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Intimate Set
So this is an intimate set
Between you and me
So please
Leave your bags at the door
Don't carry what you don't need
Come in, have a seat
Because I want to confess to you
Everything
Right here
Right now
You see it’s a new year
A new sun
El sexto sol
A time of transformation
A new me
A new you
And every moment
A snowflake
So you wanna know a secret?
You’re free to think for yourself here
You’re free to truly be yourself here
You are loved here
Because out there
In the desierto
And all along that Berlin Wall with Mexico
They can tax us
They can discriminate against us
They can deny us an education, ban our literature and our leaders,
Erase our history and our unalienable rights
They can declare war against us
They can invade us
Take us hostage and prisoner
Poison our water our food our land our air
They can even shoot and bomb our babies
Rape us
Sell us
Buy us
Eat us alive
But they cannot and will not have you
And they cannot and will not have me
And they cannot and will not have the love here
Between you and me.
String Theory Relationships
The essential idea is this — the man you love is connected to you
no matter what, but he’s also connected to the woman
down the street with the small dog that barks at the lilacs,
and she’s connected to the cashier at the market who’s a bit rough
with your grapes, but he thinks you’re ten years younger than you are
and he gives you free saltwater taffy and calls you
darling — but he also calls her darling, and her dog
darling, and the man you love along with the grapes.
The essential idea is this — all objects are composed of vibrating anxieties
— everyone wants a window or aisle seat and no one wants to sit
in the middle. Call it deniability. Call it the flashlight you keep
by the door never works in emergencies. We are all connected
by the blast that brought us here, the big bang,
the slam dunk, the heavy petting. We can’t always be pretty.
We can’t always be the eyelash and the wink, sometimes we have to be
the ear, sometimes the mouth. You are and are not the speaker in this story —
you are the bridge connected to the bridge connected to the man
you love and the woman you dislike who teaches spin class. It’s not
personal. It’s not personal when the universe says it’s complicated
and you have ten minutes to understand quantum physics.
When the man you love says there’s a new connection called supersymmetry
and it exists between two fundamentally different types of particles
called bosons and fermions, you hear bosoms and females.
You hear he’s thinking about the spin teacher with the nice breasts
and you burrow deeper. The essential idea is this — someone will always bruise
your grapes and someone will end up in the middle. Someone you love
will break your favorite coffee mug and bring you lilacs. And you
will be connected to people who make your eyes roll.
You’ll be connected to others who stand on the bridge and consider jumping off.
You’ll try to care for them. And you will not look your age, but you will
feel sad when you look in the mirror because we all want to live
a little longer, because the small dog has died and the cashier
has lost his job for stealing saltwater taffy from the bin, but he still calls you darling,
calls everyone darling, and today, darling, darling, darling, the flashlight works.
Orchids are Sprouting From the Floorboards
Orchids are sprouting from the floorboards.
Orchids are gushing out from the faucets.
The cat mews orchids from his mouth.
His whiskers are also orchids.
The grass is sprouting orchids.
It is becoming mostly orchids.
The trees are filled with orchids.
The tire swing is twirling with orchids.
The sunlight on the wet cement is a white orchid.
The car tires leave a trail of orchids.
A bouquet of orchids lifts from its tailpipe.
Teenagers are texting each other pictures
of orchids on their phones, which are also orchids.
Old men in orchid pennyloafers
furiously trade orchids.
Mothers fill bottles with warm orchids
to feed their infants, who are orchids themselves.
Their coos are a kind of orchid.
The clouds are all orchids.
They are raining orchids.
The walls are all orchids,
the teapot is an orchid,
the blank easel is an orchid
and this cold is an orchid. Oh,
Lydia, we miss you terribly.
Prayer
translated by Francisco Aragón
I want a god
as my accomplice
who spends nights
in houses
of ill repute
and gets up late
on Saturdays
a god
who whistles
through the streets
and trembles
before the lips
of his lover
a god
who waits in line
at the entrance
of movie houses
and likes to drink
café au lait
a god
who spits
blood from
tuberculosis and
doesn’t even have
enough for bus fare
a god
knocked
unconscious
by the billy club
of a policeman
at a demonstration
a god
who pisses
out of fear
before the flaring
electrodes
of torture
a god
who hurts
to the last
bone and
bites the air
in pain
a jobless god
a striking god
a hungry god
a fugitive god
an exiled god
an enraged god
a god
who longs
from jail
for a change
in the order
of things
I want a
more godlike
god
Upon a Day, Came Sorrow in to Me
Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Upon a day, came Sorrow in to me,
Saying, ‘I’ve come to stay with thee a while’;
And I perceived that she had ushered Bile
And Pain into my house for company.
Wherefore I said, ‘Go forth – away with thee!’
But like a Greek she answered, full of guile,
And went on arguing in an easy style.
Then, looking, I saw Love come silently,
Habited in black raiment, smooth and new,
Having a black hat set upon his hair;
And certainly the tears he shed were true.
So that I asked, ‘What ails thee, trifler?’
Answering, he said: ‘A grief to be gone through;
For our own lady’s dying, brother dear.’
Teaching My Mother English over the Phone
I try to explain the difference between pant & pants
why the former isn’t simply one pair
but what the lungs do with fear or excitement
why clothe isn’t a singular noun
but what most do to the body each morning
she calls on a Wednesday needs help
with an assignment for her third English
beginners course where she meets twice a week
her classmates from countries with names beautiful as hers
I try to make the language clear to my mother
as she one day —before my English took hold—
explained to me that I did not in fact make friends
with a girl named Sorry:
but we were on the playground and she hit me, fue accidenté,
y me dijo “I’m sorry” & when someone says I am, yo soy—
that’s not how this works I remind her
when she asks if the plural of dust is dusts
she asks me to conjugate love
I love you love he loves she loved
we loved you have loved I am loving
she wants to know how a word can be both
a thing and an action like war & mistake
although I can’t put into words in Spanish
how I know the difference so I tell her I have to go
and I go & she goes & I haven’t taught her
anything & for that I am sorry to no one but myself
Caged Bird
A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
The Mothering Blackness
She came home running
back to the mothering blackness
deep in the smothering blackness
white tears icicle gold plains of her face
She came home running
She came down creeping
here to the black arms waiting
now to the warm heart waiting
rime of alien dreams befrosts her rich brown face
She came down creeping
She came home blameless
black yet as Hagar’s daughter
tall as was Sheba’s daughter
threats of northern winds die on the desert’s face
She came home blameless
gathering words
para mami
One day I will write you a letter
after I have gathered enough words
I have heard
pop! pop! pop!
like little soap bubbles escaping
the animated mouths
of the women who share
pieces of gossip like bombones
in la lavandería every Sunday
One day I will write you a letter
after I have gathered enough words
that blossom without thorns
in painted mouths, in someone else’s countries…
In my corner, I listen to how voices ring
without the sting of bofetadas
and how they undulate above
gushing water and swirling clothes
in machines that vibrate in la lavandería
One day, I will write you a letter
after I have gathered enough words
and enough courage
to let them ring in my mute dreams
until they sing to me: Write us. Así.
