After the exhibition “La Gravedad de Los Asuntos 
                 (Matters of Gravity)”
 
The Mexicans and the Russians were always in on it 
This is collaboration in zero gravity democracy 
—blurry violet lights and no clear answer 
This is a nuclear glow in the dark so we can start over 
We board planes to Mars and six engines fire
 
You spin away. It’s candy guts out here—all our voting machines are breaking 
You tumble and can’t stop, but 
Grab a harness—an adult pigtail
 
Six plane engines click on and your homie has to 
Push you so you can swing at the exploding star 
A way of thinking, una estructura doblada
 
Alguien cortó oropel azul en cuadritos 
And stuffed it into the piñata. A yellow paleta 
Big as a chicken, floats to the right hand corner and balances 
Tipping into the comrade’s hands
 
What’s a layer of confetti and candy compared to DDT 
The kind you sprayed over all our naked bodies 

We’re diamonds: hard, shiny, and we 
Get processed to go through 
We don’t infest, pendejo. We invest 
There goes your friend again, diving toward 
The paleta, which has to be pineapple flavor
 
We were always in on it together 
Me and my honey watch a video on loop 
We gently hold each other like the beach balls we are 
The light dims and that constellation swings 

Only one Russian cosmonaut will smile at a time 
They watch a compa swim away 

Reach out 
Don’t make someone else do your work for you 
Some of us were grounded 
The whole time 

By Hannah Ensor and Laura Wetherington

In meditation my thought-labeling
has gotten more specific: raging. capital. scheming.
What is the nothingness before the storm? I have tried
to be tzim tzum. I have tried to forget the word MARTYR.
So many parts of my life are like that, like when the thought comes
and I keep it inside. I’m a deep kettle whistle. I see what you mean
about the sun being sharp. My explanation for why
is under-scientific. Laughing forms kinship. Laughing is a way
to say I hear you. Or here we are. Sitting in a room creates a room
that we carry with us. It can be big, if you like.
It can hold your friends. Some feelings are for now
and some feelings are for later. I believe we can queer each other
through listening. I keep forgetting today. Did you get my letter?
My throat closed and I put brackets around it. I can’t help but notice 
how many of my feelings are about thinking.

No matter the rush of undertow
everything else is still
here. I scrawl your name 
at the bottom of the river
I sing it and it sings me 
back. What I’d give for a name 
so keen     it whittles
the valleys of my neck. I’m forever drenched 
in this night, and you 
no longer exist. The river catches 
the sky’s black, ink 
meant to preserve a memory. I stay
because it’s easy. Here. I relive 
what you did to me, find myself again 
in the water—swollen and sullen 
as a bruise. I trace 
and retrace, graffiti 
every river’s bank, drown 
into ecstasy

instead of moving on with my life. 
I wear what you did to me 
like gills, a new way to breathe. 
I jump into the river
for days. I forget I have lungs at all.

whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp-posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes

telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate

(her words play softly up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)

then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent

My white therapist calls it my edge, I hear
Angry Black Woman. She says, Strength
of Willful Negative Focus. She says, Acerbic
Intellectual Temperament. I copy her words
onto an index card. She wants
an origin story, a stranger with his hand
inside me, or worse. I’m without
linear narrative and cannot sate her. We
perform rituals on her living room floor. I burn
letters brimming with resentments, watch
the paper ember in the fireplace, admit
I don’t want to let this go. What if anger,
my armor, is embedded in the marrow
of who I am. Who can I learn to be
without it? Wherever you go,
there you are. She asks what I will lose
if I surrender, I imagine a gutted fish,
silvery skin gleaming, emptied of itself—

Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one
Because his children were all failures.
But I know of a fate more trying than that:
It is to be a failure while your children are successes.
For I raised a brood of eagles
Who flew away at last, leaving me
A crow on the abandoned bough.
Then, with the ambition to prefix Honorable to my name,
And thus to win my children’s admiration,
I ran for County Superintendent of Schools,
Spending my accumulations to win—and lost.
That fall my daughter received first prize in Paris
For her picture, entitled, “The Old Mill”—
(It was of the water mill before Henry Wilkin put in steam.)
The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me.

English is your fourth language

the baby of the family

the one your mouth spoils

favorite by default

who may one day be sold off by its siblings

in hopes to never return

all of your other tongues have grown jealous

your country has over 200 dialects

that’s over 200 ways

to say Love

to say family

to say I am a song

to say I belong to something

that does not want to kill me

& does not want to siphon the gold from my

blood or the stories from my bones

When did I know that I’d have to carry it around
in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket,

the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
added to, handful by handful if necessary, until

the way my mother would sit all night in a room
without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?

Where would she go, because I would go there.
In the morning, nothing but a blanket and all her

absence and the feeling in the air of happiness.
And so much loneliness, a kind of purity of being

and emptiness, no one you are or could ever be,
my mother like another me in another life, gone

where I will go, night now likely dark enough
I can be alone as I’ve never been alone before.

The hurt returns as it always intended—it is tender
as the inside of my thighs, it is as blue, too. O windless,

            wingless sky, show me your empire of loneliness,
let me spring from the jaws of what tried to kill me.

Let me look at your face and see a heaven worth having, all
                         your sorry angels falling off a piano bench, laughing.

Do you burn because you remember darkness? Outside
the joy is clamoring. It is almost like the worst day of your life

                                      is ordinary for everyone else.

And on the first day
god made
something up.
Then everything came along:

seconds, sex and
beasts and breaths and rabies;
hunger, healing,
lust and lust’s rejections;
swarming things that swarm
inside the dirt;
girth and grind
and grit and shit and all shit’s functions;
rings inside the treetrunk
and branches broken by the snow;
pigs’ hearts and stars,
mystery, suspense and stingrays;
insects, blood
and interests and death;
eventually, us,
with all our viruses, laments and curiosities;
all our songs and made-up stories;
and our songs about the stories we’ve forgotten;
and all that we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten;

and to hold it all together god made time
and those rhyming seasons
that display decay.

is what my sons call the flowers—
purple, white, electric blue—
 
pom-pomming bushes all along
the beach town streets.
 
I can’t correct them into
hydrangeas, or I won’t.
 
Bees ricochet in and out
of the clustered petals,
 
and my sons panic and dash
and I tell them about good
 
insects, pollination, but the truth is
I want their fear-box full of bees.
 
This morning the radio
said tender age shelters.
 
This morning the glaciers
are retreating. How long now
 
until the space-print backpack
becomes district-policy clear?
 
We’re almost to the beach,
and High dangerous! my sons
 
yell again, their joy in having
spotted something beautiful,
 
and called it what it is.

We pay to enter the dirty
pen. We buy small bags of feed
to feed the well-fed animals. We are
guests in their home, our feet
on their sawdust floor. We pretend
not to notice the stench. Theirs
is a predictable life. Better,
I guess, than the slaughter,
is the many-handed god. Me?
I’m going to leave here, eat
a body that was once untouched,
and fed, then gutted and delivered
to my table. Afterwards, I’ll wash
off what of this I can. If I dream
it will be of the smallest goat,
who despite her job, flinched
from most of the hands. Though
she let me touch her, she would not
eat from my palm. In my dream,
she’ll die of old age
and not boredom.

after a bottle of chianti
              Don’t mistake me, I’ve pondered this before.
              But tonight I’m serious.
              One bottle and the end is certain.
              Tomorrow: Lawyer. Boxes. Road map. More wine.

while walking the dog
              Paris won’t even notice.
              I’ll feed the pup, pack a quick bag,
              take out the trash, and slip away into the night.
              Home to Sparta. Or Santa Monica.
              An island off the southernmost tip of Peru.
              Disappear. Like fog from a mirror.

while paying the bills
              Guess I’ll have to give up that whole new career plan.
              Academic dreams. House-and-yard dreams.
              Stay on like this a few more years. Or forever.
              Face the bottomless nights in solitude.
              Wither. Drink. Write poems about dead ends.
              Drink more. Work. Pay rent.
              End.

when Paris comes home drunk
              Call Clytemnestra. Make a plan.
              Move a few things into Clym’s spare room,
              storage for the rest. Set up arbitration.
              File what needs to be filed.
              Head to Athens. Or back to Crown Heights.
              Maybe find a roommate in Fort Greene.
              All I know is out out out.
              Sure, I can blame the past or the scotch
              or my own smartmouth or my worst rage,
              but blame is a word. I need a weapon.

when Menelaus writes a letter
              As if.

from the ocean floor
              Bathtub. Ocean. Whichever. All this water.
              Yes, Paris pulled me from the ruby tub.
              Menelaus fed me to the river a year before that.
              Metaphorical, and not at all.
              O, a girl and her water. Such romance.
              Gaudy. And gauche.
              How do I leave what cared enough to keep me?
              What of those goddamn ships?
              That ridiculous horse? All those men?
              Now, wretched little me. All this dizzy sadness.
              How many kings to tame one woman? Silence her?
              How many to put her under?

my roommate one year in college
would say of my smallness 
that any man who found me attractive
had a trace of the pedophilic  


& i would shrink                    newly girled
twenty-one with my eyebrows
plucked to grownup arches             sprouting
back every three weeks  
in sharp little shoots             already men         
have tried to steal me


in their taxis   corral me into alleyways
of the new city            already
the demand  for my name              though
no one ever asks how old i am


though no one ever did      i feel creaking
& ancient in the repetition
of it all   i feel my girlhood gone for
generations    my entire
line of blood crowded with exhausted
women            their unlined faces 


frozen in time            with only a thickness
about the waist          a small shoot
of gray to belie the years


i make up names to hand
to strangers at parties  
i trim years from my age & share without
being asked    that i am
fifteen              seventeen      & no one blinks  
no one             stops wanting       


i am disappeared      like all the girls
before me    around me 
all the girls to come             


everyone thinks
i am a little girl & still
they hunt me               still they show their teeth        
i am so tired i am
one thousand  years old          one thousand
years older when touched

I love two dogs, even when they’re killing
a baby possum near the columbines,
shaking the varmint
until the death squeal chokes to a gargle,
 
and both dogs stand before the bloody marsupial
nosing it to move,
 
because that’s Nature, right?
(And whom did I just ask whether that was right?)
(And what’s a moral quandary for a possum?)
 
