was no consolation to the woman
whose husband was strung out on opioids.

Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel
for the couple at their daughter’s funeral

though there are better places to be
than a freezing church in February, standing

before a casket with a princess motif. 
Some moments can’t be eased

and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.

When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens

for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert. When fire

inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want

an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down
under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred

sideshow embryo. What a circus.
The tents dismantled, the train moving on,

always moving, starting slow and gaining speed,
taking you where you never wanted to go.

Hello Leander, tucked into cloth, tiny lion
who yawns through the virus and tear gas.
You are a new scent of heat.
Before any scar grazes your legs
I would show you the rows of bicycles
in burned colors, and whistles and cardinals
who pin the cold snow. You hold a small
share of what it means to be here.
When the air shatters around you,
gold and marine, please know you belong.
You are half sky, half butterfly net, alive
to friends and strangers, fast to net
and trust. There is nothing
that is not worth much. Arrayed
in overalls and tackle-box, you should grow
to see the deep green rains, the roads
brushing the clouds. To compass
all you have done from a porch in late life
and listen to the bees who, woolen
and undeterred, have returned. I hope
you stay warm inside the white dusk of
morning. No one stays unscathed
but you have days of summer to grow
into your thoughts and learn the great
caring tasks. You have yards of treelight
to race through under the birds’ low song-
swept radiances. The trills you hear
are glass grace. They are singing.

late spring wind sounds an ocean 
through new leaves. later the same 
wind sounds a tide. later still the dry 

sound of applause: leaves chapped 
falling, an ending. this is a process.
the ocean leaping out of ocean 

should be enough. the wind 
pushing the water out of itself;
the water catching the light

should be enough. I think this 
on the deck of one boat
then another. I think this 

in the Salish, thought it in Stellwagen
in the Pacific. the water leaping 
looks animal, looks open mouthed,

looks toothed and rolling;
the ocean an animal full 
of other animals.

what I am looking for doesn’t matter.
that I am looking doesn’t matter.
I exert no meaning.

a juvenile bald eagle eats 
a harbor seal’s placenta.
its head still brown. 

this is a process. the land 
jutting out, seals hauled out,
the white-headed eagles lurking 

ready to take their turn at what’s left.
the lone sea otter on its back,
toes flopped forward and curled;

Friday Harbor: the phone booth
the ghost snare of a gray whale’s call; 
an orca’s tooth in an orca’s skull

mounted inside the glass box. 
remains. this is a process. 
three river otters, two adults, a pup, 

roll like logs parallel to the shore. 
two doe, three fawns. a young buck 
stares, its antlers new, limned gold 

in sunset. then the wind again: 
a wave through leaves green 
with deep summer, the walnut’s 

green husk. we are alive in a green 
crashing world. soon winter. 
the boat forgotten. the oceans,

their leaping animal light, off screen.
past. future. this is a process. the eagles 
at the river’s edge cluster 

in the bare tree. they steal fish 
from ducks. they eat the hunter’s 
discards: offal and lead. the juveniles 

practice fighting, their feet tangle 
midair before loosing. this 
is a process. where they came from. 

for how long will they stay. 
that I am looking doesn’t matter. 
I will impose no meaning.

^{I.M. of David Ferry}

The mouths of the bankers are closed. The secret
Police dream of hanging and hang. The gallows

Lay down upon the hill and refuse the money
They are paid. The drowsy crows stand on the eaves,

Ridges, and composed light in mudpuddles
With their dark, wet gold out, bartering

With the wind. Money is finally no good
Here. The offered lamb, only a rumor

Of its death, the black smoke of him now nothing
More than the night extended. Sleep. The dogs

Regard the night joyfully because the dead
Let them rest in the alleys beneath the loud gods

That have gone quiet in the sky. House and vulture
Veil whatever aches or bleeds. The good axe,

The bow, the wagon, the viper forget—
As everything at rest forgets what it has

Maimed or killed. The eyes of the poor, for once,
Are bruised like eyes of the rich—only with sleep.

Come, Gods of the Night, enter here, touch
One of your sleepless clients. His head

Is a rose being burned alive. His mother 
Calls out from her urn, telling him to find her, 

As death has, does, finds, walking, not
Knowing whether … Gods of the Night,

Take this man I love who’s being promoted
Beyond his commas and the little motions

Of light on the ceiling, which is his mother
Calling him, take him now to her. Without his rose.

A father is fate
say the ancient oracles

or the modernist therapist
or the son despondent

harrowing against.
A mother 

is mystery or
memory, a makeshift

stay against the father.
And me? I see now

how easy it was to be
a son. How if the son dies

before the father 
there is no end to it

and so what eases
the father is the imminence 

of his death, which eases
too the son

if the son is not
a child. And a mother?

