& each fish feels solid land before its gills
cease moving. I miss sex but can’t imagine 

dating. Glass shatters in patterns designed 
for a specific aftermath. What confession  

offers isn’t relief. From my bed, coverlet tucked 
under chin, I heard my father’s hand connect 

with my mother’s cheek. A fish slap requires 
actual fish-to-face contact. Windowpanes 

bust in shards. Car windshields spider & smash
into square chunks or mini blocks, so on impact 

they won’t decapitate or slash the face. A tank’s
ideal temperature for tropical fish is 75 to 80 degrees. 

I tried to learn how to stab the worm on the hook 
to bait the prey, but in the end I was only called 

a pussy. Tackle box tipped over, the red & white
striped sleek lure. Don’t they think of everything: 

claims to cover any minor loss, inspections to avert 
damage. Even so, at the health center, the multiple-choice

form omits the oval to fill in adopted so I leave 
the question blank. We’re here to consider my choices

in contraception, how to prevent an itchy rash down there 
& to discuss the definitions of sex & life. What’s hereditary 

gets lost to wonderland, elsewhere a consultant advises 
curators on predation, tells the team which fish to import 

for show-stopping colors & compatibility. But we know 
the inspector misses the crack, walks by the leak, & finally 

without pause someone sweeps & stuffs dozens of trash bags 
with glass & dead fish parts. We want what we want.

^{translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori}

I’m not that unrequited lover, so bitter I flee Love.
There’s no dagger in my hand,
no urge to dodge a challenge.

I am a wooden board the carpenter sizes up. 
His axe, his nails—they don’t worry me.

Let the carpenter make something of me.
If I resist, let Love’s flames have me. 

I’ll be cramped and dark as a cave
if I flee the friend who finds me there.

I’ll be frustrated, dull, and barren as stone,
if I don’t step out of my petty self,
take off its tight shoes, 
and wade into rubies. 

How many eons must pass 
before the treasures I find here appear again. 
Why ignore them now?

And why not seek my noblest self?
I’m not here to be ignoble. 

I don’t have a queasy stomach.
Why should I flee the tavern?

And why fear the prince?
I’m not a bandit, 
though I curb my heart.
“Quit it! Enough!” I tell it foolishly.

My heart answers back,
“I’m in a gold mine, deep in gold.
Why flee your chance to give?”

I wonder what I’d do
               with eight arms, two eyes
                              & too many ways to give
                                             myself away

                                             see, I only have one heart
                              & I know loving a woman can make you crawl
               out from under yourself, or forget
the kingdom that is your body

& what would you say, octopus?
               that you live knowing nobody
                              can touch you more
                                             than you do already

                                             that you can’t punch anything underwater
                              so you might as well drape yourself
                                             around it, bring it right up to your mouth
                              let each suction cup kiss what it finds

                                             that having this many hands
                              means to hold everything
               at once & nothing
to hold you back

that when you split
               you turn your blood
                              blue & pour
                                             out more ocean

                                             that you know heartbreak so well
                              you remove all your bones
so nothing can kill you.

^{I don’t make any separations. A poem is a poem.
A building’s a building…. I mean, it’s all structure.
—John Hejduk}

I need villanelles of you pulling 
my breath like lines moving down

the page and the promise of rhyme 
bending my ear. I need a sestina

of touch, patterns of palm, stroke,
skim, brush, and rub returning—

a cycle of sound and pressure I
apprehend in my bones. I need

the triolet’s refrain rolling off 
your tongue like a sample, new

and nuanced here and here and here.
It’s all structure is why I need angles

of play, the love our bodies build.
I miss you. The ache's more sour

than a dropped foot, a forced rhyme.
If you're free from me too long,

what will you jettison first? Meter?
Lines? Come home. Our sonnet’s

the fourteen creases in the sheets. 
A couplet of light greens your eyes

only inches from mine when iambs
ascend atop iambs. Please. I need

you in haiku: distilled in syllables,
laid bare in the last line’s turn.