I love the dog who leans,
matter-of-fact in her need,
and the big smile of the small Pit Bull.
 
But when I am a hummingbird, finally,
I will beat my wings
eighty times per second,
 
thousands of seconds
and eighty thousands and thousands
 
of my splendiferous beating wings,
faster than all of the eighty thousand
beautiful things in the world,
 
and no one will stop me or catch me
or take my picture, I will be too fast,
 
and I will dive into the meat
of the possum
and beat there,
the mean, bloody thing alive again.

After Hanif Abdurraqib & Frank O’Hara
 
It is the last class of the day & I am teaching a classroom of sixth graders about poetry & across town a man has walked into a Starbucks & blown himself up while some other men throw grenades in the street & shoot into the crowd of civilians & I am 27 years old which means I am the only person in this room who was alive when this happened in New York City & I was in eighth grade & sitting in my classroom for the first class of the day & I made a joke about how mad everyone was going to be at the pilot who messed up & later added, how stupid do you have to be for it to happen twice? & the sixth graders are practicing listing sensory details & somebody calls out blue skies as a sight they love & nobody in this classroom knows what has happened yet & they do not know that the school is in lockdown which is a word we did not have when I was in sixth grade & the whole class is laughing because a boy has called out dog poop as a smell he does not like & what is a boy if not a glowing thing learning what he can get away with & I was once a girl in a classroom on the lucky side of town who did not know what had happened yet & electrical fire is a smell I did not know I did not like until my neighborhood smelled that way for weeks & blue skies is a sight I have never trusted again & poetry is what I reached for in the days when the ash would not stop falling & there is a sixth grade girl in this classroom whose father is in that Starbucks & she does not know what has happened yet & what is a girl if not a pulsing thing learning what the world will take from her & what if I am still a girl sitting in my classroom on the lucky side of town making a careless joke looking at the teacher for some kind of answer & what if I am also the teacher without any answers looking back at myself & what is an adult if not a terrified thing desperate to protect something you cannot save? & how lucky do you have to be for it to miss you twice? & tomorrow a sixth grade girl will come to class while her father has the shrapnel pulled from his body & maybe she will reach for poetry & the sky outside the classroom is so terribly blue & the students are quiet & looking at me & waiting for a grown-up or a poem or an answer or a bell to ring & the bell rings & they float up from their seats like tiny ghosts & are gone

When, at the end, the children wanted
to add glitter to their valentines, I said no.

I said nope, no, no glitter, and then,
when they started to fuss, I found myself

saying something my brother’s football coach
used to bark from the sidelines when one

of his players showed signs of being
human: oh come on now, suck it up.

That’s what I said to my children.
Suck what up? my daughter asked,

and, because she is so young, I told her
I didn’t know and never mind, and she took

that for an answer. My children are so young
when I turn off the radio as the news turns

to counting the dead or naming the act,
they aren’t even suspicious. My children

are so young they cannot imagine a world
like the one they live in. Their God is still

a real God, a whole God, a God made wholly
of actions. And I think they think I work

for that God. And I know they will someday soon
see everything and they will know about

everything and they will no longer take
never mind for an answer. The valentines

would’ve been better with glitter, and my son
hurt himself on an envelope, and then, much

later, when we were eating dinner, my daughter
realized she’d forgotten one of the three

Henrys in her class. How can there be three Henrys
in one class? I said, and she said, Because there are.

And so, before bed we took everything out
again—paper and pens and stamps and scissors—

and she sat at the table with her freshly washed hair
parted smartly down the middle and wrote

WILL YOU BE MINE, HENRY T.? and she did it
so carefully, I could hardly stand to watch.

The Junior Minister waved a hand
                       toward the courtyard where, he said,

                                    Goering’s private lion used to live.

                       With him we climbed Parliament’s steps,

walls pockmarked still with bullet holes.
                       In the conference room the Social Democrats

                                    passed trays of petit fours and coffee.

                       We were perhaps insufficient, he said.

His voice, uninflected: they shipped
                       my father to Stalingrad. Forty days

                                    and dead. In the room,

                       the transcriptionist, the translator,

and security stationed against
                       the wall. Some time passed.

                                    In East Germany, he said, at least

                       it was always terrible. Bad luck, he said,

to be on that side of the wall. Even
                       the apples were poison. We were

                                    to understand this was a little joke.

                       He brought the teacup to his mouth,

but did not drink. His fingernails
                       were tapered and very clean.

                                    When you are the victim, he said,

it doesn’t matter who is killing you.

turns out
there are more planets than stars
more places to land
than to be burned

I have always been in love with
last chances especially 
now that they really do 
seem like last chances

the trill of it all upending
what’s left of my head
after we explode

are you ready to ascend
in the morning I will take you
on the wing

There once was a planet who was both
sick and beautiful. Chemicals rode through her
that she did not put there.
Animals drowned in her eyeballs
that she did not put there—
animals she could not warn
against falling in because
she was of them, not
separable from them.
Define sick, the atmosphere asked.
So she tried: she made
a whale on fire
somehow still
swimming and alive.
See? she said. Like that,
kind of. But the atmosphere did
not understand this, so the planet progressed in her argument.
She talked about the skin
that snakes shed, about satellites that circled her
like suitors forever yet never
said a word.
She talked about the shyness
of large things, how a blueberry dominates
the tongue that it dies on.
She talked and talked and
the atmosphere started nodding—
you could call this
a revolution, or just therapy.
Meanwhile the whale spent the rest of his
life burning (etc., etc., he sang a few songs).
When he finally died
his body, continuing
to burn steadily, drifted down
to the ocean floor.
And although the planet
had long since forgotten him—he was merely one
of her many examples—he became
a kind of god in the eyes
of the fish that saw him as he fell. Or
not a god exactly, but at least something
inexplicable. Something strange and worth
briefly turning your face toward.

Here on my lap, in a small plastic bag,
my share of your ashes. Let me not squander
them. Your family blindsided me with this gift.
We want to honor your bond they said at the end
of your service, which took place, as you'd
arranged, in a restaurant at the harbor,
an old two-story boathouse made of dark
wood. Some of us sat on the balcony, on black
leather bar stools, staring at rows of docked boats.
Both your husbands showed up and got along.
And of course your impossibly handsome son.
After lunch, a slideshow and testimonials,
your family left to toss their share of you
onto the ocean, along with some flowers.

You were the girlfriend I practiced kissing
with in sixth grade during zero-sleep
sleepovers. You were the pretty one.
In middle school I lived on diet Coke and
your sexual reconnaissance reports. In this
telling of our story your father never hits
you or calls you a whore. Always gentle
with me, he taught me to ride a bike after
everyone said I was too klutzy to learn.
In this version we're not afraid of our bodies.
In this fiction, birth control is easy to obtain,
and never fails. You still dive under a stall
divider in a restroom at the beach to free me
after I get too drunk to unlock the door. You still
reveal the esoteric mysteries of tampons. You
still learn Farsi and French from boyfriends
as your life ignites. In high school I still guide you
safely out of the stadium when you start yelling
that the football looks amazing as it shatters
into a million shimmering pieces, as you
loudly admit that you just dropped acid.

We lived to be sixty. Then poof, you vanished.
I can't snort you, or dump you out over my head,
coating myself in your dust like some hapless cartoon
character who's just blown herself up, yet remains
unscathed, as is the way in cartoons. In this version,
I remain in place for a while. Did you have a good
journey? I'm still lagging behind, barking up all
the wrong trees, whipping out my scimitar far
in advance of what the occasion demands. As I
drive home from your memorial, you fizz in
my head like a distant radio station. What
can I do to bridge this chasm between us?
In this fiction, I roll down the window, drive
uncharacteristically fast. I tear your baggie
open with my teeth and release you at 85
miles an hour, music cranked up full blast.

A young man learns to shoot
& dies in the mud
an ocean away from home,
a rifle in his fingers
& the sky dripping
from his heart. Next to him
a friend watches
his final breath slip
ragged into the ditch,
a thing the friend will carry
back to America—
wound, souvenir,
backstory. He’ll teach 
literature to young people
for 40 years. He’ll coach
his daughters’ softball teams. 
Root for Red Wings
& Lions & Tigers. Dance
well. Love generously. 
He’ll be quick with a joke
& firm with handshakes.
He’ll rarely talk
about the war. If asked
he’ll tell you instead
his favorite story:
Odysseus escaping
from the Cyclops
with a bad pun & good wine
& a sharp stick.
It’s about buying time
& making do, he’ll say. 
It’s about doing what it takes 
to get home, & you see 
he has been talking 
about the war all along.
We all want the same thing
from this world:
Call me nobody. Let me live.

In Saint Petersburg, on an autumn morning,
having been allowed an early entry
to the Hermitage, my family and I wandered
the empty hallways and corridors, virtually every space

adorned with famous paintings and artwork.
There must be a term for overloading on art.
One of Caravaggio’s boys smirked at us,
his lips a red that betrayed a sloppy kiss

recently delivered, while across the room
the Virgin looked on with nothing but sorrow.
Even in museums, the drama is staged.
Bored, I left my family and, steered myself,

foolish moth, toward the light coming
from a rotunda. Before me, the empty stairs.
Ready to descend, ready to step outside
into the damp and chilly air, I felt

the centuries-old reflex kick in, that sense
of being watched. When I turned, I found
no one; instead, I was staring at The Return
of the Prodigal Son. I had studied it, written about it

as a student. But no amount of study could have
prepared me for the size of it, the darkness of it.
There, the son knelt before his father, his dirty foot
left for inspection. Something broke. As clichéd

as it sounds, something inside me broke, and
as if captured on film, I found myself slowly sinking
to my knees. The tears began without warning until soon
I was sobbing. What reflex betrays one like this?

