Here I am sorting old documents after breakfast.  
And here you are—bright as a bee sting!— 
clinging to my daughter’s souvenir birth certificate 
three decades old. How bold you seem, Dead 
Name, anchoring dates. How bold, corroborating  
vitals: 21 inches, 8 pounds 3 ounces, male, etc.  
How bold, floating above her tiny footprints. 

Of course, I love my daughter and her new  
name. But I still have a reluctant soft spot  
for you, splashed with myth as you are, citizen 
of the sea, the green of Wales poking through. 
Now you are cypher and palimpsest, collateral  
damage, slippage of signifier and signified.  
Syllables we’ve scrubbed from our vocabulary.

To show solidarity with her, maybe I should  
bury the birth certificate, along with her old  
report cards, along with you, out back.  
Dead Name, I swear it’s nothing personal.  
Dead Name, we selected you from a cast  
of 1000s. Dead Name, truth is I rarely think  
of you till one of your accidental appearances. 

Like today. Or like last fall, first day of class.  
I found myself reading you, Dead Name,  
from a list of hopefuls wanting to add. I paused.  
Almost couldn’t say you, like I was dropping  
F-bombs to welcome the class. Said you  
anyway. Your wild syllables waiting to home  
to whoever raised their hand and said I’m here.

Today my mum said she doesn’t remember
arriving at my house with a dishcloth,
doesn’t remember me telling her
my kitten stayed overnight at the vet,
that I’d be coming over to help with bills.
What she remembers is now.
She knows her memory is a ship
leaving port without permission,
her memory is a cloud she can’t hold.
When she asks, Why is everything so hard?
I say, I don’t think you’re the only one
asking that. When I say, I have trouble 
with loss, she says, We are all leaving.
She adds: I know I won’t be around
much longer. So I ask her 
what she’ll come back as? A pig, she says, 
then laughs. I tell her I can’t imagine 
seeing a pig and having to say, 
Oh, there’s my mom! She smiles 
and says, Then maybe I’ll return 
as a hummingbird. Another conversation 
in the present. Another conversation 
I will remember alone.

This is me mistaking bats for swallows.  
It’s a new story. This is me trying 

to change my mind. I’ve seen the door  
my family takes: my father,

my cousins, my uncle. Ends 
of rope, cold barrels gone hot & cold 

again in the hand. It is a shocking thing 
to know how possible finality can be:

the burden of it, weighing on backs.  
Look up: hear that cheeping that comes 

at dusk: focus on the sound of it: looking  
for direction, avoiding obstacles. 

There is no comfort in this. 

This is me hoping to find something  
in the resurrection moss. How it clings 

to limbs that make arches over the roads  
that I drive. This is me leaving the nail 

in my tire. Filling my tire with air every ten days. 
This is me leaving again. I’m scared

to answer the phone. This is me falling in love  
with the northwest breeze on the right street, 

a leaf swirling to the ground, the sound  
of someone’s voice through something 

plastic. The creeping shapes in my dark yard.  
When they die they hurt us all. I’m worried 

I wouldn’t even do that. Here comes the heat  
again, brewing, pushing me into places. Here 

is my little motor. Tweaked and ticking. This is me  
looking up. This is me mistaking swallows for bats. 

When I say first time, that implies 
there will be a second, a fourth, a ninety-ninth. 
From far away our teeth must look like Tic Tacs, 
Chiclets, moons of a faraway planet. Nocturnal 
animals can smell better at night because scent 
lingers when the air is still, and so I smell the mint 
of our mouths but also the spill of peppers 
from the salsa dropped on your shirt. The greasy 
sidewalks we walked an hour earlier. Hotel soap 
freshly bubbled and wet in the dish. When I root through 
the thicket or the brush pile, my fur turns electric striped 
and tail-tumbled. I foam at the mouth. The mask 
on my face means bandit. Turns out I love the dark. 
My little paws want to grab everything and wash it. 

Into the furnace let me go alone;

Stay you without in terror of the heat. 



I will go naked in—for thus 'tis sweet—

Into the weird depths of the hottest zone. 

I will not quiver in the frailest bone, 

You will not note a flicker of defeat; 

My heart shall tremble not its fate to meet, 

Nor mouth give utterance to any moan.

The yawning oven spits forth fiery spears; 

Red aspish tongues shout wordlessly my name. 

Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears, 

Transforming me into a shape of flame. 



I will come out, back to your world of tears, 

A stronger soul within a finer frame. 

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;  
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:  
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run  
Or bring more or more blazon man's distress.  
And I not help. Nor word now of success:       
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—  
Work which to see scarce so much as begun  
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.  
  
Or what is else? There is your world within.  
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.   
Your will is law in that small commonweal...

Hold your soul open for my welcoming.
Let the quiet of your spirit bathe me
With its clear and rippled coolness,
That, loose-limbed and weary, I find rest,
Outstretched upon your peace, as on a bed of ivory.

Let the flickering flame of your soul play all about me,
That into my limbs may come the keenness of fire,
The life and joy of tongues of flame,
And, going out from you, tightly strung and in tune,
I may rouse the blear-eyed world,
And pour into it the beauty which you have begotten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck.