In your childhood tongue. Recóbranos. Recover us.
At that time, I will be able to return without fear
to la lavandería with my bags of clothes
and enough words and surrender myself to the bubbles.
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
The Average
His peasant parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil
For any of those smart professions which
Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.
The pressure of their fond ambition made
Their shy and country-loving child afraid
No sensible career was good enough,
Only a hero could deserve such love.
So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town;
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;
The silence roared displeasure: looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the Exceptional, and ran.
Everything will hurt for a while
And the lie is that I survived because parts of me didn’t.
So take all the sorrow you can carry,
like my mother’s cabinets of Slim Fast
and Little Debbies and the weight
we would never lose, how we stood
in front of mirrors and men
hoping one would change our minds
and neither did. Look, here, in her letters
and their cursive of longing: Baby, survive this.
Listen, I was only sixteen and drunk
on wine coolers and teenage invincibility,
limp over a stranger’s bathtub, I was lifted
lifted into a bedroom and birdsong
erupted in the delirious morning light.
Her letters sigh, You’ve lost too much weight.
Your dad is starting to worry. Her letters remind
me it could’ve been worse. When I told her what
happened she asked, Was he cute?
None of us got what we deserved.
Holiday Wish
No snow. A little fog. The afternoon
is a few short hours and evening falls.
But look how the sun hangs down
its old rope good for one more pull.
Look at the latticework of leaves
in the stricken ash, golden in the gray,
like coins in a purse or notes from some old hymn.
I hope my friends are warm this day.
I hope the ones I love, will always love—
the one gone far away, the two sweet
souls holding hands near the end,
humming through a feverish night,
the ones whose needs I cannot guess
or have no needs this lucky day
on earth—I hope for them, for all of us,
a little peace, a touch of hope, another day
come round with easy light. So quiet now.
So still. A flake of snow, then two.
I hope you hear a bell from far away
begin to peal. This bell I pull for you.
Epistemology
Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Future Legend
And in the death,
As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy
Thoroughfare,
The shutters lifted in inches in Temperance Building,
High on Poacher's Hill.
And red, mutant, eyes gaze down on Hunger City.
No more big wheels.
Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats,
And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes,
Coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers,
Like packs of dogs assaulting the glass fronts of Love-Me Avenue.
Ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny silver fox, now leg-warmers.
Family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald.
Any day now,
The year of the Diamond Dogs.
"This ain't Rock'n'Roll,
This is Genocide."
a song in the front yard
I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.
I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.
They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine
How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).
But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.
And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.
We Real Cool
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
The Microscopes
Heavy and expensive, hard and black
With bits of chrome, they looked
Like baby cannons, the real children of war, and I
Hated them for that, for what our teacher said
They could do, and then I hated them
For what they did when we gave up
Stealing looks at one another's bodies
To press a left or right eye into the barrel and see
Our actual selves taken down to a cell
Then blown back up again, every atomic thing
About a piece of my coiled hair on one slide
Just as unimportant as anyone else's
Growing in that science
Class where I learned what little difference
God saw if God saw me. It was the start of one fear,
A puny one not much worth mentioning,
Narrow as the pencil tucked behind my ear, lost
When I reached for it
To stab someone I secretly loved: a bigger boy
Who'd advance
Through those tight, locker-lined corridors shoving
Without saying
Excuse me, more an insult than a battle. No large loss.
Not at all. Nothing necessary to study
Or recall. No fighting in the hall
On the way to an American history exam
I almost passed. Redcoats.
Red blood cells. Red-bricked
Education I rode the bus to get. I can't remember
The exact date or
Grade, but I know when I began ignoring slight alarms
That move others to charge or retreat. I'm a kind
of camouflage. I never let on when scared
of conflicts so old they seem to amount
To nothing really-dust particles left behind
Like the viral geography of an occupied territory,
A region I imagine you imagine when you see
A white woman walking with a speck like me.
She Walks in Beauty
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Hammond B3 Organ Cistern
The days I don’t want to kill myself
are extraordinary. Deep bass. All the people
in the streets waiting for their high fives
and leaping, I mean leaping,
when they see me. I am the sun-filled
god of love. Or at least an optimistic
under-secretary. There should be a word for it.
The days you wake up and do not want
to slit your throat. Money in the bank.
Enough for an iced green tea every weekday
and Saturday and Sunday! It’s like being
in the armpit of a Hammond B3 organ.
Just reeks of gratitude and funk.
The funk of ages. I am not going to ruin
my love’s life today. It’s like the time I said yes
to gray sneakers but then the salesman said
Wait. And there, out of the back room,
like the bakery’s first biscuits: bright-blue kicks.
Iridescent. Like a scarab! Oh, who am I kidding,
it was nothing like a scarab! It was like
bright. blue. fucking. sneakers! I did not
want to die that day. Oh, my God.
Why don’t we talk about it? How good it feels.
And if you don’t know then you’re lucky
but also you poor thing. Bring the band out on the stoop.
Let the whole neighborhood hear. Come on, Everybody.
Say it with me nice and slow
no pills no cliff no brains onthe floor
Bring the bass back. no rope no hose not today, Satan.
Every day I wake up with my good fortune
and news of my demise. Don’t keep it from me.
Why don’t we have a name for it?
Bring the bass back. Bring the band out on the stoop.
Hallelujah!
My partner wants me to write them a poem about Sheryl Crow
but all I want to do is marry them on a beach
that refuses to take itself too seriously.
So much of our lives has been serious.
Over time, I’ve learned that love is most astonishing
when it persists after learning where we come from.
When I bring my partner to my childhood home
it is all bullets and needles and trash bags held
at arm’s length. It is my estranged father’s damp
bed of cardboard and cigar boxes filled
with gauze and tarnished spoons. It is hard
to clean a home, but it is harder to clean
the memory of it. When I was young, my
father would light lavender candles and shoot
up. Now, my partner and I light a fire that will
burn all traces of the family that lived here.