What nerve agent did Rembrandt hide
within the dark shades of paint that he used?
What inside me had malfunctioned, had left me
kneeling and sobbing in a museum?

Prosto plakat. Prosto plakat. Osvobodi sebya
said the guard as his hands steadied my shoulders.
He stood there repeating the phrase until
I stopped crying, until I was able to rise.

I’m not crazy, nor am I a very emotional man.
For most of my life, I have been called, correctly, cold.
As a student, I catalogued the techniques, carefully
analyzed this painting for a class on the “Dutch Masters.”

Years later, having mustered the courage to tell
this ridiculous story, a friend who spoke Russian
translated the guard’s words for me: “Just cry. Just cry.
Free yourself.” But free myself from what, exactly?

You see, I want this whole thing to be something
meaningful, my falling to my knees in front of a painting
by Rembrandt, a painting inspired by a parable
of forgiveness offered by a father to his lost son.

But nothing meaningful has presented itself. Even now,
after so much time has passed, I have no clue
what any of this means. I still haven’t figured out
whether or not I am the lost son or the found.

Of course, I don’t know very much

    About these politics,

But I think that some who run ’em

    Do mighty ugly tricks.

I’ve seen ’em honey-fugle round,

    And talk so awful sweet,

That you’d think them full of kindness,

    As an egg is full of meat.

Now I don’t believe in looking

    Honest people in the face,

And saying when you’re doing wrong,

    That “I haven’t sold my race.”

When we want to school our children,

    If the money isn’t there, 

Whether black or white have took it,

    The loss we all must share.

And this buying up each other

    Is something worse than mean,

Though I thinks a heap of voting,

    I go for voting clean. 

My mother said this to me
long before Beyoncé lifted the lyrics
from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

and what my mother meant by
Don’t stray was that she knew
all about it—the way it feels to need

someone to love you, someone
not your kind, someone white,
some one some many who live

because so many of mine
have not, and further, live on top of
those of ours who don’t.

I’ll say, say, say,
I’ll say, say, say,
What is the United States if not a clot

of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?
If not the place we once were
in the millions? America is Maps—

Maps are ghosts: white and 
layered with people and places I see through.
My mother has always known best,

knew that I’d been begging for them,
to lay my face against their white
laps, to be held in something more

than the loud light of their projectors
as they flicker themselves—sepia
or blue—all over my body.

All this time,
I thought my mother said, Wait,
as in, Give them a little more time

to know your worth,
when really, she said, Weight,
meaning heft, preparing me

for the yoke of myself,
the beast of my country’s burdens,
which is less worse than

my country’s plow. Yes,
when my mother said,
They don’t love you like I love you,

she meant,
Natalie, that doesn’t mean
you aren’t good.

*The italicized words, with the exception of the final stanza, come from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Maps.”

When Milo was a kitten 

and spent the night

with us in the big bed,

curled like a brown sock

at our feet, he would

wake before daybreak,

squeak plaintively 

in his best Burmese,

cat-castrato soprano,

and make bread on our stomachs

until if one of us did not rise,

sleep-walk to the kitchen

and open his can of food,

he would steal under the covers,

crouch, run hard at us,

jam his head

in our armpits,

and burrow fiercely.

Probably he meant nothing by that.

Or he meant it in cat-contrary,

just as he did not intend

drawing blood the day

he bolted out the door

and was wild again

for nearly three hours.

I could not catch him

until I knelt, wormed

into the crawl-space

under a neighbor house

and lured him home

with bits of dried fish.

Or he meant exactly what he smelled,

and smelled the future

as it transmogrified out of the past,

for he is, if not an olfactory

clairvoyant,

a highly nuanced cat—

an undoer of complicated knots,

who tricks cabinets,

who lives to upend tall

glasses of Merlot.

With his whole body,

he has censored the finest passages of Moby-Dick.

He has silenced Beethoven with one paw.

He has leapt three and a half feet

from the table by the wall

and pulled down

your favorite print by Miró.

He does not know the word no.

When you asked the vet what 

kind of cat it was, she went

into the next room

came back and said,

“Havana Brown.”

The yellow eyes, the voice,

the live spirit that plays into dead seriousness

and will not be punished into goodness,

but no—

an ancient, nameless breed—

mink he says and I answer in cat.

Even if I was not

born in a dumpster 

between a moldy cabbage

and an expired loaf of bread,

I too was rescued by an extravagant woman.

like some 14 year old girl waiting for her crush to glance back i 

keep waiting for capitalism to end

but it won’t end

my adult life lover states

on what will end:

Libraries 

Birds 

Retirement 

Recess

Sprinting during recess 

Hispid Hares

Starfish shaped like stars 

Inconvenience

Wrinkles 

Sunken cheeks 

Living corals 

Protests

Anti-Nuclear Proliferation 

Non-Aggression Pacts 

Dragonflies

Mangosteen 

DMZs

Trade Embargos 

Leopards, all kinds 

Sawfins

Rewilding

Infiltration Plot/Dreams 

Oak, Trees.

Partulina Variabilis 

Partulina Splendida

(-------) Violence Prevention Programs

News. News:

Might a few jellyfish survive—

counting till revelations becomes part of—

<sup>Mudslide in Rio de Janeiro state...: in the early hours of Saturday, following two days of heavy downpour. A boulder slid down a slope and hit a group of houses in the city of Niterói. Volunteers joined rescuers in silence so that any survivors could be heard.

                       —BBC News, November 11, 2018</sup>

It's as if the marrow of the earth mistook us

for part of itself, our limbs its own settling

form, like we have sunk into chairs and taken as us

our tight-tucked legs, our bellies. Or known the settling

head of our daughter to sternum as an uncleaved us,

one sleeping self inside a woken self. The settling

mud around, its heave, seems simple now: is softening us

into dense dark shape, and we are settling

our gauges too: voice from volume, sediment, shadow, us

from the spaces we lived. Silence settling

who we thought we were, was us,

into this all-consuming lack. Nothing settling

a choke around the circumference of light, drawing us

in. We no longer know if our eyes are open, only settling:

(where our daughter sank her pillow—her hair—and us

somewhere too), though we're yielding there to this, settling

aphotic loss, how we once lived what we could bear: us,

her, no more. Now there is weight so true, a settling

so whole, we could die in its lightness: it exiles us

to formless terror—no blanket, no bed, but settling.

If we could remember that once a throat was us

inside a body. Only: here, or here, inside this settling,

a hint of shade, almost like memory: the sound of us. 

If we could just know again our mouths. We 

could part the earth with our voices, ask to be heard.

Out of the night that covers me,   

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,   

I thank whatever gods may be   

  For my unconquerable soul.   

In the fell clutch of circumstance 

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.   

Under the bludgeonings of chance   

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.   

Beyond this place of wrath and tears   

  Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And yet the menace of the years   

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.   

It matters not how strait the gate,   

  How charged with punishments the scroll,   

I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,—
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

          how do I admit I’m almost glad of it?

          the way it’s scraped off

          those flash-storms of rage

          I grew delicately-feathered

          luna moth antennae

          to fine-tune your emotional weather:

          sometimes a barometric shift

          in the house’s atmosphere / a tight

          quickening / some hard dark shadow

          flickering glossy as obsidian

          pulled down like a nightshade

          behind your irises / but sometimes

          you struck with no warning at all

          rattlesnaked fang of lightning

          incinerating my moon-pale wings

          to crumpled cinder and ash

          now your memory resets

          itself every night / a button

          clearing the trip odometer

          back to zero / dim absinthe fizz

          of radium-green glow

          from the dashboard half-lifing

          a midnight rollover from

          omega to alpha to omega

          I remember when you told me

          (maybe I was three?)

          I was mentally damaged

          like the boy across the street /

          said you’d help me pass

          for normal so no one would know

          but only if I swore to obey

          you / and only you / forever

          now your memory fins

          around and around / like

          the shiny obsessive lassos

          of a goldfish gold-banding

          the narrow perimeters

          of its too-small bowl

          coming home from school

          (maybe I was fifteen?)

          you were waiting for me

          just inside the front door /

          accused me of stealing a can

          of corned beef hash from

          the canned goods stashed

          in the basement / then beat me

          in the face with your shoe

          how do I admit I’m almost glad of it?

          that I’ve always pined for you

          like an unrequited love / though I

          was never beautiful enough

          for you / your tinned bright laugh

          shrapneled flecks of steel to hide

          your anger when people used to say

          we looked like one another

          but now we compare

          our same dimpled hands /

          the thick feathering of eyebrows

          with the same crooked wing

          birdwinging over our left eye /

          our uneven cheekbones making

          one half of our face rounder

          than the other / one side

          a full moon / the other side

          a shyer kind of moon

          how can I admit I’m almost glad of it

          when you no longer recognize

          yourself in photographs

          the mirror becoming stranger

          until one day—will it be soon?—

          you’ll look in my face / once again

          seeing nothing of yourself

          reflected in it, and—unsure

          of all that you were and all

          that you are—ask me: who are you?

^{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.

          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

My two hunting dogs have names, but I rarely use them. As 

I go, they go: I lead; they follow, the blue-eyed one first, then

the one whose coloring—her coat, not her eyes—I sometimes 

call never-again-o-never-this-way-henceforth. Hope, ambition: 

these are not their names, though the way they run might suggest 

otherwise. Like steam off night-soaked wooden fencing when 

the sun first hits it, they rise each morning at my command. Late 

in the Iliad, Priam the king of Troy predicts his own murder—

correctly, except it won’t be by spear, as he imagines, but by 

sword thrust. He can see his corpse, sees the dogs he’s fed and 

trained so patiently pulling the corpse apart. After that, he says,

When they’re full, they’ll lie in the doorway, they’ll lap my blood. 

