It’s dusk on a Tuesday in June. A hot wind

       bears down and east. In my room, a stranger’s

hairclip lies like a gilded insect beside the sink.

       Hours later, it’s still dusk; it will be dusk all night.

Last month, I cut the masking tape from a box my mother left

       my sister and me. On the lid, she wrote, Life is hard, not

unbeatable. If I can do it, darlings, so can you. 2 am. A rosy dark

       dusting the window, the heat a ladder into sleep.

On certain corners cars circle ceremoniously & couriers carry cake to
circumvent cases. Classics & coupes constellate  
Crenshaw, Carey, Compton. Cobalt chrysanthemums,  
candles, & champagne celebrate cherished companions ‘cause
comrades collaborated to counter crooked cops  
            & corrupt civic commanders cannibalizing our cities, coloring us cancerous 

Courts, Congress & CEOs conspired to confine citizens 
in coffins & cells, like crack was contagious.  
Churches cried considering their children,  
the condition of their classrooms.  
Caught in a cruel, ceaseless cycle of crisis, 
Crip clenched circumstance

Crip cracc’d the cement chasin’ chicc’n & change  
in California, that concert of calamities.  
Crip cultivated concrete, co-created a community  
of cousins, a coalition come covenant, connected  
by the crimson chronicle of cotton, the collective choice to chase
control coverless in the center of chaos.

Curiously commentary censors constructive critiques that challenge
common conversations about the culture of crippin. Contrary to
contextless caricatures of conflict & consumption C-notes, Chucks, &
chunky cuban chains, cartoonish  
canards of capos, cognac, cocaine, & caskets,  
the code calls for care, coordination. Character is critical.

It’s criminal how Crip been criminalized, then  
commodified. Caliban of Calabasas,  
conscious of the cosmos’ complexity, 
capitalism’s chokehold & its charter, 
the clock’s cold, constant counting,  
& the cramped capaciousness of County,

Crip charted a coastline, cartography of chances 
for the chronically cut off, credit-less, convicted &  
concurrent, constrained like chattel, clamoring 
for a cathartic clash, a calm chapter: 
a clean crib to chill in, consistent checcs 
compassion, a cure for the cancer of civility

Cuhz came correct, clutch Curry. Coruscant champion, clear-sighted
Caesar with cloth cerulean crown, confident, cunning, cutthroat for the
conclusion of combat, crumple the Constitution. Cremate this colony

The man has chosen
that he wants his ashes scattered
from the end of the pier

where he used to fish with his buddies.
They’d sit on overturned paint buckets.
Sometimes the waves gusted up

and the hems of his pants got wet and salty.
He liked the gulls that stood on the railing,
all puffed up with sky.

Having made the decision,
he walks at dusk to the end of the pier
and looks out at the sea.

As he turns away, he sometimes gives
a small, happy nod, like a man
thinking yes, I will buy this house.

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
I wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

A man who is probably my husband sails by. 
But I just see a sailboat, not who steers it. 
But I picture a man, in the gender of things. 

My husband who you will not meet.
He’s off, I don’t know, marshalling.
Ideas, not soldiers. Sailing helps him think. 

I used to join him. Then we argued.
For a decade we argued. And sometimes 
sailed, though I was admittedly mostly 

decorative, a mermaid on the prow. 
Whether I brought him better luck 
is not my weather to tell. I cost him. 

Time. He costs me. More.

My marriage ended in an airport long ago.
I was not wise enough to cry while looking for my car,

walking through the underground garage;
jets were roaring overhead, and if I had been wise

I would have looked up at those heavy-bellied cylinders
and seen the wheelchairs and the frightened dogs inside;  

the kidneys bedded in dry ice and Styrofoam containers.
I would have known that in synagogues and churches all over town 

couples were gathering like flocks of geese 
getting ready to take off,  while here the jets were putting down 

their gear, getting ready for the jolt, the giant tires 
shrieking and scraping off two 

long streaks of rubber molecules,
that might have been my wife and I, screaming in our fear.

It is a matter of amusement to me now,    
me staggering around that underground garage,  

trying to remember the color of my vehicle,
unable to recall that I had come by cab—

eventually gathering myself and going back inside,
quite matter-of-fact,

to get the luggage 
I would be carrying for the rest of my life.

My daughter, ten and brown—another summer
in Arizona with her father—steps
nonchalantly down the ramp as planes
unfurl their ghostly plumes of smoke.
I had forgotten how his legs, dark
and lean as hers, once strode toward me
across a stretch of hammered sand.
And her shoulders, sloped like his, a cotton
blouse scooped so low I can see
her collarbones arched gracefully
as wings, the cruel dip
in the hollow of her throat. And my throat
closes when she smiles, her bangs
blown into a fan around her face, hair
blond as the pampas grass that once waved
wild behind our fence. Whatever held us
together then is broken, dishes
in pieces on the floor, his dead
cigarettes crushed one after another
into the rail of the porch.
Now she opens her arms as he
used to, against a backdrop of blue sky,
so wide I worry she’ll float up on these
gusts of clutching wind and disappear,
like a half-remembered dream, into
the perilous future, into the white
heart of the sun.

When the starvation-hair appears

all over my body, you call it fascinating,

which is not the same as beautiful.

I never decide what to wish for first,

food or you. Or rather, eating food again

or never again eating you. Your favorite part

of me, my cupped hipbone, empty

as a half mango scooped clean of its flesh.

Your least favorite part, my hunger.

I learn to fill myself with other things:

the julienned light in the bedroom, mouthfuls

of Debussy from the old piano, the endless suck

of the toilet, which, bravely, never stops running.

Even vowels become impossible luxuries,

so round they seem indulgent against my tongue.

I consider violence after hearing that on death row

you get one last perfect meal. I imagine the photo

in the newspaper story, where I look so

beautiful.

I think of the woman in the Bible

who asks for John’s head on a platter.

Maybe she was only hungry.

Maybe she wanted to be satisfied.

With apologies to James Whitcomb Riley.

(“The result of taking second place to girls at school is that the boy feels a sense of inferiority that he is never afterward able to entirely shake off.”—Editorial in London Globe against co-education.)

There, little girl, don’t read,

You’re fond of your books, I know,

But Brother might mope

If he had no hope

Of getting ahead of you.

It’s dull for a boy who cannot lead.

There, little girl, don’t read.

 1. Because man’s place is the armory.


 2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.


 3. Because if men should adopt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.


 4. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.


 5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them particularly unfit for the task of government. 

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man’s chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.