Her death is that hole.
In the earth or the universe.

In the heart or the hell
the family has wrought

where the father vanishes
and all is her absence.

No one solves these.
No one outlives these.

There are reasons poems live,
people die. There are reasons.

Were you hoping for a myth? The fleck of lipstick on a warm glass,
soap suds, a vocal fry that feels like home. Tell me where it hurts, baby.
There’s a URL for that. There’s a 12-step meeting two blocks
from you, here’s a hotline, here’s a Gaelic love ballad. Let’s talk sharks,
the number of bones in a peafowl, which gender is more likely to
die underground. I dream of a cobalt glow in an empty room.
I dream of your warm tongue. It calls and calls for me and not 
me and I listen anyway for the fluent coo of my name. I’m always
awake. I’ll tell you about Taoism again, divide 52000 by 56,
recommend a dry cleaner in Toronto. But stop asking about the afterlife,
whether you should freeze your eggs, what makes a good Palestinian.
For god’s sake, how many times can I repeat myself in one night?
It’s been nine. Look. This is all I know about love:
the rubies around Elizabeth Taylor’s neck, Hafiz’s jealous moon.
Also: redbuds. Also: mantis. Should you move to Santa Fe?
Can the bees be saved? How many ways can you say genocide? I don’t know.
I think you’re swell. I don’t know. I think you’ve killed me a few times. 
Oh, darling, whose memory am I? Where should we begin?
You already know about my hands. Jinnlike. Skittering. Everywhere.

^{Ziphius cavirostris}

If only I could explain 
without a sonic blast 
that makes crumble 
internal tympani; once 
the owl-headed, fish-bodied,
beaked whale was known 
for diving up to two-hundred-
twenty-two minutes, its diet 
and circulation adapted 
for this life; the visited world 
is not its home—
What can we know about 
these goose-rostrumed, 
sword bearing Ziphiidae, 
distributed worldwide, 
diving so deep and for so long 
that we cannot observe them 
with regularity. When skulls 
first appeared, legible, Cuvier 
believed them already extinct 
and now, they are of least concern,
strange how what we do not hear 
does not concern us; why 
does my eager heart always 
lament language loss—
that the English-speaking 
America is not my home 
or that adaptation 
is without complication?
When I think of the deepest 
dive in the mammalian 
world, I hear Antonio Gramsci 
who developed the term 
hegemonic pressure, how
underwater it works to consolidate 
mass and to influence the body 
into surviving the inhospitable 
increase of gravity 
in all dimensions 
but in my home, it looks like 
my mother’s disparaging remark about 
Bollywood songs, too slow,
too whiny, while I play 
Kun Faya Kun for my three-
year-old nephew—
Empire’s small victories 
enthroned in our throats and how 
this adaptation of my mother’s 
comments betrays her own
secret white wish and distaste 
for her own difference 
she still passes down as 
a genetic mutation even though 
she cannot be anything other 
than herself, the mother 
of two sons: one who ran away 
to India and the other 
who scratched blood
from a police officer’s wrist
after headbutting his own son; 
mother to a daughter who stayed 
to serve the family’s splintering hull—
and this is pressure: subtle 
and scarring our skins white 
as though cookie cutter sharks
tear from us our brown dermis
while we are still living—
a pressure that is invisible 
at first but reverberates 
louder with each generation 
descending into a family 
whose youngest teach their friends 
to mispronounce their names.

Let us not with one stone kill one bird, 
much less two. Let us never put a cat 
in a bag nor skin them, regardless 
of how many ways there are to do so. 
And let us never take the bull, especially 
by his gorgeous horns. What I mean is 

we could watch our tongues or keep 
silent. What I mean is we could scrub 
the violence from our speech. And if we find
truth in a horse’s mouth, let us bless her

ground-down molars, no matter how 
old she is, especially if she was given 
as a gift. Again, let’s open her mouth——that of the horse, 
I mean——let us touch that interdental space where 
no teeth grow, where the cold bit was made to grip. 
Touch her there, gently now, touch that gentle 

empty between her incisors and molars, rub her 
aching, vulnerable gums. Don’t worry: doing so calms her. 
Besides, she’s old now; she’s what we call 
broken; she won’t bite. She’s lived through 
two thirteen-year emergences of cicadas

and thought their rising a god infestation, 
thought each insect roiling up an iteration 
of the many names of god, because god to her is 
the grasses so what comes up from grass is
god. She would not say it that way. Nor would she