I say: Why shouldn’t they? Everywhere, the same people who 

mistake obedience for loyalty think somehow loyalty weighs more 

than hunger, when it doesn’t. At night, when it’s time for bed, 

we sleep together, the three of us: muscled animal, muscled animal, 

muscled animal. The dogs settle to either side of me as if each 

were the slightly folded wing of a beast from fable, part power, part 

recognition. We breathe in a loose kind of unison. Our breathing 

ripples the way oblivion does—routinely, across history’s face.

Where does the sea end and the sky begin?

We sink in blue for which there is no word.

Two sails, fog-coloured, loiter on the thin

Mirage of ocean.

There is no sound of wind, nor wave, nor bird,

Nor any motion.

Except the shifting mists that turn and lift,

Showing behind the two limp sails a third,

Then blotting it again.

A gust, a spattering of rain,

The lazy water breaks in nervous rings.

Somewhere a bleak bell buoy sings,

Muffled at first, then clear,

Its wet, grey monotone.

The dead are here.

We are not quite alone.

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me. 

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed

for children walking to school? 
Those same children

also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs

as they eat at McDonalds.
They shouldn’t have to stop

to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might

reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,

I had one student
who opened a door and died. 

It was the front
door to his house, but

it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written

any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old

and was aiming
at someone else. But

a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn’t

distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,

and how was the bullet
supposed to know this

child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment

because his friend
was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who

opened a door and died? 
That’s wrong.

There were many. 
The classroom of grief

had far more seats
than the classroom for math

though every student
in the classroom for math

could count the names
of the dead. 

A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,

nor could the gun, because
“guns don't kill people,” they don’t

have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose

or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t

have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how

we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be,

and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside

each of them. Today,
there’s another

shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school,

a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world

is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save,

you may open a door

and enter a meadow, or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be

mourned, then buried
in rhetoric. 

There will be
monuments of legislation,

little flowers made
from red tape. 

What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close

like a door above you. 
What should we do?

And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.

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

Still are there wonders of the dark and day:
   The muted shrilling of shy things at night,
      So small beneath the stars and moon;
   The peace, dream-frail, but perfect while the light
      Lies softly on the leaves at noon.
         These are, and these will be
             Until eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.

Each dawn, while yet the east is veiléd grey,
   The birds about her window wake and sing;
      And far away, each day, some lark
   I know is singing where the grasses swing;
      Some robin calls and calls at dark.
         These are, and these will be
             Until eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.

The wild flowers that she loved down green ways stray;
   Her roses lift their wistful buds at dawn,
      But not for eyes that loved them best;
   Only her little pansies are all gone,
      Some lying softly on her breast.
         And flowers will bud and be
             Until eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.

Where has she gone? And who is there to say?
   But this we know: her gentle spirit moves
      And is where beauty never wanes,
   Perchance by other streams, mid other groves;
      And to us there, ah! she remains
         A lovely memory
             Until eternity;
She came, she loved, and then she went away.

I ask the new migrant if he regrets leaving Russia.

We have dispensed already with my ancestry.

He says no. For a time, he was depressed. He found

with every return he missed what he left behind.

A constant state of this. Better to love by far

where you are. He taps the steering wheel of his car,

the hum of the engine an imperceptible tremble

in us. When he isn’t driving, he works tending

to new trees. I’ve seen these saplings popping

up all over the suburbs, tickling the bellies

of bridges, the new rooted darlings of the State.

The council spent a quarter mil on them &

someone, he—Lilian—must ensure the dirt

holds. Gentrification is climate-friendly now.

I laugh and he laughs, and we eat the distance

between histories. He checks on his buds daily.

Are they okay? They are okay. They do not need

him, but he speaks, and they listen or at least

shake a leaf. What a world where you can live off

land by loving it. If only we cared for each other

this way. The council cares for their investment.

The late greenery, that is, not Lilian, who shares

his ride on the side. I wonder what it would cost 

to have men be tender to me regularly, 

to be folded into his burly, to be left on the side

of the road as he drove away, exhausted. Even

my dreams of tenderness involve being used

& I’m not sure who to blame: colonialism,

capitalism, patriarchy, queerness or poetry?

Sorry, this is a commercial for the Kia Sportage

now. This is a commercial for Lilian’s thighs.

He didn’t ask for this and neither did I—how

language drapes us together, how stories tongue

each other in the back seat and the sky blurs

out of frame. There are too many agonies

to discuss here, and I am nearly returned.

He has taken me all the way back, around

the future flowering, back to where I am not,

to the homes I keep investing in as harms.

I should fill them with trees. Let the boughs

cover the remembered boy, cowering

under a mother, her raised weapon

not the cane but the shattering within,

let the green tear through the wall

paper, let life replace memory. Lilian, I left

you that day, and in the leaving, a love

followed. Isn’t that a wonder and a wound?

Tell me which it is, I confess I mistake the two.

I walk up the stairs to my old brick apartment

where the peach tree reaches for the railing,

a few blushing fruits poking through the bars,

eager to brush my leg, to say linger, halt.

I want to stop, to hold it for real, just once

but I must wait until I am safe.

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.

My grandmother is only one day

into her infirmity and doped up

on Morphine. Her shoulder is immobile

beneath layers of plaster.

Her eighty-five-year-old frame droops

from the weight of it.

My mother confesses:

she cannot take care of her mother.

I am not she says a nursemaid.

My mother is angry. Angry

at my sister who didn’t give enough

support, angry at my grandmother

for shuffling her feet, angry even

at the dog that was tucked beneath

my grandmother’s arm

as they all three tried to squeeze

into the door of the vet’s office.

She calls me from the emergency room

to say that grandmother fractured her shoulder

in three places. She’s become an invalid

overnight, she says. My sister calls her cruel

for refusing to run the bathwater, refusing

to wash my grandmother’s naked body, for

not even considering renting

a wheelchair for her to move from place

to place. When grandmother whispers

that she is afraid to walk, my mother

tells her that there’s nothing wrong with

her legs, tells her she’ll have to go to a

nursing home if she won’t walk

to the bathroom: one piss in the bed is

understandable, two is teetering too

close to in-home care.

My sister does not understand that there

is too much to overcome between them—

always the memory of the black dress

grandmother refused to wear

on the day of her husband’s funeral—

the way she turned to my mother and said,

I am not in mourning.

There once was a planet who was both
sick and beautiful. Chemicals rode through her
that she did not put there.
Animals drowned in her eyeballs
that she did not put there—
animals she could not warn
against falling in because
she was of them, not
separable from them.
Define sick, the atmosphere asked.
So she tried: she made
a whale on fire
somehow still
swimming and alive.
See? she said. Like that,
kind of. But the atmosphere did
not understand this, so the planet progressed in her argument.
She talked about the skin
that snakes shed, about satellites that circled her
like suitors forever yet never
said a word.
She talked about the shyness
of large things, how a blueberry dominates
the tongue that it dies on.
She talked and talked and
the atmosphere started nodding—
you could call this
a revolution, or just therapy.
Meanwhile the whale spent the rest of his
life burning (etc., etc., he sang a few songs).
When he finally died
his body, continuing
to burn steadily, drifted down
to the ocean floor.
And although the planet
had long since forgotten him—he was merely one
of her many examples—he became
a kind of god in the eyes
of the fish that saw him as he fell. Or
not a god exactly, but at least something
inexplicable. Something strange and worth
briefly turning your face toward.

Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone

until you hear the whole story:

In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either

so let’s say, in the story, I was human

and made of human-things: fear

and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it

another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes

I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you

to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held.  

Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure

you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t

die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even

soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually.

Here is how one might start: Before. The truth?

I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove.

Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look

at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid

history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved

it or what it was like before: my unscarred body

visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove,

I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars.

I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how

I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story:

I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise

to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map

of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream.

Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove

do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing?

I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard.

My truth is: blade. My hands

on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands

carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous

memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands

because they are like mine. Holding a knife

by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation

to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid

we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be.

The truth is: I have made fire

before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened

this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered

before: flesh

against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.

Breakfast rained on again,

and I’m lifted up the stairs

on the breath of what

the dark of the day

might promise in its

perfect silence. The light

in my daughter’s room

has been on all night

like every night,

but the sun shifting

changes the shape

of the space from

a square into an unfolding

universe. I had always

imagined a different type

of fatherhood before

fatherhood found me, but if you

asked me to describe it now,

I don’t think I could

find the words. Try to find

a way to describe living

a few different ways at once.

For a while I imagined

there would be more attempts

at trying out what I’m still

trying to see in the room

that’s gone power out,

but the weeds in the yard

grow too quickly to be left

alone for long. I had forgotten

the strangeness of a humid

February. I had forgotten

all that makes up the memories

that need me to exist. It was

easier to carve out a place

before I had words to describe

it. Now looking back feels

like looking forward. I am 

drawing a self-portrait

and trying to remove the self.

You are never mentioned on Ararat

or elsewhere, but I know a woman’s hand

in salvation when I see it. Lately,

I’m torn between despair and ignorance.

I’m not a vegetarian, shop plastic,

use an air conditioner. Is this what happens

before it all goes fluvial? Do the selfish

grow self-conscious by the withering

begonias? Lately, I worry every black dress

will have to be worn to a funeral.

New York a bouillon, eroded filigree.

Anything but illness, I beg the plagues,

but shiny crows or nuclear rain.

Not a drop in London May through June.

I bask in the wilt by golden hour light.

Lately, only lately, it is late. Tucking

our families into the safeties of the past.

My children, will they exist by the time

it’s irreversible? Will they live

astonished at the thought of ice

not pulled from the mouth of a machine?

