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.

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.

Related Poems

Assiduously

From a coffee cup’s sweet bitterness into cold wind swept knowing that the place you search and yearn for is nowhere, no street names, no city gate. No degrees nor longitudinal measures to speak of. A compass can be useless when you are lost. Nowhere multiplies in your chest ravenous, like yeast. It hurts. The exact second, your shadow on the pavement. Sometimes your life is a minute ahead and a few days behind the place you want to be. Sometimes things align and you want to tear a piece of the shadow as you would a piece from a loaf of bread. But this place you search has no replicable terrain, no map. It moves as you move. A shapeshifter with a tropic of memory, a tropic of fear, a meridian to decide you can and an equator to know you choose.

[You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior]

You ask me to talk
               about the interior

it was all roadside flowers & grasses
               growing over the cities

was made of wilderness & sky
               with God washed out of it

was the foreign prayer-word
               it was a list of missing persons

was the solid bronze charging
               bull on the famous street

was like the Roman method for making bees

was its taken-down carcass
               & its bed of apple-branches & thyme

was a new anatomy      a beaten hide
               a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids

& the bee born out & the grist of them born
               glistening as coins

it was anthem
               was the listening

the way a searchlight listens over a lake
               it was the prayer-word out of your mouth

your thousand-noun request
               it goes up up to the florescent weather

was hurdle & burn      burning through
               the infinite      your overbright comet

was made of stones      made of berries & plastic & boxtops & eggshells
               it was like the word having reached the ear

& the words pollinated the dark      there was darkness there
                             like the afterhours inside a library

Not Doing Something Wrong Isn't the Same as Doing Something Right

In my defense, my forgotten breasts. In my defense, the hair
no one brushed from my face. In my defense, my hips.

Months earlier, I remember thinking that sex was a ship retreating
on the horizon. I could do nothing but shove my feet in the sand.

I missed all the things loneliness taught me: eyes that follow you
crossing a room, hands that find their home on you. To be noticed, even.

In my defense, his hands. In my defense, his arms. In my defense,
how when we just sat listening to each other breathe, he said, This is enough.

My body was a house I had closed for the winter. It shouldn’t have been
that difficult, empty as it was. Still, I stared hard as I snapped off the lights.

My body was a specter that haunted me, appearing when I stripped
in the bathroom, when I crawled into empty beds, when it rained.

My body was abandoned construction, restoration scaffolding
that became permanent. My body’s unfinished became its finished.

So in my defense, when he touched me, the lights of my body came on.
In my defense, the windows were thrown open. In my defense, spring.