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.