Which parent will be the one to break

the myth; the Arctic wasn’t Sisyphus’s

snowy hill. Noah’s wife, I am wringing

my hands not knowing how to know

and move forward. Was it you

who gathered flowers once the earth

had dried? How did you explain the light

to all the animals?

<sup>I'd like to be under the sea

In an octopus' garden in the shade.

            —Ringo Starr</sup>

The article called it “a spectacle.” More like a garden than a nursery: 

hundreds of purple octopuses protecting clusters of eggs 

while clinging to lava rocks off the Costa Rican coast. 

I study the watery images: thousands of lavender tentacles 

wrapped around their broods. Did you know there’s a female octopus 

on record as guarding her clutch for 53 months? That’s four-and-a-half years 

of sitting, waiting, dreaming of the day her babies hatch and float away. 

I want to tell my son this. He sits on the couch next to me clutching his phone, 

setting up a hangout with friends. The teenage shell is hard to crack. 

Today, my heart sits with the brooding octomoms: not eating, always on call, 

always defensive, living in stasis in waters too warm to sustain them. 

No guarantees they will live beyond the hatching. Not a spectacle 

but a miracle any of us survive.

I have wanted other things more than lovers …	
I have desired peace, intimately to know	
The secret curves of deep-bosomed contentment,	
To learn by heart things beautiful and slow.	
 
Cities at night, and cloudful skies, I’ve wanted;
And open cottage doors, old colors and smells a part;	
All dim things, layers of river-mist on river—	
To capture Beauty’s hands and lay them on my heart.	
 
I have wanted clean rain to kiss my eyelids,	
Sea-spray and silver foam to kiss my mouth.
I have wanted strong winds to flay me with passion;	
And, to soothe me, tired winds from the south.	
 
These things have I wanted more than lovers …	
Jewels in my hands, and dew on morning grass—	
Familiar things, while lovers have been strangers.
Friended thus, I have let nothing pass.

Probably you’ll solve gravity, flesh 

out our microbiomics, split our God 

particles into their constituent bits 

of christs and antichrists probably, 

probably you’ll find life as we know it 

knitted into nooks of the chattering 

cosmos, quaint and bountiful as kismet 

and gunfights in the movies probably, 

probably, probably you have no patience

for the movies there in your eventual 

arrondissement where you have more

credible holography, more inspiring

actual events, your ghazals composed 

of crow racket, retrorockets, glaciers 

breaking, your discotheques wailing

probably, probably, probably, probably 

too late a sentient taxi airlifts you 

home over a refurbished riverbank, 

above the rebuilt cathedral, your head 

dozing easy in the crook of your arm,

emptied of any memory of these weeks 

we haven’t slept you’ve been erupting 

into that hereafter like a hydrant on fire, 

like your mother is an air raid, and I am 

an air raid, and you’re a born siren 

chasing us out of your airspace probably

we’ve caught 46 daybreaks in 39 days, 

little emissary arrived to instruct us,

we wake now you shriek us awake,

we sleep now you leave us to sleep.

People always tell me, “Don’t put the cart

before the horse,” which is curious

because I don’t have a horse.

Is this some new advancement in public shaming—

repeatedly drawing one’s attention

to that which one is currently not, and never

has been, in possession of?

If ever, I happen to obtain a Clydesdale,

then I’ll align, absolutely, it to its proper position

in relation to the cart, but I can’t

do that because all I have is the cart. 

One solitary cart—a little grief wagon that goes

precisely nowhere—along with, apparently, one

invisible horse, which does not pull,

does not haul, does not in any fashion

budge, impel or tow my disaster buggy

up the hill or down the road.

I’m not asking for much.  A more tender world

with less hatred strutting the streets.

Perhaps a downtick in state-sanctioned violence

against civilians.  Wind through the trees.

Water under the bridge. Kindness.

LOL, says the world. These things take time, says

the Office of Disappointment. Change cannot

be rushed, says the roundtable of my smartest friends.

Then, together, they say, The cart!

They say, The horse!

They say, Haven’t we told you already?

So my invisible horse remains

standing where it previously stood:

between hotdog stands and hallelujahs,

between the Nasdaq and the moon’s adumbral visage,

between the status quo and The Great Filter,

and I can see that it’s not his fault—being

invisible and not existing—

how he’s the product of both my imagination

and society’s failure of imagination.

Watch how I press my hand against his translucent flank.

How I hold two sugar cubes to his hypothetical mouth.

How I say I want to believe in him,

speaking softly into his missing ear.

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Spring in Hell and everything’s blooming.

I dreamt the worst was over but it wasn’t.

Suppose my punishment was fields of lilies sharper than razors, cutting up fields of lies.

Suppose my punishment was purity, mined and blanched.

They shunned me only because I knew I was stunning.

Then the white plague came, and their pleas were like a river.

Summer was orgiastic healing, snails snaking around wrists.

In heat, garbage festooned the sidewalks.

Old men leered at bodies they couldn’t touch

until they did. I shouldn’t have laughed but I laughed

at their flesh dozing into their spines, their bones crunching like snow.

Once I was swollen and snowblind with grief, left for dead

at the castle door. Then I robbed the castle and kissed my captor,

my sadness, learned she was not a villain. To wake up in this verdant field,

to watch the lilies flay the lambs. To enter paradise,

a woman drinks a vial of amnesia. Found in only the palest

flowers, the ones that smell like rotten meat. To summon the stinky

flower and access its truest aroma, you have to let its stigma show.

You have to let the pollen sting your eyes until you close them.

Last night when my work was done,
And my estranged hands
Were becoming mutually interested
In such forgotten things as pulses,
I looked out of a window
Into a glittering night sky.

And instantly
I began to feather-stitch a ring around the moon.

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert 
                    the unpainted stairs 
at the back where we squat 
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire 

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,

     It isn’t just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter

When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,

     Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James,

Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—

     All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,

     Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:

Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—

     But all of them sensible everyday names,

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,

     A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,

     Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,

     Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,

Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum—

     Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,

     And that is the name that you never will guess;

The name that no human research can discover—

     But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

          His ineffable effable

          Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular name.

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.

                                  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.

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

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.

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like
his.

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

Let me not lose my dream, e'en though I scan the veil

      with eyes unseeing through their glaze of tears,

Let me not falter, though the rungs of fortune perish

      as I fare above the tumult, praying purer air,

Let me not lose the vision, gird me, Powers that toss

      the worlds, I pray!

Hold me, and guard, lest anguish tear my dreams away!

After Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (Uffizi, 1620)

Because I know what rough work it is to fight off

a man. And though, yes, I learned tenebroso from

Caravaggio, I found the dark on my own. Know too



well if Judith was alone, she’d never be able to claw

her way free. How she and Abra would have to muster

all their strength to keep him still long enough

to labor through muscle and bone. Look at the old

masters try their best to imagine a woman wielding

a sword. Plaited hair just so. She’s disinterested

or dainty, no heft or sweat. As if she were serving

tea—all model and pose. No, my Judith knows

to roll her sleeves up outside the tent. Clenches

a fistful of hair as anchor for what must be done.

Watch the blood arc its way to wrist and breast.

I have thought it all through, you see. The folds

of flesh gathered at each woman’s wrist, the shadows

on his left arm betraying the sword’s cold hilt.

To defeat a man, he must be removed from his body

by the candlelight he meant as seduction. She’s been

to his bed before and takes no pleasure in this.

Some say they know her thoughts by the meat of her

brow. Let them think what they want. I have but one job:

to keep you looking, though I’ve snatched the breath

from your throat. Even the lead white sheets want

to recoil. Forget the blood, forget poor dead Caravaggio.

He only signed one canvas. Lost himself in his own

carbon black backdrop. To call my work imperfect

would simply be a lie. So I drench my brush in

a palette of bone black—femur and horn transformed

by their own long burning—and make one last

insistence. Between this violence and the sleeping

enemies outside, my name rises. Some darknesses

refuse to fade. Ego Artemitia. I made this—I.

Brown love is getting the pat down but not the secondary screening

and waiting after you clear to make sure the Sikh man or

the Black woman or the hijabis behind you get through



Brown love is asking the Punjabi guy working at the starbucks knockoff

if all the tea sizes are still the same price

and he says no,

it hasn’t been like that for at least four years,

but he slips you an extra tea bag without talking about it.



Brown love is the unsmiling aunty

at the disabled immigration line

barking

anything to declare? No? No? Have a good day.

and your rice, semolina, kari karo seeds and jaggary all get through

even though they are definitely from countries

where there are insects that could eat america to the ground



Brown love is texting your cousin on whatsapp asking

if she’s ever had a hard time bringing weed tincture in her carry on 



brown love is a balm

in this airport of life



where, if we can scrape up enough money

we all end up

because we all came from somewhere

and we want to go there

or we can’t go to there but we want to go to the place we went after that

where our mom still lives even though we fight

or our chosen sis is still in her rent controlled perfect apartment

where we get the luxury of things being like how we remember

we want to go to the place we used to live

and even if gentrification snatched the bakery

with the 75 cent coffee where everyone hung out all night

we can still walk the block where it was

and remember



and the thing about brown love is, nobody smiles.

nobody is friendly. nobody winks. nobody can get away with that

they’re all silently working their terrible 9 dollar an hour

food service jobs where tip jars aren’t allowed

or TSA sucks but it’s the job you can get out of the military

and nobody can get away with being outwardly loving

but we do what we can



brown love is the woman who lets your 1 pound over the 50 pound limit bag go

the angry woman who looks like your cousin

who is so tired on the american airlines customer service line

she tags your bag for checked luggage

and doesn’t say anything about a credit card, she just yells Next!

Brown love is your tired cousin who prays you all the way home

from when you get on the subway to when you land and get on another.

This is what we have

we do what we can.