I now replace desire 

with meaning. 

Instead of saying, I want you, I say, 

there is meaning between us.

Meaning can swim, has taken lessons from the river 

of itself. Desire is air. One puncture 

above a black lake and she lies flat.

I now replace intensity with meaning.

One is a black hole of boundless appetite, a false womb,

another is a sentence.

My therapist says children need a “father” for language 

and a “mother” for everything else.

She doesn’t get that it’s all language. There is no else. 

Else is a fiction of life, and a fact of death.

That night, we don’t touch. 

We ruin nothing. 

We get bagels in the morning before you leave on a train, 

and I smoke a skinny cigarette and think 

I look glam, like an Italian diva.

You make a joke at my expense, which is not a joke, really, 

but a way to say I know you. 

I don’t feed on you. Instead, I watch you 

like a faraway tree. 

Desire loves the what if, the if only, the maybe in another lifetime. 

She loves a parallel universe. Or seven. 

Meaning knows its minerals,

knows which volcanic magma belongs 

to which volcanic fleet.

Knows the earth has parents. That a person is raised. 

It’s the real flirtation, to say, you are not a meal. 

To say, I want you 

to last. 

^{translated from the Italian by Will Schutt}

You pursue me with a thought, are a thought 
that comes to me without thinking, like a shiver 
you slowly scorch my skin and lead my eyes 
toward a clear point of light. You’re a memory 
retrieved and glowing, you’re my dream 
beyond dreams and memories, the door that closes 
and opens onto a wild river. You’re something 
no word can express, and in every word you resonate 
like the echo of a slow exhale, you’re my wind 
rustling the spring foliage, the voice that calls 
from a place I do not know but recognize as mine.
You’re the howl of a wolf, the voice of the deer 
alive and mortally wounded. My stellar body.

Corpo Stellare 

Mi segui con un pensiero, sei un pensiero 
che non devo nemmeno pensare, come un brivido 
mi strini piano la pelle, muove gli occhi 
verso un punto chiaro di luce. Sei un ricordo 
perduto e luminoso, sei il mio sogno 
senza sogno e senza ricordi, la porta che chiude 
e apre sulla corrente di un fiume impetuoso. Sei una cosa 
che nessuna parola può dire e che in ogni parola 
risuona come l’eco di un lento respiro, sei il mio vento 
di foglie e primavere, la voce che chiama 
da un posto che non so e riconosco e che è mio.
Sei l’ululato di un lupo, la voce del cervo 
vivo e ferito a morte. Il mio corpo stellare.

I’ll say it—the most remarkable way a man 
has touched me is when he didn’t intend to, found
the heat of me on accident. I’m saying his hand
punctured the gap between our backs, rooted around

for the blanket we shared and swept my rib-ridged side.
In movies, that touch is the domino
that starts the chain, but his bed did not abide
by rules of fantasy. He touched me and, oh,

I held my breath. Waited for the regret
he never felt. My God, he touched me then slid
closer beneath the duvet, our spines close-set
arches that joined in the dark, kissing. I did

not know it then, but his fingers flexed with want
into the night. His heart at my back. Desire out front.

I love your hands:
They are big hands, firm hands, gentle hands;
Hair grows on the back near the wrist . . . .
I have seen the nails broken and stained
From hard work.
And yet, when you touch me,
I grow small . . . . . . . and quiet . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . And happy . . . . . . . .
If I might only grow small enough
To curl up into the hollow of your palm,
Your left palm,
Curl up, lie close and cling,
So that I might know myself always there,
. . . . . . . Even if you forgot.

remembering the boys—
much older, only unsettling
in hindsight

back then, they gave us
beers and we took them,
uncertain in the summer

of sage and honey.
we hid in the bathroom
so we could talk

for a while, swimming in the empty
bathtub and watching each
other’s reflections in the mirror.

