannot win an argument with a hammer & nail.

a thousand years of daughters, then me.
what else could i have learned to be?

girl after girl after giving herself to herself
one long ring-shout name, monarchy of copper 

& coal shoulders. the body too is a garment.
i learn this best from the snake angulating 

out of her pork-rind dress. i crawl out of myself 
into myself, take refuge where i flee. 

once, i snatched my heart out like a track 
& found not a heart, but two girls forever 

playing slide on a porch in my chest.
who knows how they keep count

they could be a single girl doubled 
& joined at the hands. i’m stalling.

i want to say something without saying it 
but there’s no time. i’m waiting for a few folks 

i love dearly to die so i can be myself.
please don’t make me say who. 

bitch, the garments i’d buy if my baby
wasn’t alive. if they woke up at their wake 

they might not recognize that woman
in the front making all that noise.