I clean its latex length three times a day

                      With kindliest touch,

           Swipe an alcohol swatch

From the tender skin at the tip of him

                      Down the lumen

            To the drainage bag I change

Each day and flush with vinegar.

                       When I vowed for worse

            Unwitting did I wed this

Something-other-than-a-husband, jumble

                       Of exposed plumbing

            And euphemism. Fumble

I through my nurse’s functions, upended

                        From the spare bed

            By his every midnight sound.

Unsought inside our grand romantic

                       Intimacy

           Another intimacy

Opens—ruthless and indecent, consuming

                        All our hiddenmosts.

            In a body, immodest

Such hunger we sometimes call tumor;

                       In a marriage

           It’s cherish.  From the Latin for cost.

Like when, seventeen, I’d slide into your Beetle and you’d head

out of town, summer daylight, and parked among the furrows

of some field, you’d reach for the wool blanket. I knew you’d

maneuver then into the cramped quarters between passenger seat

and glove box, blanket over your head and my lap, where you’d

sweat and sweat until I cried out. Or further back, first winter

of our courtship, nearing curfew, when we’d “watched” Predator again

from the Braden’s lovers’ row, you’d slow to a halt at the last stop sign

before my house. I knew we’d linger under the streetlamp’s acid glow,

and you’d ask if I had to go home. Yes, I’d say, I better, soon—but I

knew you wouldn’t hit the gas, not for the longest time, three minutes,

five, and snow falling and the silent streets carless, I’d lift my top,

you’d unzip my jeans and treat the expanse of soft skin between shirt hem

and underwear like sex itself, your worshipful mouth, my whole body lit

from within and without. Or even further back, how I knew by the first

electric touch of our fingers in that dark theater, like a secret handshake—

I know you, I need you, like an exchange of life force between two

aliens from planets never before joined across the cold, airless terror

of space, that it was on, that it was on and on and on, forever.

What kind of thoughts now, do you carry

   In your travels day by day

Are they bright and lofty visions, 

   Or neglected, gone astray?

Matters not how great in fancy, 

    Or what deeds of skill you’ve wrought; 

Man, though high may be his station, 

    Is no better than his thoughts. 

Catch your thoughts and hold them tightly, 

   Let each one an honor be; 

Purge them, scourge them, burnish brightly, 

   Then in love set each one free. 

^{English translation from Spanish}

we are fiercer than melted snow;
we are bigger than storage cemeteries;
we are more rabid than mired winds;
we are immenser than rivers in sea;
we are wider than wasted tyrannies;
we are more tender than roots with earth;
we are more tender than rain in moss;
we are more tender than downpour’s tremor;
we are stronger than overworked years;
we are braver than stalking anguish;
we are more beautiful than universal monarchies;
we are more jevos than the dreamt good life;
we are richer than stolen ports;
we are more pirates than federal governments;
we are more justice-seeking than armed gods;
we are more more than the minimum
and more more than the most.
we are insularly sufficient.

we owe no one shame.

we owe no one smallness.

they tell us for a whole centuried
and quintuplentaried life that we are
the smallest of the upper,
that we are much of the less
and too little of the more,
but we are more than what they say,
more than what they imagine
and more than, to this day,
we have imagined.

we are home libraries
gathered in a data strike
that miss their bowels
of historied flesh.

we are a latitude of tied belts,
serpents who shed their punishing skins,
make a tape to measure the globe
and know if the world can
expand by opening chests.

we are that calculation that traces today
and hits rock bottom.

we are the fortaleza without spaniards,
the rib cage that expires the old empire
where before they housed crusades.

we are fatal, meaning,
the death of trenches
and the governments that induce them.

we are high-and-mighty on the coast
and humble in the mountains.
we gather coffee and plant it
in the buildings we build,
the children we raise,
and the exponential applications
we complete.

and in all things we are independent,
even in the most colonized hole of our porous fear;
even in the panadería most packed with papers that cover ads;
even in the corrosive act of saying we are only an island;
even that we have done looking each other in the face,
gathering cement blocks,
arming the neighbor’s storage rooms;
even from afar, it has been us
who has gone to the post office
and sent cans and batteries.

don’t fear what you already know.
we’ve spent a lifetime fearing ourselves
while getting robbed by strangers.
look at us. look closely.
don’t you see we are
beauty? 

la independencia (de puerto rico)

somos más fieros que la nieve derretida;
somos más grandes que un cementerio de vagones;
somos más rabiosos que los vientos atascados;
somos más inmensos que los ríos en el mar;
somos más amplios que las tiranías gastadas;
somos más tiernos que las raíces con la tierra;
somos más tiernos que la lluvia en el musgo;
somos más tiernos que el temblor del aguacero;
somos más fuertes que los años fajones;
somos más bravos que la angustia acosadora;
somos más bellos que las monarquías universales;
somos más jevos que la buena vida soñada;
somos más ricos que los puertos robados;
somos más piratas que los gobiernos federales;
somos más justicieros que los dioses armados;
somos más más que lo más mínimo
y más más que lo más mejor.
somos insularmente suficientes.

no le debemos a nadie la vergüenza.

no le debemos a nadie la pequeñez.

nos dicen por toda una vida siglada
y quintuplegada que somos
el menor de las mayores,
que somos mucho de lo menos
y muy poco de lo más,
pero somos más que lo que dicen,
más de lo que se imaginan
y más de lo que hasta hoy
nos hemos imaginado.

somos las bibliotecas de las casas
juntadas en una huelga de datos
que añoran sus entrañas
de carne historiada.

somos una latitud de correas atadas,
sierpes que mudaron su piel de castigo
por una cinta de medir el globo
para saber si el mundo puede
expandirse abriendo pechos.

somos ese cálculo que traza hoy
y toca fondo.

somos la fortaleza sin españoles,
la caja torácica que expira el viejo imperio
donde antes se almacenaban cruzadas.

somos fatales, es decir,
la muerte de las trincheras
y los gobiernos que las inducen.

somos altaneros en la costa
y humildes en la cordillera.
recogemos café y lo sembramos
en los edificios que construimos,
los niños que cuidamos,
las solicitudes exponenciales
que completamos.

y en todo somos independientes,
hasta en el hueco más colonizado del temor poroso;
hasta en la panadería más llena de periódicos de anuncios;
hasta en el acto corrosivo de decir que somos isla solamente;
hasta eso lo hemos hecho mirándonos las caras,
juntando los bloques de cemento,
armando los almacenes de los vecinos;
hasta en la lejanía, hemos sido nosotros,
nosotros los que llegamos al correo
y enviamos latas y baterías.

no temas lo que ya conoces.
llevamos una vida temiéndonos
mientras nos roban extraños.
míranos bien.
¿no ves que somos
hermosura?

Up until this sore minute, you could turn the key, pivot away.

But mine is the only medicine now

wherever you go or follow.

The past is so far away, but it flickers,

then cleaves the night. The bones

of the past splinter between our teeth.

This is our life, love. Why did I think

it would be anything less than too much

of everything? I know you remember that cheap motel

on the coast where we drank red wine,

the sea flashing its gold scales as sun

soaked our skin. You said, This must be

what people mean when they say

I could die now. Now

we’re so much closer

to death than we were then. Who isn’t crushed,

stubbed out beneath a clumsy heel?

Who hasn’t stood at the open window,

sleepless, for the solace of the damp air?

I had to get old to carry both buckets

yoked on my shoulders. Sweet

and bitter waters I drink from.

Let me know you, ox you.

I want your scent in my hair.

I want your jokes.

Hang your kisses on all my branches, please.

Sink your fingers into the darkness of my fur.

Sycorax

As if someone blew against the back of my neck,

I writhed up, becoming a wind myself,



and I flowed out the window of my bedroom.

Maybe I also emitted a moan over the croaking



of the frogs that night. Then I raised my arms

to the clouds, rooting my feet deep in the soil.



A stretch, I called it.



Now—pure nature in the night,

too sway-of-the-trees wise to worry about men—



I opened my nightgown but offered nothing

to anyone. This is for me, I said aloud to the night.



People would have laughed had they seen me

out their windows, naked but for my nightgown



flapping: I was small but the conviction of my stance

would’ve made me seem immense, framed



through their windows. Without my clothes

I was a world of possibility, more than a desire.



I, knowing better, I ought to mind my place,

I ought to walk like a lady,



I ought to demure myself to make him feel stronger,

I ought to mourn him when



he is gone. But every word I spoke to the wind

carried to him the scent of his regrets.



Every word blew through the night,

a breeze of my indifference.

The way that the sea fails

to drown itself everyday. And entendre alludes all those not listening.

The way unfertilized chicken eggs fail to have imagination,

           dozened out in their cardboard trays,

by which I mean they will never break

           open

from the inside. The way my imagination (née anxiety) has

           bad brakes and a need

to stop sometimes. The way I didn’t believe

it when he told me we were going to crash into the car idling

           at a red light

ahead of us. To know our future like that seemed unlikely.

           But to have time to tell me?

—Nearly impossible. I may have broken

           several ribs that day

but I will never know for sure. I’m okay,

I guessed aloud to the paramedic. It doesn’t matter

           if you’re broken if you’re broke,

I moaned in bed that night, after several glasses

           of cheap red. I thought it would make a good blues

refrain. I made myself

           laugh and so I made myself hurt—

MEMOIRS BY EMILIA PHILLIPS, goes the joke.

A friend of mine competes in beard and mustache tournaments,

           even though she can’t grow one herself—

Once, she donned a Santa Claus made entirely out of hot-glued tampons.

It was as white as the spots in memories I doubt.

           The first woman

I kissed who had never kissed a woman before

couldn’t get over how soft my face is,

           even the scar. Once,

a famous poet said what’s this and touched my face

           without asking—

his thumb like a cat’s tongue on the old wound.

He must have thought he was giving

me a blessing.

I thought I could stop

time by taking apart

the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.