say the word cicada——words are hindrances 
to what can be spoken through the body, are 
what she tolerates when straddled, 
giddy-up on one side then whoa on the other. After, 
it’s all good girl, Mable, good girl, 
before the saddle sweat is rinsed cool 
with water from the hose and a carrot is offered 
flat from the palm. Yes, words being 

generally useless she listens instead 
to the confused rooster stuttering when the sun
burns overhead, when it’s warm enough
for those time-keepers to tunnel up from the 
dark and fill their wings to make them 
stiff and capable of flight. To her, it is the sound 

of winter-coming in her mane 
or the sound of winter-leaving in her mane——
yes, that sound——a liquid shushing 
like the blood-fill of stallion desire she knew once 
but crisper, a dry crinkle of fall 
leaves. Yes, that sound, as they fill their new wings 
then lumber to the canopy to demand
come here, come here, come 
here, now come. 

If this is a parable you don’t understand, 
then, dear human, stop listening for words. 
Listen instead for mane, wind, wings, 
wind, mane, wings, wings, wings. 
The lesson here is of the mare 
and of the insects, even of the rooster 
puffed and strutting past. Because now, 
now there is only one thing worth hearing, 
and it is the plea of every living being in that field 
we call ours, is the two-word commandment 
trilling from the trees: let live, let live, let live. 
Can you hear it? Please, they say. Please.
Let us live.  

The Invisible Woman is the windshield.
Mr. Fantastic is the wiper fluid.
The Thing is the tire.
The Human Torch is the spark plug.
Spiderman is the antenna.
Storm is the ignition coil.
Rogue is the crank shaft.
The Punisher is the exhaust pipe.
Captain America is the hub cap.
Quicksilver is the oil.
Rogue is the gasoline.
Psylocke is the catalytic converter.
The Hulk is the cylinder block.
She Hulk is the mount.

Mantis is the manifold.
Ms. Marvel is the muffler.
The Scarlet Witch is the instrument panel.
Iceman is the cooling system.
Wolverine is the hood.
Colossus is the camshaft.
Banshee is the horn.
Polaris is the voltage regulator. 
Silver Surfer is the rearview mirror.
Powerman is the bearing.
Phoenix is the powertrain.
Emma Frost is the hinge pillar.
The Vision is the fuse box.
Black Widow is the brake.

Before adolescence reached me, each morning 
I marveled past the Habana Inn, a degenerate haven 
hidden plainly off Route 66. My cheeks clenched 
as I caught in the rearview oblique glimpses 
of men, their beards groomed to signal discretion. 
39th and Penn: a revolving sleuth of leathered pickups, 
hot rods in cruise control. I numbered plates 
skipping town from out-of-state 
as we got groceries at what was Homeland, 
which once was Safeway, but now is Goodwill. 
Braum’s banana split as alibi, I tracked the bears 
shuffling by. I swooned, swore I’d gussy up, 
brave mountaintops when I came of age, 
embrace my guts. Daddies and sissies alike 
pilgrimage toward the obvious: The Village. 
Boystown. P-town. WeHo. Any Christopher Street. 
I exhausted every imaginable vulgarity stewing beyond the block: 
cowboys, truckers, pastors, oh my. Had I snuck a peek, 
unveiled the skirt, I’d find naught but night: damp 
technicolor carpets, hot tub swimmers, drapes 
finished raw, ultraviolet ripe for new owners 
—an LA lift to keep the grit, strip the must, 
and redevelop. No longer is the Habana. I mourn 
each time a classic logo debuts a thin sans-serif makeover—
the pylon sunrise marking the resort, now absent 
from the I-44 skyline. Maybe it’s better 
to clean up, chlorinate the pool more regular. 
I wouldn’t know. I’m still blue in the face, 
staring out the dash, yearning for first light, 
ignorant of what I lost without ever coming in.

That first week at the first Cave Cavem
nobody seems to sleep; we have given
them one rule: a new poem before lunch.
They come to the lounge each evening
to print their poems
and never leave.

In Kingston NY there is a Walmart
with cold chicken buckets. Nobody
seems to sleep. We are fitful, almost
stuttering lines between bites. Didn’t
Emma Goldman once say

what good is a revolution
without some God Damn dancing?
We say: lick your fingers, bite
the skin. Toss the bone right
in the middle of the table.