Black plastic smoke curdles up, and loose bullets
discharge in the flames. My partner holds
my hand as gunfire rings through
the birch trees. Though this is almost
beautiful, it is not. And if I’m being honest,
my partner and I spend most of our time
on earth feeding one another citrus fruits
and enough strength to go on. Every morning
I pack them half a grapefruit and some sugar.
And they tell me it’s just sweet enough.
Painted
Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn
To my craft I’m attentive, and I love it.
But today I’m discouraged by the slow pace of the work.
My mood depends upon the day. It looks
increasingly dark. Constantly windy and raining.
What I long for is to see, and not to speak.
In this painting, now, I’m gazing at
a lovely boy who’s lain down near a spring;
it could be that he’s worn himself out from running.
What a lovely boy; what a divine afternoon
has caught him and put him to sleep.–
Like this, for some time, I sit and gaze
And once again, in art, I recover from creating it.
My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death
She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said, Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a market fish. And now, she dropped like laundry on the bed.
The furniture moved toward her, the kitchen knives and spoons, the vibrating spoons—they dragged the tablecloth, the corner tilting in, her mouth a sinkhole. She wanted all of it: the house and the car too, and the flowers she planted, narcissus and hoa mai, which cracked open each spring—the sky, she brought it low until the air was hot and wet and broke into a rain—
the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn’t. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings. I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin.
Frame
There is a door to the right of the woman and a door behind her. Here: a woman made of doors, who stands on the borders between rooms and is still a woman. When children smile into picture books, they are looking through a series of windows that ends in a pastel wall.The woman named her first daughter after the space between the walls the day she learned to fit. She named her daughter January. She named her second daughter after the distance between an eye and a picture book lying open on the other side of a glass door. She named her second daughter Never. This isn’t true. The woman named her daughters after grandmothers long dust, as a means of hoping they would become hallways between rooms, or at least the hollow knock that hints of secrets in the walls. The daughters named their mother after the light smiling through the bottom crack of a door.The woman named herself after the way a girl, sitting in a door frame, looks pretty enough to hang in a museum.
homage to my hips
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
wishes for sons
i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.
i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.
later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.
let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.
Oil & Steel
My father lived in a dirty dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead," he would say, an anti-preacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil—my inheritance.
Once, I saw him weep in a courtroom—
neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful.
Wanda Why Aren't You Dead
wanda when are you gonna wear your hair down
wanda. that's a whore's name
wanda why ain't you rich
wanda you know no man in his right mind want a
ready-made family
why don't you lose weight
wanda why are you so angry
how come your feet are so goddamn big
can't you afford to move out of this hell hole
if i were you were you were you
wanda what is it like being black
i hear you don't like black men
tell me you're ac/dc. tell me you're a nympho. tell me you're
into chains
wanda i don't think you really mean that
you're joking. girl, you crazy
wanda what makes you so angry
wanda i think you need this
wanda you have no humor in you you too serious
wanda i didn't know i was hurting you
that was an accident
wanda i know what you're thinking
wanda i don't think they'll take that off of you
wanda why are you so angry
i'm sorry i didn't remember that that that
that that that was so important to you
wanda you're ALWAYS on the attack
wanda wanda wanda i wonder
why ain't you dead
On Turning Ten
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
‘Lights Out!’
I wonder often about what goes through the mind of the first-time offender, when the lights go out. The thoughts of more than one sunset, or sunrise, witnessed on the wrong side of cinderblocks and bars? What happens in the thoughts, in the wrestling with sheets and eyelids to not be the first to sleep? What is the reaction to the sounds and scratches in the sheets, in the air, in the wind, the noise nobody can stop when everything is metal and stone? At what point does one mouth the words, or give birth to the wish of wanting to go home? What is the “fresh fish” experience like? Although I cannot say I’ve been there, I’ve witnessed the gloss of fear and unpredictability. The killing of that not-so-curious cat, the deer in the headlights, the wanderer on the pod, the one stuck in a corner. I’ve seen them all, taught them. I feel for those, no matter the offense, who have to realize their situation with time served cold.
the great advantage of being alive
the great advantage of being alive
(instead of undying)is not so much
that mind no more can disprove than prove
what heart may feel and soul may touch
— the great (my darling)happens to be
that love are in we, that love are in we
and here is a secret they never will share for whom create is less than have
or one times one than when times where —
that we are in love,that we are in love:
with us they’ve nothing times nothing to do
(for love are in we am in i are in you)
this world(as timorous itsters all
to call their cowardice quite agree)
shall never discover our touch and feel
–for love are in we are in love are in we;
for you are and i am and we are(above
and under all possible worlds)in love
a billion brains may coax undeath
from fancied fact and spaceful time–
no heart can leap,no soul can breathe
but by the sizeless truth of a dream
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.
For love are in you am in i are in we
The Recital
with lyrics from “One, Two Step” by Ciara and Missy Elliot
Baby Phat coat a feather-stuffed
fist around my shoulders, I shuffle
onto the playground ready to
fight. I’ve clawed months of mornings
out of my mother’s calendar to reach
today: my official tryout for the Cool
Black Girls of 4th grade.
Legend has it their gossip turns
to gloss on they lips. Legend has it they can
suspend you with a look. The glitter-clique
has a simple audition: memorize Missy and Ciara’s slick
anthem for us and spit it like I got beef
with the devil himself. My first
lesson in what ferocity means to girls
with our sunset skin. I wouldn’t call it courage,
what nudges my hand-me-down Nikes
anxious across the blacktop. Instead, I name it
what we name the wolf’s instinct to bind to its pack.
This beat is automatic.
Who can call us prey
when we fang like this?
Side-eyes so box-cutter sharp
no white boy has talked to Saniyah in months.
Supersonic, hypnotic Everybody at recess know
she lying about having a knife. But there are some truths
you don’t let off the leash. Like how our mothers send us
to school without popping the bubblegum
dream that any of this will protect us.
That there isn’t a world of things that want us
dead that we can’t even pronounce yet. But I’m here,
in the midst of this black girl blood recital,
hoping to make the cut for safety. Deja don’t
think I got what it takes. Asks why I don’t have
the mandatory crush on Usher. And all I can think
of is the way her eyes catch the light. Here I was
thinking this club, this little swingset secret, was for black girls
that love black girls for life. That wanted to hold
a hand just as soft as theirs and know every good
shade of forever. I tell Deja I would follow her lip gloss
anywhere if she’d let me. But there are certain truths
you don’t let off the leash. Deja suck her teeth.
Tells me her mom said princesses don't
marry each other and I become the swingset beneath her.
Hold her every afternoon until she decides
she’s outgrown that kind of freedom.
It don't take long for my chances
of friendship to rust in the rain between us.
