Playlist: 11 Weeks

1. lush field of shadows, static
    hush and radial itch, primordial

2. goo of the sonogram's wand 
    gliding across my belly

3. my daughter blooming
    into focus, feathered

4. and fluttering across the stormy
    screen, the way it rained 

5. so hard one night in April
    driving home from the café in Queens

6. where we’d eaten sweet tamales
    I thought we might drown

7. in the flooded streets
    but we didn’t and I want to say

 8. that was the night she was conceived:
     husk and sugar,

9. an apartment filled with music, 
    hiss of damp clothes 

10. drying on the radiator, 
      a prayer made with a record’s broken needle

11. to become beaming
      and undone.

Weaning, I Listen to Paganini's Concerto No. I

When I’m alone my tits scream
while the refrigerator

hums like a man nodding
off behind me on the bus.

There is never any food
I want to eat and I am ravenous

all the time: soft-boiled
eggs and mint tea. Milk

thick as leftover grease
stored under the sink.

My friend is a dairy farmer,
which means she delivers

cows, pulls velvety hooves
from gaping maws like psalms

into the muck and wet
hay. We haven’t spoken

since my daughter was born
but maybe our friendship

ended when I was eight months
pregnant and she told me about

a stillbirth over the phone,
how the mother

kept licking the calf’s body
drowned in dull light

and I couldn’t un-hear
her voice, no matter how much

I believed it might unstitch
me from my own grief,

the way I became no more
or less beautiful

when I became a mother,
more like the perpetual

frost of astonishment
across a windshield,

more like I was doubled
and emptied, permanently

bent as if tending to a wound
or some unspeakable joy.

Seville

Because the cathedral leaked yellow light

onto cobblestones like a slit carton of milk.

Because boxes of red wine emptied

down the throat’s swiveling street.

Because the music of my footsteps

like notes of ash.

Because he curved like a question mark

puncturing a flap of heaven.

Because litros tucked in brown paper bags,

two packs of Chesterfields a day, 

at the breakfast table, 

on the lip of a balcony.

Because I woke in a shrine   

of my own stickiness.

Because his lips were aperitif.

Because my father kissed his forehead 

outside the mosque,

the taste of rum and rose petals. 

Because oranges bulging in coat pockets.

Because the condom held against the light,

swirling cities of children we would never conceive.

Because it broke,

the cartography of longing pulsed onto soft thigh.

Because the long walk home chaperoned by stray dogs,

the drunk's grief of the Guadalquivir,

blue cough and jasmine rotting in my hair.

Because I passed out in the bar bathroom

and mistook the toilet for my mother's legs.

Because the shard of glass in the singer's throat.

Because he cried when he was happy.

Because the thief looked me in the eyes and didn't take the purse.

Because the petroglyphs of our hands wounded the white walls,

how we made the world small,

siphoning god's breath 

to sweeten the blood-flavored noon.

Related Poems

Prodigal

Copper and ginger, the plentiful
      mass of it bound, half loosed, and
            bound again in lavish

      disregard as though such heaping up
were a thing indifferent, surfeit from
            the table of the gods, who do

            not give a thought to fairness, no,
      who throw their bounty in a single
lap. The chipped enamel—blue—on her nails.

The lashes sticky with sunlight. You would
      swear she hadn’t a thought in her head
            except for her buttermilk waffle and

      its just proportion of jam. But while
she laughs and chews, half singing
            with the lyrics on the radio, half

            shrugging out of her bathrobe in the
      kitchen warmth, she doesn’t quite
complete the last part, one of the

sleeves—as though, you’d swear, she
      couldn’t be bothered—still covers
            her arm. Which means you do not

      see the cuts. Girls of an age—
fifteen for example—still bearing
             the traces of when-they-were-

            new, of when-the-breasts-had-not-
      been-thought-of, when-the-troublesome-
cleft-was-smooth, are anchored

on a faultline, it’s a wonder they
      survive at all. This ginger-haired
            darling isn’t one of my own, if

      own is ever the way to put it, but
I’ve known her since her heart could still
            be seen at work beneath

            the fontanelles. Her skin
      was almost otherworldly, touch
so silken it seemed another kind

of sight, a subtler
      boundary than obtains for all
            the rest of us, though ordinary

      mortals bear some remnant too,
consider the loved one’s fine-
            grained inner arm. And so

            it’s there, from wrist to
      elbow, that she cuts. She takes
her scissors to that perfect page, she’s good,

she isn’t stupid, she can see that we
      who are children of plenty have no
            excuse for suffering we

      should be ashamed and so she is
and so she has produced this many-
            layered hieroglyphic, channels
           
            raw, half healed, reopened
      before the healing gains momentum, she
has taken for her copy-text the very

cogs and wheels of time. And as for
      her other body, says the plainsong
            on the morning news, the hole

      in the ozone, the fish in the sea,
you were thinking what exactly? You
            were thinking a comfortable

            breakfast would help? I think
      I thought we’d deal with that tomorrow.
Then you’ll have to think again.