the boys waited outside
in the yard, and we let them

wait while we were fifteen
and silver-tongued, all shoulder-
blades and hummingbird and safe
for now

A firm hand. The shadow waves of satin.
I am not yet flesh. He calls me baby,
and I touch my face. I’m searching for god
when I oil my body in the mirror. To love it
means to love a man means an opening
to another man. When I take my glasses off
all the lines blur. A body is a body without
language, I tell my girlfriend and she laughs,
mouth wide enough to hide in. She shows me
my softest parts. I dissolve into what. I forget
hiding also means a good beating, the way
passion can be suffering. I can’t believe
my whole life I never touched what made me
holy. We have bread, butter and nowhere to be.

Even in California
all of my friends require touch    

to get through winter.                
It’s true, I am waiting to be in love          

in front of the people I love.       
He says, I’m glad you’re here                       

& I want to cover his mouth
to warm my hands.        

Of course I understand              
how one would mistake

that earthquake for a passing train
but what do we do with the stillness                    

when after great change             
nothing moves, but his hand      

sliding a glass of wine
across the table

instructing me to drink              
with a single nod.

I bring the glass to my face                     
but don’t let a drop pass my lips.

Beside him, I am almost somewhere        
I’d like to be for a while.

To make him smile        
I tell him I am bad at sex.

To make him kiss me
I tell him when I’m happy

I go looking for things
I haven’t lost yet.

was sex and more of it. sex and talk of it. sex and sexuality and sexism. until some among us began to differentiate it. prefix and suffix it. label it a matter of preference, genetic reconnaissance at birth. and it was it and it was not it. until some among us began to psalm. and what about doing it. and when would we do it to each other again. and it was gratuitous. the blue and white lament of it. until it moved us into ecological proximity. what was near and how loud. the flesh budding, ripening. it had always been a matter of proximity. the what it is was close to us. lewd and it was common. consumptive and it was money. extractive and it was public.

to whet the thing a finger strums a seam of glass

then spirit set its feels on us

we were tending
we were swirling

and we were sensing when it hit us

a porous limb        a glowing portal

sam rivers on repeat

the romanticism of aromanticism inside a poem
the orifice of pitch        a clutch of birds

then our dreams became tumescent
such holiness was flame


and it was fuchsia fuchsia all over the place

there must be one thing you can’t have in order to be alive 

watching flowers open on youtube 

I mean, my life is wasted on my life

requirement is simple 

it takes a wound to

return to yourself 

the new sky 

is the same as the old one

its achy maw 

its barbwire grip 

people are whatever they are next to

that won’t remember them

a dumb desert 

a broken open sign

whatever I love best

reminds me of something else

I say hunger and mean your hands bitten to boneseed,

bandaged with bedsheet and the night while two states over,

a mouth—ready soil—says your name. Next June’s lover

speaks the harvest: your rich, vowel-tender song

but for the neighbor. More hello than amen. Not yet

a whole book of psalms. Choose this. Not your bare room.

Your self-vacancies. Unlearn empire’s blackness:

night spun savage, space cast empty when really

a balm slicks the split between stars. Really

hipthick spirits moonwalk across the lake ice.

Maps to every heaven gauze the trees in velvet

between that greenbright spectacle of bud and juice

and dust—I’m saying there’s no such thing

as nothing. Try and try, you’ll never disappear.

I say hunger, mean hands you think empty

though everywhere, even the dark, heaves.

How desire is a thing I might die for. Longing a well,
a long dark throat. Enter any body

of water and you give yourself up
to be swallowed. Even the stones

know that. I have writhed
against you as if against the black

bottom of a deep pool. I have emerged
from your grip breathless

and slicked. How easily
I could forget you

as separate, so essential
you feel to me now. You

beneath me like my own
blue shadow. You silent as the moon

drifts like a petal
across your skin, my mouth

to your lip—you a spring
I return to, unquenchable, and drink.