When I tell this story, I always say
I pushed her off the swings.
Once All the Hounds Had Been Called Home
When the grapevine had thinned
but not broken & the worst was yet to come
of winter snow, I tracked my treed heart
to the high boughs of a quaking
aspen & shot it down.
If love comes fast,
let her be a bullet & not a barking dog;
let my heart say, as that trigger’s pulled,
Are all wonders small? Otherwise, let love
be a woman of gunpowder
& lead; let her
arrive a brass angel, a dark powdered comet
whose mercy is dense as the fishing sinker
that pulleys the moon, even when it is heavy
with milk. I shot my heart
& turned myself in
to wild kindness, left the road to my coffin
that seemed also to include my carrying it & walked
back along the trampled brush I remembered
only as a blur of hot breath & a howling in my chest.
Why I Hate Raisins
And is it only the mouth and belly which are
injured by hunger and thirst?
-Mencius
Love is a pound of sticky raisins
packed tight in black and white
government boxes the day we had no
groceries. I told my mom I was hungry.
She gave me the whole bright box.
USDA stamped like a fist on the side.
I ate them all in ten minutes. Ate
too many too fast. It wasn’t long
before those old grapes set like black
clay at the bottom of my belly
making it ache and swell.
I complained, I hate raisins.
I just wanted a sandwich like other kids.
Well that’s all we’ve got, my mom sighed.
And what other kids?
Everyone but me, I told her.
She said, You mean the white kids.
You want to be a white kid?
Well too bad ’cause you’re my kid.
I cried, At least the white kids get a sandwich.
At least the white kids don’t get the shits.
That’s when she slapped me. Left me
holding my mouth and stomach—
devoured by shame.
I still hate raisins,
but not for the crooked commodity lines
we stood in to get them—winding
around and in the tribal gymnasium.
Not for the awkward cardboard boxes
we carried them home in. Not for the shits
or how they distended my belly.
I hate raisins because now I know
my mom was hungry that day, too,
and I ate all the raisins.
‘Faith’ is a fine invention
“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!
This World is not Conclusion
This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond -
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -
It beckons, and it baffles -
Philosophy, dont know -
And through a Riddle, at the last -
Sagacity, must go -
To guess it, puzzles scholars -
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown -
Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -
Blushes, if any see -
Plucks at a twig of Evidence -
And asks a Vane, the way -
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -
Strong Hallelujahs roll -
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul -
Excerpt From “Season of Beginning and End"
Shall we begin at zero point?
What harm in that?
The season of creation begins in the
season of nothingness:
the arduous climb
is the beginning of the end.
yasmeen
i was born i was planted
the rupture the root where land became ocean became land anew
i split from my parallel self i split from its shape refusing root in my fallow mouth
the girl i also could have been cleaving my life neatly
& her name / easy / i know the story & my name / taken from a dead woman
all her life / my mother wanted to remember / to fill an aperture with
a girl named for a flower cut jasmine in a bowl
whose oil scents all our longing
our mothers / our mothers’
petals wrung wilting
for their perfume garlands hanging from our necks
Advice to Myself
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic–decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
Personal Statement
I don’t believe I was born, maybe emerged
from a soupy formation of gays
and other beautiful things instead. I’ve gone
on and on telling you all about how I
created myself, took a photograph of what
I was given, tore it up, set it on fire, inhaled
its smoke and grew twenty times my size.
All of this has been said. Today I want to make
this space my own and project my light through
every surface. I think by now I’ve earned this—
what with the breathing exercises just to leave
the house, and the hyper-awareness of every blade
of grass’s movement, and the drinking, and the
getting high each night to stave off the nightmares.
You know, just girly things. So here’s what you need
to know—any time I’m doing something I’m doing
something I’m afraid of. This makes each experience
seem new and old at the same time. I’m always like
I don’t give a fuck when in reality I am literally
going to die from how much of a fuck I give. Also
I’m a witch and I get all my powers from the wind.
Wow. Aren’t I special? Don’t you want to love me
with all of your heart for the next ten seconds?
Don’t you want to rescue me
from all the things that make you feel safe?
Excerpt From “I Am Waiting”
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
Spanish Midterm
We gather in a park, four of us each
with forties in hand, among the spray-
painted tree trunks, our voices strained
against the nearby 710 freeway. Jacob
and Romeo, home from deployment,
recount stories of near death in the darkness
of another world I can only imagine. Jorge,
a father in high school, tells us how last
night, over the phone, his girlfriend told
him he would be a father again and wanted
then, to say to her that she had dialed
the wrong number or hang up, because
he says, he may be too much a coward
to be twice a father at only twenty-one.
I have nothing to offer. Instead, I talk
of days in high school when we ditched
fifth period English and drove to Pedro
with pounds of carne asada and twelve
packs of Coronas, days when we knew
little except the city in which we lived.
As we drink, drink more, drink again,
I watch a dark hush begin to fill the 710,
fill the trees, watch it crawl over countless
cigarette butts, the tossed bottle of Cuervo,
the failed Spanish midterm resting beside
my foot, an exam some student dropped
on purpose, I suppose, because of the red
“F” on top, written with a carelessness
I can remember clearly because I too
have failed. Today, here with old friends
whose faces I barely recognize in the dim
light of dusk, I am filled with a darkness,
a desire, really, I suppose fills all four of us:
to carelessly, effortlessly, as if it were that
easy to abandon all our failures on the floor.
Stampede
You don’t know this horse.
What you love most doesn’t
Have a name and runs wild.
Ridden with guilt, you slept
in a field, naked and hungry,
committed to memory the cold
how it sunk its teeth into your
body one mouthful at a time.
That night all the small animals
you’d buried came alive. You
told yourself, don’t be afraid.
I am no longer that man. Laid
your head on the dirt and watched
the grass trill, heard the beating
In your chest for the first time:
the beasts starting to stampede.
The Sleeping Pig
It is easy to love a pig in a nightgown.
See how he sleeps, white flannel
straining his neck at the neckhole.
His body swells and then deflates.
The gown is nothing to be ashamed of, only
the white clay of moonlight smeared
over his hulk, original clothing, the milk
of his loneliness. The flickering candle
of a dream moves his warty eyelids.
All sleeping things are children
In Dispraise Of Poetry
When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Kidnap Poem
ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see
play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were
a poet i'd kid
nap you
Let Birds
Eight deer on the slope
in the summer morning mist.
The night sky blue.
Me like a mare let out to pasture.
The Tao does not console me.
I was given the Way
in the milk of childhood.
Breathing it waking and sleeping.
