I use a trick to teach students
how to avoid passive voice.

Circle the verbs.
Imagine inserting “by zombies”
after each one.

Have the words been claimed
by the flesh-hungry undead?
If so, passive voice.

I wonder if these
sixth graders will recollect,
on summer vacation,
as they stretch their legs
on the way home
from Yellowstone or Yosemite
and the byway’s historical marker
beckons them to the
site of an Indian village—

Where trouble was brewing.
Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter.
Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred.
Where most were women and children.

Riveted bramble of passive verbs
etched in wood—
stripped hands
breaking up from the dry ground
to pinch the meat
of their young red tongues.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

It's the same old story from the previous century
about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning
about me and my son.

It's called "Survival Strategies
and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation."

It's called "Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,"

called "The Child Who'd Rather Play than Study."

Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man.

But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you?

You're always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body's finitude,
at peace with the soul's disregard
of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.

If you don't believe you're inside me, you're not,
she answered, at peace with the body's greed,
at peace with the heart's bewilderment.

It's an ancient story from yesterday evening

called "Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,"

called "Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,"

called "I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs."

All our windows open, steady drizzle on the kudzu’s 
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North 
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere 
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads, 
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge, 
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say, 
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I  
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver  
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end 
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that 
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it, 
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy. 
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.  
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs, 
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around. 
Parades, in spite of—Pride, in spite of—Please, someone answer all my 
questions about hummingbirds and the little futures we are 
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,  
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on. 
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned 
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your 
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo 
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can 
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But 
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go 
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.

An act can be many things at once. 
We can be deliverers or takers both.

Was he saying thank you to the airbags, 
thank you to the chassis for its metal

promise to stop the impact short of 
breath and body and the bureaucracy

of the outside world. Praising all of it 
today. Praising the collision recalculated

that it could have been worse. Where 
is poetry if it is not at the base of

the wreck. Rich said it clearly. So clear 
we could see the ocean’s bottom

as if the glass had been emptied out 
from one last sip. My son and then

my other son and then the one 
who knows what I’m talking about. 

What if I say I want this poem to bless 
you, the reader. Will you take it? Will

you trust that it, line by line, truly 
means to protest harm, means well?

What if I told you he wasn’t that bad? 
That you couldn’t smell it on his breath 
after all, & that he wasn’t one of the loud ones 
the way he is in all my poems? Not at all 
like the viral headlines made him seem? What if 
I told you he smiled in PTA meetings & never spoke first? 
That he sat on the sidelines at little league games 
& laughed with other parents? That he loves to sink 
his soft hands into soil & clip the crisped 
edges of dog-tongue rhododendron leaves because 
they make him feel small? What if I told you 
he sits in church basements with other white-whiskered 
men to talk about how proud they all are of their 
gay sons? & the whirling manic I cartoon him to be 
in line at the rehab hospital, or barking through 
car windows with an open Sauv Blanc bottle 
cinched between his khakis—what if I said 
that was all mostly for me?