Nothing can keep. Nothing

is kept. Only kept track of. I felt

passing seconds

accumulate like dead calves

in a thunderstorm

of the mind no longer a mind

but a page torn

from the dictionary with the definition of self

effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving

on as if nothing happened.

Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed.

Went to work. Went home.

There were parties. Ecstasy.

Hennessy. Dancing

around each other. Bluntness. Blunts

rolled to keep

thought after thought

from roiling

like wind across water—

coercing shapelessness into shape.

I put on my best face.

I was glamour. I was grammar.

Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.

I, too, had been taken apart.

I didn’t want to be

fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless

like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.

I thought I could stop

time by taking apart

the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.

Nothing can keep. Nothing

is kept. Only kept track of. I felt

passing seconds

accumulate like dead calves

in a thunderstorm

of the mind no longer a mind

but a page torn

from the dictionary with the definition of self

effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving

on as if nothing happened.

Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed.

Went to work. Went home.

There were parties. Ecstasy.

Hennessy. Dancing

around each other. Bluntness. Blunts

rolled to keep

thought after thought

from roiling

like wind across water—

coercing shapelessness into shape.

I put on my best face.

I was glamour. I was grammar.

Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.

I, too, had been taken apart.

I didn’t want to be

fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless

like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.

For years had anyone needed me

to spell the word commiserate

I’d have disappointed them. I envy

people who are more excited

by etymology than I am, but not

the ones who can explain how

music works—I wonder whether

the critic who wrote

that the Cocteau Twins were the voice

of god still believes it. Why not,

what else would god sound like.

Even though I know better, when I see

the word misericordia I still think

suffering, not forgiveness;

when we commiserate we are united

not in mercy but in misery,

so let’s go ahead and call this abscess

of history the Great Commiseration.

The difference

between affliction and affection

is a flick, a lick—but check

again, what lurks in the letters

is “lie,” and what kind of luck

is that. As the years pile up

our friends become more vocal

about their various damages:

Won’t you let me monetize

your affliction, says my friend

the corporation. When I try to enter

the name of any city

it autocorrects to Forever:

I’m spending a week in Forever,

Forever was hotter than ever

this year, Forever’s expensive

but oh the museums,

and all of its misery’s ours.

Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.

I leapt
to freedom.

A.k.a.



          the other gold.



                    Now that’s the stuff,



                               shredded or melted



                                         or powdered



                                                 or canned.



                                                             Behold



                                         the pinnacle of man



                     in a cheeto puff!



Now that’s the stuff



                      you’ve been primed for:



                                             fatty & salty & crunchy



          and poof—gone. There’s the proof.



Though your grandmother



                        never even had one. You can’t



                                    have just one. You



                                              inhale them puff—



                                                                     after puff—



                                                                after puff—



                               You’re a chain smoker. Tongue



                      coated & coaxed



but not saturated or satiated.



                       It’s like pure flavor,



                                   but sadder. Each pink ping



                                                       in your pinball-mouth



                                                                expertly played



                             by the makers who have studied you,



                               the human animal, and culled



                    from the rind



         your Eve in the shape



                                 of a cheese curl.



                                              Girl,



                                come curl in the dim light of the TV.



                           Veg out on the verge of no urge



                  of anything.



         Long ago we beached ourselves,



                                 climbed up the trees then



                                          down the trees,



                                                knuckled across the dirt



                               & grasses & thorns & Berber carpet.



                                           Now is the age of sitting,



                                   so sit.



           And I must say,



                       crouched on the couch like that,



                             you resemble no animal.



                                    Smug in your Snuggie and snug



                                                     in your sloth, you look



                                           nothing like a sloth.



           And you are not an anteater,



                                   an anteater eats ants



                                                   without fear



                                       of diabetes. Though breathing,



                 one could say, resembles a chronic disease. 



                                                                                            What’s real



                             cheese and what is cheese product?



                              It’s difficult to say



               but being alive today



                                      is real-



                                                real-



                                                       really



                                like a book you can’t put down, a stone



                       that plummets from a great height. Life’s



                      a “page-turner” alright.



               But don’t worry



                                      if you miss the finale



                                                of your favorite show, you can



                                                   catch in on queue. Make room



                                      for me and I’ll binge on this,



                                                            the final season with you.

I always took it for granted, the right to vote

She said

And I knew what my mother meant

Her voice constricted tightly by the flu A virus

& a 30-year-relationship 

with Newport 100s

I ain’t no chain smoker

she attempts to silence my concern

only a pack a week. That’s good, you know?

My mother survived a husband she didn’t want 

and an addiction that loved her more 

than any human needs

I sit to write a poem about the 100 year Anniversary

of the 19th Amendment 

& my first thought returns to the womb

& those abortions I did not want at first

but alas

The thirst of an almost anything 

is a gorge always looking to be

until the body is filled with more fibroids 

than possibilities

On the 19th hour of the fourth day in a new decade

I will wake restless from some nightmare

about a bomb & a man with no backbone

on a golf course who clicks closed his Motorola phone

like an exclamation point against his misogynistic stance

He swings the golf club with each chant

Women let me grab

Women like me

Women vote until I say they don’t

In my nightmare he is an infective agent

In the clear of day

he is just the same

Every day he breathes is a threat to this country’s marrow

For Ida & Susan & Lucretia & Elizabeth Cady

& every day he tweets grief  

like a cynical cornball comic’s receipts 

like a red light signaling the end of times

The final night of 2019

& my New Year’s Eve plans involves

anything that will numb the pain

of a world breaking its own heart

My mother & I have already spoken

& her lungs are croaking wet

I just want you to know I don’t feel well

& I pause to pull up my stockings beneath my crumpled smile

On this day I sigh

I just wanted to dance & drink & forget about the 61.7% votes

My silk dress falls to my knees with the same swiftness

defiant as the white feminist who said “I’m your ally”

then voted for the demise of our nation’s most ignored

underpaid, imprisoned & impoverished citizens

Every day there is a telephone near 

I miss my mother

In the waiting room of the OB/GYN

Uptown bound on the dirt orange train seat of the subway

O! How my mother loves the places she can never go

Her bones swaddled with arthritis & smoke

So she relies on my daily bemoans

The train smells like yesterday, Ma

They raise the tolls & fix nothing for the people

My landlord refuses to fix my toilet, my bathroom sink, my refrigerator

The city is annoying like an old boyfriend, always buzzing about nothing 

& in the way of me making it on time to the polls

This woman didn’t say thank you when I held the door

& who does she think she is?

Each time I crack & cap on the everydayness of my day

My mother laughs as if she can see the flimsy MTA card

The yellow cabs that refuse to stop for her daughter

In these moments she can live again 

A whole bodied woman with a full mouth

to speak it plain

I ask my mother what hurts? 

What hurts? 

How can I help from here?

3000 miles away

Alone in a tower between the sea 

& the Mexico borders

My mother sighs a little sigh & says

Nothing

I just wanted to hear your voice

Admittedly I may be blowing my <6 mm mole somewhat
out of proportion in the general scheme of things. At my
last follow-up, Dr. Song gently reminded me that we
entered the “catabasis” phase of my journey through
dermatological oncology some time ago. 

Cata-, from the ancient Greek κατά, or downward, prefixed
to the intransitive form of the verbal stem baínō, to go. It
means a trip to the coast, a military retreat, an endless
windstorm over the Antarctic plateau, or the sadness
experienced by some men at a certain point in their lives. 

In a clinical context, the term may also refer to the decline
or remission of a disease. So why do I still feel a ghostly
pinprick along the crease of my arm where the needle went
in before I went under? I suspect that I am not quite out of
the woods yet. Then again, maybe the woods have yet to
exit me.

In the worst hour of the worst season

    of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

     He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

     There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

      Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman.

And in which darkness it can best be proved.

The windshield’s dirty, the squirter stuff’s all gone, so
we drive on together into a sun-gray pane of grime
and dust. My son

puts the passenger seat back as far as it will go, closes
his eyes. I crack my window open for a bit
of fresher air. It’s so

incredibly fresh out there.

Rain, over.
Puddles left
in ditches. Black mirrors with our passing 

reflected in them, I suppose, but I’d
have to pull over and kneel down at the side
of the road to know.

The day ahead—

for this, the radio
doesn’t need to be played.
The house we used to live in

still exists
in a snapshot, in which
it yellows in another family’s scrapbook.

And a man on a bicycle
rides beside us
for a long time, very swiftly, until finally

he can’t keep up—

but before he slips
behind us, he salutes us
with his left hand—

a reminder:

that every single second—
that every prisoner on death row—
that every name on every tombstone—

that everywhere we go—
that every day, like this one, will
be like every other, having never been, never

ending. So
thank you. And, oh—
I almost forgot to say it: amen.

^{–From the immigration questionnaire given to Chinese entering or re-entering the U.S. during the Chinese Exclusion Act}

Have you ridden in a streetcar?
Can you describe the taste of bread?
Where are the joss houses located in the city?
Do Jackson Street and Dupont run
in a circle or a line, what is the fruit
your mother ate before she bore you,
how many letters a year
do you receive from your father?
Of which material is your ancestral hall
now built? How many water buffalo
does your uncle own?
Do you love him? Do you hate her?
What kind of bird sang
at your parents’ wedding? What are the birth dates
for each of your cousins: did your brother die
from starvation, work, or murder?
Do you know the price of tea here?
Have you ever touched a stranger’s face
as he slept? Did it snow the year
you first wintered in our desert?
How much weight is
a bucket and a hammer? Which store
is opposite your grandmother’s?
Did you sleep with that man
for money? Did you sleep with that man
for love? Name the color and number
of all your mother’s dresses. Now
your village’s rivers.
What diseases of the heart
do you carry? What country do you see
when you think of your children?
Does your sister ever write?
In which direction does her front door face?
How many steps did you take
when you finally left her?
How far did you walk
before you looked back?