But now there is no amazing smell
of sperm on my thighs,
no spreading it on my stomach
to show pleasure.
I will never give up longing.
I will let my hair stay long.
The rain proclaims these trees,
the trees tell of the sun.
Let birds, let birds.
Let leaf be passion.
Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be
between us. Let joy.
Let entering. Let rage and calm join.
Let quail come.
Let winter impress you. Let spring.
Allow the ocean to wake in you.
Let the mare in the field
in the summer morning mist
make you whinny. Make you come
to the fence and whinny. Let birds.
Excerpt from "She Had Some Horses"
I. She Had Some Horses
She had some horses.
She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.
She had some horses.
She had horses with eyes of trains.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.
She had some horses.
She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.
She had some horses.
She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.
She had some horses.
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
2pac Couplets
one line for each year he lived
ninety six minutes after tyson wins and you’re gone
las vegas quickly strips you of your last song
every black man in nevada pilgrims to trudge you
walk last rites, as only god can judge you
nomad, you baltimore, you new york, you l.a.
captured only by wind, a consummate stray
west coast makes you ours. claims you loudest
you gave game for free, we recoup it proudest
don’t want no producers dancing in our videos
named our first borns after brenda’s embryo
your dear mama, eschews her crackfiend fame
afeni becomes household, recognized name
the people used to clown when you came around
with the underground mimic and savior your sound
mark your ink, the lives of thugs on their stomachs
their bottoms, their rolling twenties, their hunneds
your words so sacrament so memorized so litmus
test and testament so wretched so generous
never knew malcolm as machiavellian text, hence
you vexed and cursing: our black and shining prince
our sweetest thing, our prism and its light
lynched by bullet, won’t survive the knight
now your blood spills and the people crowd around
just one question:
r u
still
Down
Suicide's Note
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
Excerpt from "Bigger Than Life"
No I don't want your love, it’s not why I make music
I owe myself, I told myself back then that I would do this
And I always look so out of reach, and just seem so confusing
That I felt my place in life, a young black man it seems so useless
But I don’t want no help, just let me suffer through this
The world would not know Jesus Christ if there was never Judas
This knife that's in my back will be the truth that introduced us
And the distance in between us is the proof of my conclusion
Life is what you make it, I hope you make a movement
Hope your opportunity survives the opportunist
Hopin' as you walk across the sand, you see my shoe print
And you follow 'til it change your life, it’s all an evolution
And I hope you find your passion 'cause I found mine in this music
But I hope it’s not material 'cause that’s all an illusion
And they all in collusion / This racist institution, double standard
Actin' like they not the reason we ruthless
Ode to my Uni-brow
Perhaps it is not pronounced enough to easily notice,
at least from a distance, but praise be to the hairs
populating the Bering Straight, or more accurately
crossing the Mediterranean — bridge like cedar planks
with black nails, bridge like the boat
my jido came here in, bridge to Dearborn,
Michigan. The hairs stand up like spines, like each
is a monument over the bridge
of my nose. Since high school I used to keep the middle
trimmed, used clippers to separate such striving
for togetherness, in the name of neatness, I told myself,
though how so many of us have tried to pass, and true —
that is a form of survival but this now also
a form of thriving, of what refuses to be cut down
any longer, so praise be to the hairiness my Lebanese
family shares, praise be to owning what may keep
the TSA’s eyes on us, though god-willing not their hands
(and fuck the TSA, while we’re at it), and praise be
to pride and to the Muslim man at the gas station
who asks if I am Muslim, too, and though I am not, praise
to being seen as a brother (and to the beard
and back and knuckle hair, while we’re at it) —
an oak with so many of its leaves
refusing to enter another shaven autumn,
a cedar holding tight to all its needles.
We Lived Happily During the War
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
In Vain
The stars in the sky
In vain
The tragedy of Hamlet
In vain
The key in the lock
In vain
The sleeping mother
In vain
The lamp in the corner
In vain
The lamp in the corner unlit
In vain
Abraham Lincoln
In vain
The Aztec empire
In vain
The writing hand: in vain
(The shoetrees in the shoes
In vain
The windowshade string upon
the hand bible
In vain—
The glitter of the greenglass
ashtray
In vain
The bear in the woods
In vain
The Life of Buddha
In vain)
Monologue for an Onion
I don’t mean to make you cry.
I mean nothing, but this has not kept you
From peeling away my body, layer by layer,
The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills
With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit.
Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.
Hunt all you want. Beneath each skin of mine
Lies another skin: I am pure onion–pure union
Of outside and in, surface and secret core.
Look at you, chopping and weeping. Idiot.
Is this the way you go through life, your mind
A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy of truth,
Of lasting union--slashing away skin after skin
From things, ruin and tears your only signs
Of progress? Enough is enough.
You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed
Through veils. How else can it be seen?
How will you rip away the veil of the eye, the veil
That you are, you who want to grasp the heart
Of things, hungry to know where meaning
Lies. Taste what you hold in your hands: onion-juice,
Yellow peels, my stinging shreds. You are the one
In pieces. Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to
You changed yourself: you are not who you are,
Your soul cut moment to moment by a blade
Of fresh desire, the ground sown with abandoned skins.
And at your inmost circle, what? A core that is
Not one. Poor fool, you are divided at the heart,
Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love,
A heart that will one day beat you to death.
Trust the Hours (Wait)
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
Haiku (1)
Eastern guard tower
glints in sunset; convicts rest
like lizards on rocks.
Facing It
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
Told You So
When my daughter spills her orange juice, I wipe it off the linoleum
with the old plaid boxers of the man I thought I’d marry.
Elastic ripped out, seams unraveling—I’ve had lives
already. At night they crawl across
my skin before I can turn on the light.
We spend all these years wanting, and then one day—sudden
as a lamp set to a timer—we have.
There were the nights I drank just so I could feel a little
more of my own unhappiness. Now, with my feet pressed
into this rug, I’ll never be that drunk again.
Before I went to the clinic to get pregnant, I cried onto the shoulder
of an old flame, worried that whoever I loved next would never know
my body when it was beautiful.
How could I have been wrong about so many things?