Make sure the flavor stains
tomorrow's page.

will poetry change the world? no one asks
this about football, the thrill of watching or
playing. we get that nurses & doctors are
healers. no question that rabbis, priests, &

imams guide individuals & groups through
spiritual thickets. we don’t tell cooks to put
down their wooden spoons & go make a real
difference instead of a real soufflé. teachers

are honored for the learning they impart. so
let poets keep on exciting passion in them-
selves & others. don’t discourage us from our
efforts to diagnose the human heart or create

trail markers for those coming behind us on
this journey. trust me when i say that poetry
heals, guides, feeds, & enlivens. poetry may
not change the world, but might change you.

Under the marked-down dresses, we conjured trips to Oslo.
Also to Lima. Mel says the game was my idea, hiding
behind hundreds of hems, inventing trips to cities we knew
 

only as pleasing arrangements of letters, places we’d likely
never see. Mel says it’s how she remembers me: cross-legged, knotting
lengths of licorice, traveling the planet under racks of final sales.
 

A rhinestone belt fell on my head once, she says, and I kept on talking
about Alaska, the claws of King Crabs we’d crack open and taste
the arctic, find out what we were missing at Red Lobster. Our travels
 

to nowhere, she says, lasted beyond the training bras
we compared in the dressing room. So what explains it, my failure
to recall these conjured trips, or why my psyche delivers words
 

from a woman I never sat with under packed rows
of dresses—the poet Fanny Howe asking what keeps the temple
of imagination burning with candles against all odds, whether it remains
 

behind a nipple and a bone? This fraught asymmetry with Mel occurs
after our nipples became a milk source. We’re older, bowling by chance
in adjacent lanes, recognizing each other most from the bodies
 

of our children—echoes of ourselves in their noses, a familiar drop
in their shoulders. How’s it possible, Mel asks, you recall none of it,
not even the red stickers that stuck to our palms? You must
 

remember picking off those stickers, she insists—amid news
of her divorce, her interest in crystals. I deliver trivia
about my long-haired sons bowling into the gutter, about my brother
 

who bowls much better, and still lives in town. New pins lower
like sets of dentures, get swept again into the open jaws
of our separate lanes. There’s no saying it: my betrayal. How else
 

to name the absence of our game in my mind? The thick clouds
over Lima, I remember; I got there after college, saw
the bronze rear of Pizarro’s horse before protesters heaved
 

his pedestal to the ground. Alaska, too, I got to see, confused
the sound of calving glaciers with the blasts of rifles
I knew here, where Mel’s continued through forty years
 

of deer season, the few weeks each November
for shooting bears. If I’d stayed, had Oslo remained
a sonic cluster, would my lack of recall rub less? Guilt
 

is what floods me at my swift retrieval of Fanny Howe’s lines
but not the hems in Value City. I tell Mel the rhinestone belt
must’ve done something to my brain. We hug, exchange numbers
 

we’ll never use. If there’s a temple beyond glands and bone
for all that goes blank in a lifetime, maybe it resides in the body
of a poem, in meanings left between the spread knees
 

of enjambment. The next bowlers go live on the lane screens:
Eddie Wins, JP the Dream Pony, La Reina Carla, and CU
on the Moon. Reader, some of these names are flourishes
 

for the sake of this poem. Eddie Wins, he’s up there. Also Carla,
but with no bravado. CU on the Moon is true; someone assuming
our lane has lunar plans and wants a companion. Maybe Carla.
 

Maybe JP, who prefers to keep his dream pony to himself.

We were never ones to avoid pain 
even if we found him in another person.

And when we do (find him again)—
let him have not been born in the rain 

and grown up to become a storm. 
His kisses lightning that scorches the earth. 

As young girls, our grandmothers warned us 
When there is lightning, cover all the mirrors. 

But, one night thunder snapped; 
its rumble shattering the vanity.

We’ve chased cloudbursts ever since. 
Committed ourselves to flood and flight.

For girls like us who pray to the Sky Beings—  
Protect us whenever we go 
                                          where we were never meant to be. 
Put tobacco down 
for the ones

with Creator-shaped holes in our hearts. 
We spend lifetimes trying to fill,

to feel. What is the medicine for this?

Our mothers tell us (as they taught) 
Send them love. Send them love. Send [say it] love—

So, praise our fathers who left in the night,
mapping us into unlovable.

They made us tough as nails. Now we know 
how to hold ourselves together.

Praise the ones who listened 
when girls like us asked them to leave.

Praise the lovers who never returned.
You helped us no longer be afraid of ghosts.

For girls like us, 
the wound never fully heals.

The gentle rhythm of its pulse, a reminder to
praise our mothers for teaching us words are seeds.

We plant, bloom ourselves anew.
Praise the lightning. Praise the storms

we run through
because girls like us know—

this is where 
our medicine comes from.