^{Lark of my house,
keep laughing.
—Miguel Hernández}

this little lark says hi
to the rain—she calls
river as she slaps
the air with both wings—
she doesn’t know pine
from ash or cedar
from linden—she greets
drizzle & downpour
alike—she doesn’t
know iceberg from melt—
can’t say sea level
rise—glacial retreat—
doesn’t know wildfire—
greenhouse gas—carbon
tax or emission—
does not legislate
a fear she can’t yet
feel—only knows cats
& birds & small dogs
& the sway of some
tall trees make her squeal
with delight—it shakes
her tiny body—
this thrill of the live
electric sudden—
the taste of wild blue-
berries on her tongue—
the ache of thorn-prick
from blackberry bush—
oh dear girl—look here—
there’s so much to save—
moments—lady bugs—
laughter—trillium—
blue jays—arias—
horizon’s pink hue—
we gather lifetimes
on one small petal—
the river’s our friend—
the world: an atom—
daughter: another
name for: hope—rain—change
begins when you hail
the sky sun & wind
the verdure inside
your heart’s four chambers
even garter snakes
and unnamed insects
in the underbrush
as you would a love
that rivers: hi—hi

^{We are mired in matter until we are not
            — Ralph Lemon}

I thought we were an archipelago 
each felt under our own finessed and gilded wing 
let’s make an assumption 
let’s make an assumption that            the lake has a bottom 
let’s make an assumption       that everyone will mourn 
let’s sack a hundred greenbacks 
for the sake of acknowledging they mean something 
what does it mean to have worth? 
who would dream to drain a lake? 
I spent my days staring into the eye of the Baltic 
it’s because I am also a body of water 
it’s not that onerous  
I’ve built a muscle memory  
it’s not that heavy 
let’s talk about erasure I mean 
that’s easy 
start with a word that you don’t like 
start with a people you didn’t know 
start with a neighborhood, rank 
start with any miasma dispersed 
let’s talk about burden 
let’s talk about burden for the weight 
it lends us 
let’s talk about supplication 
about my palms — uplift, patience 

let’s celebrate our substance  
subsistence in  
amber rivulets of stilllife 
constellations how you molded me  
country how we became it 
the longitude is a contested border  
my longest muscle I named  familiar 

Go live with yourself after what you didn’t do.

Go and be left behind. Pre-package

                              your defense, tell yourself

                                                      you were doing

             your oath, guarding the futility of

            

                   your corrupted good,

              discerning the currency of some.

                                   As if them over all else.

                                         Over us.

                                    Above God and Spirit.

                                        

                          You over me, you think.

This is no shelter in justice not sheltering with

enclosure of soft iron a sheltering of injustices

into an inferno flooding of your crimes committed

and sheltered by most culprit of them all.

                      These nesting days come

outward springs of truth,

                    dismantle the old structures,

their impulse for colony—I am done

                                                    with it, the likes of you.

To perpetrate.

To perpetrate lack of closure, smolders of unrest.

To perpetrate long days alone, centuries gone deprived.

                             To be complicit in adding to the

                   perpetration of power on a neck,

                            there and shamed,

                             court of ancestors to disgrace

              you, seeing and to have done nothing.

Think you can be like them.

Work like them.

Talk like them.

Never truly to be accepted,

                                            always a pawn.

Assétou Xango performs at Cafe Cultura in Denver.

^{“Give your daughters difficult names.
Names that command the full use of the tongue.
My name makes you want to tell me the truth.
My name does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.”
      —Warsan Shire}

Many of my contemporaries,
role models,
But especially,
Ancestors

Have a name that brings the tongue to worship.
Names that feel like ritual in your mouth.

I don’t want a name said without pause,
muttered without intention.

I am through with names that leave me unmoved.
Names that leave the speaker’s mouth unscathed.

I want a name like fire,
like rebellion,
like my hand gripping massa’s whip—

I want a name from before the ships
A name Donald Trump might choke on.

I want a name that catches you in the throat
if you say it wrong
and if you’re afraid to say it wrong,
then I guess you should be.

I want a name only the brave can say
a name that only fits right in the mouth of those who love me right,
because only the brave
can love me right

Assétou Xango is the name you take when you are tired
of burying your jewels under thick layers of
soot
and self-doubt.

Assétou the light
Xango the pickaxe
so that people must mine your soul
just to get your attention.

If you have to ask why I changed my name,
it is already too far beyond your comprehension.
Call me callous,
but with a name like Xango
I cannot afford to tread lightly.
You go hard
or you go home
and I am centuries
and ships away
from any semblance
of a homeland.

I am a thief’s poor bookkeeping skills way from any source of ancestry.
I am blindly collecting the shattered pieces of a continent
much larger than my comprehension.

I hate explaining my name to people:
their eyes peering over my journal
looking for a history they can rewrite

Ask me what my name means...
What the fuck does your name mean Linda?

Not every word needs an English equivalent in order to have significance.

I am done folding myself up to fit your stereotype.
Your black friend.
Your headline.
Your African Queen Meme.
Your hurt feelings.
Your desire to learn the rhetoric of solidarity
without the practice.

I do not have time to carry your allyship.

I am trying to build a continent,
A country,
A home.

My name is the only thing I have that is unassimilated
and I’m not even sure I can call it mine.

The body is a safeless place if you do not know its name.

Assétou is what it sounds like when you are trying to bend a syllable
into a home.
With shaky shudders
And wind whistling through your empty,

I feel empty.

There is no safety in a name.
No home in a body.

A name is honestly just a name
A name is honestly just a ritual

And it still sounds like reverence.

Assétou Xango performs at Cafe Cultura in Denver.

^{“Give your daughters difficult names.
Names that command the full use of the tongue.
My name makes you want to tell me the truth.
My name does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.”
      —Warsan Shire}

Many of my contemporaries,
role models,
But especially,
Ancestors

Have a name that brings the tongue to worship.
Names that feel like ritual in your mouth.

I don’t want a name said without pause,
muttered without intention.

I am through with names that leave me unmoved.
Names that leave the speaker’s mouth unscathed.

I want a name like fire,
like rebellion,
like my hand gripping massa’s whip—

I want a name from before the ships
A name Donald Trump might choke on.

I want a name that catches you in the throat
if you say it wrong
and if you’re afraid to say it wrong,
then I guess you should be.

I want a name only the brave can say
a name that only fits right in the mouth of those who love me right,
because only the brave
can love me right

Assétou Xango is the name you take when you are tired
of burying your jewels under thick layers of
soot
and self-doubt.

Assétou the light
Xango the pickaxe
so that people must mine your soul
just to get your attention.

If you have to ask why I changed my name,
it is already too far beyond your comprehension.
Call me callous,
but with a name like Xango
I cannot afford to tread lightly.
You go hard
or you go home
and I am centuries
and ships away
from any semblance
of a homeland.

I am a thief’s poor bookkeeping skills way from any source of ancestry.
I am blindly collecting the shattered pieces of a continent
much larger than my comprehension.

I hate explaining my name to people:
their eyes peering over my journal
looking for a history they can rewrite

Ask me what my name means...
What the fuck does your name mean Linda?

Not every word needs an English equivalent in order to have significance.

I am done folding myself up to fit your stereotype.
Your black friend.
Your headline.
Your African Queen Meme.
Your hurt feelings.
Your desire to learn the rhetoric of solidarity
without the practice.

I do not have time to carry your allyship.

I am trying to build a continent,
A country,
A home.

My name is the only thing I have that is unassimilated
and I’m not even sure I can call it mine.

The body is a safeless place if you do not know its name.

Assétou is what it sounds like when you are trying to bend a syllable
into a home.
With shaky shudders
And wind whistling through your empty,

I feel empty.

There is no safety in a name.
No home in a body.

A name is honestly just a name
A name is honestly just a ritual

And it still sounds like reverence.

What would you like, little bone-star?

Would the suicided person please stand up?
Would they please tell the height of their pain
            the very top of the trees of it
            where it extends dentricles upward

would we prefer their death or this saying of it?

they would sit with the right person
the right person
and tell their pain.
that person would build a shield around the pain
a thin wooden structure half circle uneven
fluted.
they would leave it there for three days.
on the third would pick it up
and say                      their words. What words they have.
This would be the listening & the telling.

Assétou Xango performs “Eve” for TEDx.

They call me Eve 
I was never given a last name
This was only the first case of identity theft

I know what you’ve heard about me,
That I was carved out of the ribcage of a man
only as an afterthought.
And they told you I’d look differently

Make no mistake,
they have burned down my libraries and tried their best to scorch my memory
but I remember well.
The sweetness of God’s breath on my neck when She whispered me into existence
She told me I’d be the first of this
new species she was experimenting with

There was no talk of dominion,
but She did teach me a certain harmony with Lady Gaia and told me to embody her beauty
so I walked tall

Wide hips and extra weight to nourish the children I would carry.
And as they grew, I taught them.

Taught the young, small, weak
taught them plenty.
They came to my crown
and asked me how to run their nations Aristotle, Plato, Socrates
sucked from the supple breast of my knowledge.

Little did I know when I turned my back they’d whip slave ships into it
and create this Bible
 that blames me for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

There was a snake that tempted me to leave the promise land
I’m pretty sure those was your chains, guns and aggression.
So was it fruit,
or the middle passage that closed Eden’s gates.

This Bible
that tells me childbirth is a curse
and that I am the cause.
Well I am sorry,
Sorry that I broke my back to carry your children
but if you ever dared to ask me,
I’d call you the curse
I’ve been called temptress,
but it was you who stripped me naked.
Called me slut and made me hit my knees until I knew what forbidden fruit really tasted like.

The abuse didn’t stop after Lincoln
it was just heavily disguised
as the media,
tossing me a pair of booty shorts and tell me to sway my hips to the rhythm of lynched ancestors because it reminds racists of a better time.