The Start Of The Free And Natural
Dear friend you have a problem and it’s called yourself
Dear self you have a problem and it’s called yourself
Dear swamp demon you stole from me
Dear sky you have a night
The stars they go
Dear sun you have a problem and it’s the light
Dear night you have a problem
I can’t see anyone except the red music box
Dear love you see too much
I went to the wooden lake
I saw the wooden people
I took one out
It was a boy
It was wood and did not breathe
It had its wood hair grain
In a static wave
I breathed life into it
Its eyelids finally swung open
I told it it was once a tree
I laid it down I picked it up
Out its eyes came the clear liquid
But not tears, just humor
Just plastic utterances
Out its mouth came the words
But it wasn’t alive yet
The stars in its absence, X-ed out
The middle sun, it shone
But only for me
Out your sink the bitter flowers
Oh, they have bloomed in the sewer
And the sewer flowers are jealous
Of what of what
How dare you ask
Obviously
The air
The Gift
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Zapotec Crossers (or, Haiku I Write Post-PTSD Nightmares)
i
Waves smack the body,
Nayeli, seven, drowning.
Spring: crossing season.
ii
Summer indicates
the migration will be “safe.”
Yej Susen, three, sprints.
iii
Inda Jani, one,
knows to crawl under the fence —
she was trained all fall.
iv
At four ai-em, Yao,
twelve, is sewn inside car seat;
winter will protect.
v
Itzel, five, plays dead.
Border patrol agents see
her body — they leave.
Excerpt From “Le Desert”
But evening comes, evening with its magic, and we
Let ourselves be charmed all over again….
It is the delicate and charming moment in the dying
Light that is no longer day, but not yet night
Citizenship
I am afraid
of what I mean by loyalty.
A down ass bitch.
I’d ride to the grave for love
but what of where I made country
of the place I live my possible death plot?
I wring my birth certificate of
what will bury me in due time.
what will come to the door
asking of my allegiance?
In times of war I lack metaphor
War can be defined as
everyone fucking up my money,
institutions & individuals alike
If I love you
I have threatened someone in your name.
I’m from America, blame my blood for the coming blood.
Blame my murder & assault on someone’s tame renaming
& still am I even from here?
Would I make myself violent in the name of a nation?
Yes.
I would kill for my mother.
Philosophy of Life
Whoever thinks life a heavy burden
Is himself life’s heavy burden.
Enjoy then the morning as long as it lasts,
Fear not its loss before it is lost.
Oh you complain when nothing ails you
Be beautiful and you will see the world
To be beautiful
Occidentalism
A man celebrates erstwhile conquests,
his book locked in a silo, still in print.
I scribble, make Sharpie lines, deface
its text like it defaces me. Outside, grain
fields whisper. Marble lions are silent
yet silver-tongued, with excellent teeth.
In this life I have worshipped so many lies.
Then I workshop them, make them better.
An East India Company, an opium trade,
a war, a treaty, a concession, an occupation,
a man parting the veil covering a woman’s
face, his nails prying her lips open. I love
the fragility of a porcelain bowl. How easy
it is, to shatter chinoiserie, like the Han
dynasty urn Ai Weiwei dropped in 1995.
If only recovering the silenced history
is as simple as smashing its container: book,
bowl, celadon spoon. Such objects cross
borders the way our bodies never could.
Instead, we’re left with history, its blonde
dust. That bowl is unbreakable. All its ghosts
still shudder through us like small breaths.
The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates
in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day,
a girl like me may come across it on a shelf,
pick it up, read about all the ways her body
is a thing. And I won’t be there to protect
her, to cross the text out and say: go ahead—
rewrite this.
Scientifically Speaking
There have
been exciting
discoveries
in the field
of me.
Many
of which,
I have
made
myself.
Excerpt From “Keeper of the Light”
My job doesn’t start till the sun drops
to its knees and fires pink arrows into the bellies
of clouds. Only then, do I climb the two hundred stairs,
spiraling up through the guts of the tower,
that from a distance in daylight looks like a brick telescope
wedged into the ground. Only then, do I load the lamp
with whale oil, and trim the wick so it burns evenly
like a red beard across a pirate’s face. Only then, do I scrub
the layer of carbon off the reflectors and adjust
the Fresnel lens, which is like a lampshade made out of shards
of an expensive mirror, harnessing the many stems of light
into a bouquet to be hurled out, in three second intervals.
Only then do I turn the shortwave to the chatter
of ships. Only then, binoculars around my neck,
do I slide open the door and walk the rail,
a salty breeze curling through my pores, as I comb
the dark waves with my eyes. Flag whipping
overhead. Thunder cooking up in clouds.
Then the voices start rumbling in. I read you
thirteen year-old girl pinned down by your friend’s
nineteen year-old brother in a basement and excavated
as your favorite Crosby, Stills and Nash song
plays cruelly over the speakers. I read you housewife
with a crushed starfish in your belly, clutching
a wine glass like a buoy. I cannot promise
help is on the way, but I read you high school senior
razor marks ricocheting up your forearm. I read you
husband watching school after school of naughty minnows
swim across the screen of your smart phone, as the rain gathers
around your ankles in the matrimonial rowboat. I read you
twenty year-old girl, smearing kerosene over your breasts,
like baby oil, a carousel of men assembling, jerking up
and down, like warped horses on a misery-go-round. I read you
friend from childhood, counting the petals of a daisy, I kill me,
I kill me not. I read you dockworker, wandering
the corridors under the ocean’s surface,
stuffing your unemployment check into the belly button
of a slot machine. I read you sixteen year-old girl,
getting jabbed with the t in the word slut
as you tremble on the train platform and lean back
into the broad metal arms of eternity. I read you
and chart your coordinates. Note your howls. And no,
I cannot save you, or bring supplies—just sit inside
this giant candle and fling thimbles of light
in your direction, whispering, I hear you, hold tight.
The White City
I will not toy with it nor bend an inch.
Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch
I bear it nobly as I live my part.
My being would be a skeleton, a shell,
If this dark Passion that fills my every mood,
And makes my heaven in the white world's hell,
Did not forever feed me vital blood.
I see the mighty city through a mist--
The strident trains that speed the goaded mass,
The poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed,
The fortressed port through which the great ships pass,
The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate,
Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Excerpt From “Paradise Lost” Book IV
As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A Shape within the wat’ry gleam appeerd
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love; there I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me, ‘What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair creature is thyself,
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming, and thy soft embraces, he
Whose image thou art, him thou shall enjoy
Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear
Multitudes like thyself, and thence be call'd
Mother of human Race:’ what could I do,
But follow straight, invisibly thus led?
Till I espied thee, fair indeed and tall,
Under a platan, yet methought less fair,
Less winning soft, less amiably mild,
Then that smooth watry image; back I turned,
Thou following cried'st aloud, ‘Return fair Eve,
Whom fli'st thou? whom thou fli'st, of him thou art,
His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent
Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart
Substantial Life, to have thee by my side
Henceforth an individual solace dear;
Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half:’ with that thy gentle hand
Seized mine, I yielded, and from that time see
How beauty is excelled by manly grace
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.
