after Jacqueline Rose / after Chen Chen

she fed me 
clothed me
kept me
safe albeit
in excess
five layers
in spite of 
subtropical 
winter heat
so much to
eat I needed
digestive pills
to ward off
the stomach’s 
sharp protest
how not to
utter the un- 
grateful thing: 
that I am 
irrevocably
her object
that the
poet who 
wrote this
saved my life: 
Sometimes, 
parents &
children
become
the most
common of 
strangers 
Eventually,
a street 
appears
where they 
can meet 
again
How I
wished
that street
would appear
I kept trying
to make her 
proud of my 
acumen for 
language
these words
have not
been for
nothing
I wrote
to find
the street 
where we
might meet
again & now
there is relief
guilt or blame
but they are 
nearly always 
misplaced
you are born 
into the slip-
stream of
your mother’s 
unconscious
if someone
had told her
that the last 
thing a young 
mother needs
is false decency
courage & cheer 
she might not 
have hurt us
both but what
to do with 
remorse &
love that comes 
unbidden like a 
generous rain
how to accept
her care after
the storm is there
a point at which
the mother is 
redeemed the
child forgiven
can the origin
story be re-told
transfigured into
the version where
the garden is always 
paradise & no one 
need ever fall
out of grace

The debt is paid,
The verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed.
All fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
Sweet is death forevermore.
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,
Nor murdering hate, can enter in.
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past;
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down forevermore.
None can re-enter there,—
No thief so politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink, or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend eternal Fact.

1.

Propped against a tree on a sidewalk next 
to the trash cans, shorn of sheets, its fabric 
a casing for its coils, harborer of secretions 
seeped and dried, its phosphorous surface 
glitters abandoned skin flakes in moonlight, 
shingles from roof sides of humans. Mucous
trails pearlescent from a snail crawled up
the trunk of the tree upon which this bed 
formerly slept on now leans. Loved upon?
Perhaps. Dreamt on most definitely. Hands
on skin most definitely, the stains it harbors
are the trails of dreams, the shotguns aimed
at baby carriages, molars boring holes into 
the palm upon which they are cast like dice,
and the mystery of love as scratchy and fine
smelling as the needle tree that carried you
off with its scent of resin: it’s a hideous thing.

2.

Sheet marks on the face won’t disappear into
the water filling the basin. Under the eyes dark 
lakes before the resinous reflection of window
cast into mirror by interior lights set against
the night. Do you wonder if I dream of your 
shattering? Marks on the face don’t melt into 
the water. It would be strange to dream that 
hard for a stranger, even for you who became 
strange within an hour. Yet, I am waking from 
the press of your face against my face. Carried 
off over the shoulder, hauled through doorways, 
receiving your murder, once this mattress was 
bent at its middle, sagged profuse as a gaping 
blouse, and bore stains of which I was never 
aware while asleep. You knew. You were there 
too. You will dream of congress between us. 
I withdraw my hand. I refuse. Haul me away.

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.”

It’s one thing to be hopeful and to be full 
of feathers is another and it’s a third to 
conflate the two and do fourth things
even survive being thought of? 
Five fingers on fire close into a metaphor
about how we’ll never, never ever, never ever.
The smoke above the hospital is beautiful.
The smoke above the hospital was beautiful.
Above the hospital, the smoke looked 
and seemed, its seams dissolved 
into memory which is a terrible way 
to tell time in the cold. I misread 
the “Creve Coeur Camera” sign 
of the shop beside the supermarket 
as “Cri De Coeur Camera” like it is my job
to misread signs. Something beautiful arrived
in a helicopter, something beautiful left
forever. Here we go again, against,
aghast. Something in us floats, floated, 
our feet dragging through future ruins.
I know, “something” is an ulcer 
on any reaching, making intelligence
but the ulcer wants what it wants, to be 
something after all. For an awful whale,
a moment tries to beach itself, it does,
I learn Tomaž has died 
then it is a magnet of terrible power 
when I know for certain Tomaž has died. 
I convalesce, selfish as a branch punished
mildly by wind—Tomaž lived! and will,
but it’s only the kind of enough
nothing ever is. I feel I am being 
ironed, and it all only burns. I feel 
the subtraction machine subtracting
my maneuvers. I feel the abacus 
in my brain, that accordion, finally.
Finally licked into char. Five. Now any chair 
I steal into for any length of time 
has three unsteady legs. Cri cri cri, etc.
It would be a swell time to have a handle on
any methodology for rising into the sky, 
a really great time to turn into a bird. 
What a time! the sun is out and it is snowing
and I am as close to being a plastic sword
as I ever have been. How I would love 
some toddler coming into their tongues
or some beloved ancient to sentence me. 
How I will love the sound 
of my own final clatter, but 
only if it comes when I am tossed aside 
to signal the end of hostilities.