You know I know what I’m doing.
I’m always with you.

I’m watching these lines get to you.
This is how we’re close.

We can’t have knowing looks
(we’re both as good as dead)

so we have these knowing lines,
typing till the clock says stop.

And if in the course of struggle
a foot slips and we fall,

what does that matter?
I won’t come back to you

when the song is over.
I will not want you

or your unsuitable house and lot.
Expect to miss me, though—

expect ice and snow, rain and hail.
To be embarrassed. To be changed.

To write the year on a check
and be one hundred years off.

To let it go
when I express displeasure.

To let my anger go. Just drop it. Just take it
as you drop it.

Just take it
and go.

                I come to party, I show up alone,

I feel the beat on my feet, and I’m soloing.

I sing sunshine hits in the club.

Sunshine hits baby. That’s just how I live, lawd—

                        And Lord was like—

I fled the scene,

done all I possibly could. The way it works is,

sunshine hits something and so, there is something.

Gradually, you become unlike that something

You used to hold.  I had held a cassette tape

in my hands, had held

a church in my hands,   

had held it with heavy hands, had felt love

Like adrenaline, to which no one in the church spoke.   

I had heard music emanating

from a cassette player, had heard it in church,      

had looked into the pastor’s eyes, had held her eyes   

In my hands, had felt her love like a fee.

                                                       Evil eyes,

everyone knows   

what your poems are about. Whatever it is

got me laughing.

10. Here on my knees I look for the single animal: you left

                                                   ravaged at the edge of a meadow

9. Is everything accounted for? The fingers dipped

                                     beneath the torso—to keep this body bright

8. Every breath we are desperate to take

                             sounds as if a war lost against a country of promise

7. Discarded halos: the light you remember

                   in your head—you feed on what is crushed between the teeth

6. America declares these dreams I have every night be re-

                                                      dreamed & pressed into names

5. Upended petals of qém’es

                                 abandoned like torn butterfly wings—we’é I pray

4. I pray that nobody

                  ever hears us

3. An eye gone

           bloodshot: I tear through the crisp apple of your throat & find—

2. myself: this—a boy beside a boy. An eyelash

                            fallen at the base of a valley, our dark bones bursting in-

1. to bloom. I stare into your beloved face & enter: yes,

                 yes, this nation, under god, its black sky we lay our nightmares to

0. where I am your animal: my Lamb—now eat

            me alive.

You could smell the day’s heat even before the day began. 
Constant trickle, endless green trees flanking the highway: 
summer had come back. Scattered trash 
on the apartment landing. Everyone passed by it. Everyone felt
it belonged to someone else. 

Grey fog, blue sunlight, stones like big footprints
in a wavering line across a lawn.
Everyone was talking about a new song 
in relation to the old: the same volume
but with no feeling. Standing on the porch 
just before the drizzle, 
fiercely missing my sister, how we used to take the bag 
of cut grass from the lawnmower 
and empty it over our bodies like rain.  

Days lost between the clock and my phone: I made coffee,
I brushed the cat, I went to work, I knew the time it took
to go from one room to another 
to collect my ironed shirt. I kept looking back 
to isolate individual moments, asking why
didn’t I give myself more fully to that 
friend, that stranger, that drinking, those
days. I remembered Kira and Chicago, 
leaving our apartment in the middle of the night, so hot even the moon 
looked hurt. I watched a chained dog strain
at every passerby. I thought, it must be hard
to have that much desire. 

Meanwhile, I’d gotten older. I’d grown 
accustomed to my body. 
I could sit with my shirt off
on a hot day and not think about
how my body looked 
or how I felt inside it. 
Cutting my hair the barber said, 
heat rises, that’s a known fact.
I liked her phrasing. I walked forever.
I was trying not to revise history
to make my present life
make sense. Raised voices; faded t-shirts
left in boxes on the street. 
Such strange intimacies. 
The telephones ringing 
in the houses as I passed.