Song of the Open Road
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
Don't Go Far Off
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance
Breathe deep even if it means you wrinkle
your nose from the fake-lemon antiseptic
of the mopped floors and wiped-down
doorknobs. The freshly soaped necks
and armpits. Your teacher means well,
even if he butchers your name like
he has a bloody sausage casing stuck
between his teeth, handprints
on his white, sloppy apron. And when
everyone turns around to check out
your face, no need to flush red and warm.
Just picture all the eyes as if your classroom
is one big scallop with its dozens of icy blues
and you will remember that winter your family
took you to the China Sea and you sank
your face in it to gaze at baby clams and sea stars
the size of your outstretched hand. And when
all those necks start to crane, try not to forget
someone once lathered their bodies, once patted them
dry with a fluffy towel after a bath, set out their clothes
for the first day of school. Think of their pencil cases
from third grade, full of sharp pencils, a pink pearl eraser.
Think of their handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade.
Staying Quiet
Once, a man named a thing beautiful & so we wore it,
buried it, turned it into currency. Somewhere, maybe here, maybe now,
I stand completely still until he looks in my direction. Sometimes I don’t
believe I exist until someone calls me beautiful. Sometimes
any warm thing will do. Sometimes it’s me, a warm thing in the low
light. Beautiful is what the man called me after he did
what he wanted with — I’m running out of ways to describe it
— my body, my silence. Beautiful. Why, I ask, in order to love
yourself must you, first, be loved? A bone sucked clean
of its marrow. A trail of ants magnified into ash. & of course,
I’m asking no one. & of course, I know the answer.
Of course, I know it’s not me they’re looking for, the men, I mean.
& I wished he didn’t feel the need to speak, really wished — like me
— he just kept quiet, but no, he had to speak, he had to say beautiful —
& now, goddamnit, my body appears, trapped in the long tunnel
of a telescope. & now I am here attending the aftermath
of my own ruin, with nothing but beautiful to keep me company.
Maybe he meant the city beyond the window.
Maybe he was talking to himself. Maybe beautiful, as in good job,
as in look what I just did with my own two hands.
Mixed Media
The stars grow lemon
in the field, spread
like tea leaves in
a cup; red-wing
blackbirds fold themselves
into the fence,
corn dreamers.
The sky undulating
with clouds returns
gold-throated arpeggios
to the one walking
at sunrise, sunfall.
Light as the air
I sit on my
cottage steps;
a tom cat come
home to die for
the day.
Risk
And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.
(citizen) (illegal)
Mexican woman (illegal) and Mexican man (illegal)
Have a Mexican (illegal)-American (citizen).
is the baby more Mexican or American?
place the baby in the arms of the mother (illegal).
if the mother holds the baby (citizen)
too long, does the baby become illegal?
the baby is a boy (citizen). he goes to school (citizen).
his classmates are American (citizen). He is outcast (illegal).
his “hellos” are in the wrong language (illegal).
he takes the hyphen separating loneliness (Mexican)
from friendship (American) and jabs it at the culprit (illegal).
himself (illegal). his own traitorous tongue (illegal).
his name (illegal). his mom (illegal). his dad (illegal).
take a Mexican woman (illegal) and a Mexican man (illegal).
if they have a baby and the baby looks white enough to pass (citizen).
if the baby grows up singing Selena songs to his reflection (illegal).
if the baby hides from el cucuy and la migra (illegal).
if the baby (illegal) (citizen) grows up to speak broken Spanish (illegal)
and perfect English (citizen). if the boy’s nickname is Güerito (citizen).
if the boy attends college (citizen). if the boy only dates women (illegal)
of color (illegal). If the boy (illegal)
uses phrases like “women of color” (citizen).
if the boy (illegal) (citizen) writes (illegal) poems (illegal).
if the boy (citizen) (illegal) grows up (illegal) and can only write (illegal)
this story in English (citizen), does that make him more
American (citizen) or Mexican (illegal)?
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz
You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.
Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
for children walking to school?
Those same children
also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing
on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs
as they eat at McDonalds.
They shouldn’t have to stop
to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might
reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,
I had one student
who opened a door and died.
It was the front
door to his house, but
it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written
any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old
and was aiming
at someone else. But
a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn't
distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,
and how was the bullet
supposed to know this
child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment
because his friend
was outside and screaming
for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who
opened a door and died?
That’s wrong.
There were many.
The classroom of grief
had far more seats
than the classroom for math
though every student
in the classroom for math
could count the names
of the dead.
A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,
nor could the gun, because
“guns don't kill people,” they don't
have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose
or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t
have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how
we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be,
and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside
each of them. Today,
there’s another
shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school,
a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world
is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save,
you may open a door
and enter
a meadow, or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be
mourned, then buried
in rhetoric.
There will be
monuments of legislation,
little flowers made
from red tape.
What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close
like a door above you.
What should we do?
And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,
the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.
Arms and the Boy
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
On the Steps of the Jefferson Memorial
We invent our gods
the way the Greeks did,
in our own image– but magnified.
Athena, the very mother of wisdom,
squabbled with Poseidon
like any human sibling
until their furious tempers
made the sea writhe.
Zeus wore a crown
of lightning bolts one minute,
a cloak of feathers the next,
as driven by earthly lust
he prepared to swoop
down on Leda.
Despite their power,
frailty ran through them
like the darker veins
in the marble of these temples
we call monuments.
Looking at Jefferson now,
I think of the language
he left for us to live by.
I think of the slave
in the kitchen downstairs.
Telephone Booth (number 905 1/2)
woke up this morning
feeling excellent,
picked up the telephone
dialed the number of
my equal opportunity employer
to inform him I will not
be into work today
Are you feeling sick?
the boss asked me
No Sir I replied:
I am feeling too good
to report to work today,
if I feel sick tomorrow
I will come in early
Heavy Women
Irrefutable, beautifully smug
As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell
Shawled in blond hair and the salt
Scrim of a sea breeze, the women
Settle in their belling dresses.
Over each weighty stomach a face
Floats calm as a moon or a cloud.
Smiling to themselves, they meditate
Devoutly as the Dutch bulb
Forming its twenty petals.
The dark still nurses its secret.
On the green hill, under the thorn trees,
They listen for the millennium,
The knock of the small, new heart.
Pink-buttocked infants attend them.
Looping wool, doing nothing in particular,
They step among the archetypes.