                                                                             Shrapnel and the eye

Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling

From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped

to its mother’s back, cut loose.
                                                                       Soldiers crawl the city,

the river, the town, the village,

                                the bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything.
Or burn it.

They kill what they cannot take. They rape. What they cannot kill
                                                                                        they take.

Rumors fall like rain.

                                   Like bombs.

Like mother and father tears

swallowed for restless peace.

Like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight.

Like a train blown free of its destination.                      Like a seed

fallen where

there is no chance of trees          or anyplace       for birds to live.

No, start here.                    Deer peer from the edge of the woods.

                                                         We used to see woodpeckers

The size of the sun, and were greeted

by chickadees with their good morning songs.

We’d started to cook outside, slippery with dew and laughter,

                                    ah those smoky sweet sunrises.

We tried to pretend war wasn’t going to happen.

Though they began building their houses all around us

                                         and demanding more.

They started teaching our children their god’s story,

A story in which we’d always be slaves.

No. Not here.

You can’t begin here.

This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold with words,

even poetry.

These memories were left here with the trees:

The torn pocket of your daughter’s hand-sewn dress,

the sash, the lace.

The baby’s delicately beaded moccasin still connected to the foot,

A young man’s note of promise to his beloved—
 

No! This is not the best place to begin.

Everyone was asleep, despite the distant bombs.

                                        Terror had become the familiar stranger.

Our beloved twin girls curled up in their nightgowns,

                                                                 next to their father and me.

If we begin here, none of us will make it to the end

Of the poem.

Someone has to make it out alive, sang a grandfather

to his grandson, his granddaughter,

as he blew his most powerful song into the hearts of the children.

There it would be hidden from the soldiers,

Who would take them miles, rivers, mountains

                                     from the navel cord place of the origin story.

He knew one day, far day, the grandchildren would return,

generations later over slick highways, constructed over old trails

Through walls of laws meant to hamper or destroy, over stones

bearing libraries of the winds.

He sang us back

to our home place from which we were stolen

in these smoky green hills.

Yes, begin here.

okra, pickled just the way you like it,
             in the jar on the top shelf. oranges
in the ochre clay bowl you made right there

on the counter. clove tea brewing stovetop
             & there’s an orison that my mama
taught me, metronoming ’gainst my orbital

bones. orbiting around my occipital.
             come through. let’s be each other’s oracles.
we can hold hands, craft a shrine in the gap

of our palms, in the ocean of our breaths
             at the shore of our oil-shined flesh. listen:
this is my oath to you. i’m devoted

to you, the people, my folks, my kindred—
             not to the state. & i belong with you—
not to the state. our love is ordained

by the Black ordinary & spectacle,
             our wayward waymaking. we are the more
gathered together here in our own names

calling on otherwise. serenading
             otherwheres. singing we already here—
come through

Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s

bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,

and science has proven what it had to prove:

every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.

Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,

where prayer is keyless as a foreign laugh overheard

and on the Masjid’s cobalt globe a ghost … an angel?

No, no … who am I kidding. When I say God,

what I mean is: I can barely stand to look

at my mother’s face. So, what if I’ve never seen

what she’s seen. I took the shape of her two hundred

and six bones—I did not choose her eyes. Did not

choose to masticate the ash of witness,

her crooked smile disclosing a swarm of flies,

Yes, missiles hailed there, named after ancient gods.

Hera—a word of disputed root—maybe from Erate,

beloved. And because my beloved is not a person

but a place in a headline I point to and avert my gaze,

I can now ask: would I have given up my mother for an alyssum

instead of asylum? Or one glass of water that did not

contain war? Her wound isn’t mine, yet what I needed most

was our roof to collapse on her like earth around stones.

Rain, the hard absence of skin. The silence of it—

no gust in my goddess. No artificial wind.

When the forensics nurse inspected me, she couldn’t

see the tenderness he showed me after. My walk home

 

squirmed sore with night. I passed the earthworms

displaced to sidewalk, their bodies apostrophed

 

in the sun. I did not anticipate a grief

so small, my noun of a prayer, Eat dirt to make dirt.

 

Took a man’s hand as he led me to cave. So long

as I breathed, I could huff violets in his dank, practice

 

earth’s gasp. Mother lifts daughter, daughter casts

look at camera, a killer, a stick in the mud. I hold

 

my own hand. When the forensic nurse inspected

me, I described the house, historic blue. Asked me

 

to push my hips down. Little crescent moons

where his nails stabbed into me. She gave me

 

the word abrasion so gently I offered consent. Blue

as the moon when I sighed wait, blue as the no of my



throat. Abrasion, possibly extended form of red.

Harm results in a starry night too, many galaxies

 

scraped under the nail of a heavenly body. Ah my

second earth, its wounds hardened into swallowed

 

prophylaxis, an injection pooling between muscle

and skin. A woke seed. Deadarmed anti-moons

 

aggregated. A storm can travel seeds up to 30 miles

away. They dust on the sidewalks like lost data.

 

He did not intend Did not. Bloody speculum

a telescope searching the angry night sky for proof.