Everything is fine: a means to endure  
news cycles, historic cycles, menstrual 

cycles. This is walking home after work,  
crawling into bed naked. Night, quiet with 

snow. I am an empty bank account.  
I am a pylon glowing in the dark. I am  
a primal scream. I am not here.         

The body speaks first. If that doesn’t work,  
the mind empties: a crate of crabs scuttling

toward nothingness. Authoritarianism 
blossoms like a corpse flower: foul men 

spread their stench across the globe.  
I remember these songs. It’s all on fire. 

A meteor // a virus // a bomb   
like a dark-eyed angel hurtles toward us. 

I’d like to see the ocean lap against a glacier 
before the end. I’d like to see the northern 

lights. I’d like to watch effigies of foul men  
burn in the desert. I’d like to be there, reel there, 
at the end.

I wear my grandmother’s teeth on my wrist. She mostly  
used her teeth for smiling. Hi gang! Big and open, her whole 
arm scribing overhead in joy as we approached. Seems  
almost caricature, but it was real. She was real. I miss her. I don’t 

know how she stayed, after all her losses, so cheerful, alone.  
Decades alone, widowed young, alone by choice 
in her bed. The teeth I wear are not from her mouth, but  
from a jaw older maybe even than humans: walrus, fossilized, 

bought before I was born that time she and her husband 
flew a small plane they could borrow cheap, thanks to  
his job at Boeing—details, details, the small gold chain 
that double-checks the bracelet’s clasp, how much security

the details give us—to Alaska. My goodness, the romance,  
the time, their lucky, white, poor and upwardly mobile, just- 
post-depression, educated selves. Those teeth of hers  
I wear are not recently of ocean or ice, and absolutely not 

of this new ocean, this new thin ice, but dug from earth  
and browned by earth, the rest of their original life gone. The  
nerves and blood, the soft gums, the sensitive, broad 
mystacial pad and its seeking whiskers. My grandmother 

wasn’t like a fossil, which is what some people get called  
when they get old. In the care home where she lived  
for a few years or months (time blurs), they said her smile hid  
her decline. I think again about the pass politeness, rote

manners, can give—their grace or shroud. Inside my mouth,  
all my teeth sit still in their sockets, minus little bits which, in some  
cases, are filled with expensive compounds my grandmother’s 
daughter could afford and which I did not tend or value

enough when their care became mine. I know how loose  
teeth can be when a life hasn’t held them or when life’s flush  
fades, when the flesh sags off. I’ve found so many seal jaws,  
dolphin jaws, porpoise jaws on the beach, in dunes, and, 

whether I pocket anything or not, I always wiggle them  
in their ragged sockets, count the cusps, touch each point, which  
tells me not what they said but who, as a species, they were.  
Are.  Hi, gang!  So sweet, so eager to see even our shitty, selfish 

teenage selves. Inside my mouth, there’s a whole lot  
of impolite, but I know how to close my lips around it.  
The teeth on my wrist from my grandmother might  
be fragile. I don’t know and can’t unless I try to break 

them. She was such a joyous force. She was such a joyous  
force. It makes me afraid to pull the bracelet over the knob  
of my wrist, to stretch the old elastic, because I have lost  
so much joy already, which is entirely my fault. She seemed, 

to me, to always be vibrant with care. The teeth are loose  
on my wrist. Once, someone put her finger on the small  
spur no one notices below the last knuckle of my hand and  
that is why I bought a different bracelet that touches me 

where she touched me, with the same, delicate precision.  
I hardly ever wear the other bracelet, the teeth, which  
are really little squares, like lozenges to ease a throat, and 
haven’t I been sore-voiced?  Hey, gang!  Her arms waving

like she was guiding a plane to the gate. The way  
she would love whoever saw her. Really. Whoever.

As if weightlessness were aspirational―
what nonsense―

                                  your death,

        a stone 

I can only hope to shoulder forever. Imagine
it gets better―

                                  what nothing

        am I left with

then? Even despair carries a particular
charge: that fantastic

                                  last whiff of lavender

      detergent

imprinted on the collar of a holiday sweater―

                                    mama,

the mourners are assembling. March me 
up that hill …

To Certain Poets About to Die

Take your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank
Which the millionaire might order his secretary to scratch off
And get cashed.

  Very well,
You for your grief and I for mine.
Let me have a sorrow my own if I want to.

I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyards hunky.
His job is sweeping blood off the floor.
He gets a dollar seventy cents a day when he works
And it’s many tubs of blood he shoves out with a broom day by day.

Now his three year old daughter
Is in a white coffin that cost him a week’s wages.
Every Saturday night he will pay the undertaker fifty cents till the debt is wiped out.

The hunky and his wife and the kids
Cry over the pinched face almost at peace in the white box.

They remember it was scrawny and ran up high doctor bills.
They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now will have more to eat and wear.

Yet before the majesty of Death they cry around the coffin
And wipe their eyes with red bandanas and sob when the priest says, “God have mercy on us all.”

I have a right to feel my throat choke about this.
You take your grief and I mine—see?
To-morrow there is no funeral and the hunky goes back to his job sweeping blood off the floor at a dollar seventy cents a day.
All he does all day long is keep on shoving hog blood ahead of him with a broom.

When he appears, he looks into my eyes
With the gaze of a child missing a perfected
Will. Then, like a child, he moves suddenly—
Insisting on his own space, summoning up that

Odd power that makes us seem real to ourselves.
His life failed him. Fame, which he had in hand,
Failed him. He believed it was because he chose me.
When I catch or remember his ripped-from-pure-terror

Characters onscreen and off (murderer, father, diplomat)—
I get that he was always a version of the liability of “us.”
He comes to me alone in dreams, spinning into a glimpse
Of such blue-eyed hate it might have been love—O

I was never sure of that living kid on the lit stage,
Floating now into the twentieth year of his death.

Let the sea beat its thin torn hands
In anguish against the shore,
Let it moan
Between headland and cliff;
Let the sea shriek out its agony
Across waste sands and marshes,
And clutch great ships,
Tearing them plate from steel plate
In reckless anger;
Let it break the white bulwarks
Of harbour and city;
Let it sob and scream and laugh
In a sharp fury,
With white salt tears
Wet on its writhen face;
Ah! let the sea still be mad
And crash in madness among the shaking rocks—
For the sea is the cry of our sorrow.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense. You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain. You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls. Alone you let the terrible stranger in, and stayed with her alone. Now you're gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life. Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast. Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all, would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me, hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived
their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.
You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back

as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid jacket
and had that beautiful smile on and you’d talk.
You’d go to get something and come back and he’d be gone.

You explain death to the clothes like that dream.
You tell them how much you miss the spouse
and how much you miss the pet with its little winter sweater.

You tell the worn raincoat that if you talk about it,
you will finally let grief out. The ancients etched the words
for battle and victory onto their shields and then they went out

and fought to the last breath. Words have that kind of power
you remind the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly
folded across the chest, or slung across the backs of chairs,

or hanging inside the dark closet. Do with us what you will,
they faintly sigh, as you close the door on them.
He is gone and no one can tell us where.