Dusk hoods them in Mary-blue
While far off, the axle of winter
Grinds round, bearing down the straw,
The star, the wise grey men
The Abuelita Poem
I. SKIN & CORN
Her brown skin glistens as the sun
pours through the kitchen window
like gold leche. After grinding
the nixtamal, a word so beautifully ethnic
it must not only be italicized but underlined
to let you, the reader, know you’ve encountered
something beautifully ethnic, she kneads
with the hands of centuries-old ancestor
spirits who magically yet realistically posses her
until the masa is smooth as a lowrider’s
chrome bumper. And I know she must do this
with care because it says so on a website
that explains how to make homemade corn tortillas.
So much labor for this peasant bread,
this edible art birthed from Abuelitas’s
brown skin, which is still glistening
in the sun.
II. APOLOGY
Before she died I called my abuelita
grandma. I cannot remember
if she made corn tortillas from scratch
but, O, how she’d flip the factory fresh
El Milagros (Quality Since 1950)
on the burner, bathe them in butter
& salt for her grandchildren.
How she’d knead the buttons
on the telephone, order me food
from Pizza Hut. I assure you,
gentle reader, this was done
with the spirit of Mesoamérica
ablaze in her fingertips.
Excerpt From “Citizen: An American Lyric” [The new therapist specializes]
/
The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.
At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?
It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.
I am so sorry, so, so sorry.
/
A Mark of Resistance
Stone by stone I pile
this cairn of my intention
with the noon’s weight on my back,
exposed and vulnerable
across the slanting fields
which I love but cannot save
from floods that are to come;
can only fasten down
with this work of my hands,
these painfully assembled
stones, in the shape of nothing
that has ever existed before.
A pile of stones: an assertion
that this piece of country matters
for large and simple reasons.
A mark of resistance, a sign.
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Excerpt From “A Roman Temple”
Stunned, I gaze around
and ask the present about its past.
Did life really flow here?
Did eyelids close on happy times
and nightingales sing good fortune?
Did Fate decree its destiny and doom?
Shall I question the dumb rock
about those who carved it?
Can I summon up spectres from the grave?
In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
The Breeze at Dawn
translated by Coleman Barks
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
Mi poema a la comida mas corto
(My shortest food poem)
Taco Bell Taco Bell
NO es is not
comida mexicana! Mexican food!
Fragment 94
Translated by Anne Carson
I simply want to be dead.
Weeping she left me
with many tears and said this:
Oh how badly things have turned out for us.
Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you.
And I answered her:
Rejoice, go and
remember me. For you know how we cherished you.
But if not, I want
to remind you
]at my side you put on
and many woven garlands
made of flowers
around your soft throat.
And with sweet oil
costly
You anointed yourself
And on a soft bed
Delicate
you would let loose your longing
and neither any [ ]nor any
holy place nor
was there from which we were absent
no grove[ ]no dance
]no sound
[
Miss Piggy
Great porcine drag queen
You who grew erudite in the slaughterhouse shadow
Eyelashes like black swords teased up to challenge heaven
Eternal in your powdered foundation
Refusing everyday the knife’s inevitable & unkosher ending
Be-snouted fount of youth! Seminal queer iconoclast!
Pearls to bed, pearls in the junkyard, pearls on television
Diva of late night, of talk shows, of prime time
Door-kicker for non-conventional romance
Shown us how to love across identities arbitrary as phylum & species
Bless that impossible coupling!
How you took an entire frog inside you & remained the same bad pig
Who’d karate chopped anyone dumb enough to disrespect HI-YA
What little faggot wouldn’t look upon you & be seen or saved or salved?
You who never questioned you were destined for stardom
O miss miss! O great swine demimonde! O dame pig!
I’m yours ‘til i end You, my religion How I understand us all now
We are ourselves & the hand inside that guides us
We who are given voice by that same spirit that gives voice
To everyone we have ever loved
The Truth the Dead Know
For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.
My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds...
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Reaching Guantánamo
Dear Salim,
Love, are you well? Do they you?
I worry so much. Lately, my hair , even
my skin . The doctors tell me it’s
I believe them. It shouldn’t
. Please don’t worry.
in the year, and moths
have gotten to your mother’s
, remember?
I have enclosed some — made this
batch just for you. Please eat well. Why
did you me to remarry? I told
and he couldn’t it.
I would never .
Love, I’m singing that you loved,
remember, the line that went
“ ”? I’m holding
the just for you.
Yours,
“Mutability” or “The Flower That Smiles To-day”
The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world's delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.
Virtue, how frail it is!
Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.
Whilst skies are blue and bright,
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep.
In Love and In War
To my daughter I will say,
‘when the men come, set yourself on fire’.
Workshop
The pale sound of jilgueros trilling in the jungle.
Abuelo rocks in his chair and maps the birds
in his head, practiced in the geometry of sound.
My uncle stokes the cabin’s ironblack stove
with a short rod. The flames that come are his
loves. I cook—chile panameño, coconut milk—
a recipe I’d wanted to try. Abuelo eats,
suppresses the color that builds in his cheek.
To him the chile is a flash of snake in the mud.
He asks for plain rice, beans. Tío hugs his father,
kneels in front of the fire, whispers away the dying
of his little flames. We soak rice until
the water clouds. On the television, a fiesta…
The person I am showing the poem to
stops reading. He questions the TV,
circles it with a felt pen. “This feels so
out of place in a jungle to me. Can you
explain to the reader why it’s there?”
For a moment, I can’t believe.
You don’t think we have 1930s technology?
The poem was trying to talk about stereotype,
gentleness instead of violence for once.
But now I should fill the little room
of my sonnet explaining how we own a TV?
A shame, because I had a great last line—
there was a parade in it, and a dancing
horse like you wouldn’t believe.
[My pills doze until I wake them]
My pills doze until I wake them
on the shelf
behind the bathroom mirror,
the one I see myself in
curled over, whimpering,
eyes dark and heavy
like lakes at night.
My pills doze until I shake them
and they dissolve inside me,
make complicated arrangements
with my biology.
They sleep and I take them,
gathered in the cup of my hand.
They tick against my teeth
and I hold my hand over my mouth
as if to shut them up.
[Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling]
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling
so I check my phone or squint at the window
with a serious look, like someone in a movie
or a mother thinking about how time passes.
Sometimes I’m not sure how to feel so I think
about a lot of things until I get an allergy attack.
I take my antihistamine with beer, thank you very much,
sleep like a cut under a band aid, wake up
on the stairs having missed the entire party.
It was a real blast, I can tell, for all the vases
are broken, the flowers twisted into crowns
for the young, drunk, and beautiful. I put one on
and salute the moon, the lone face over me
shining through the grates on the front door window.
You have seen me like this before, such a strange
version of the person you thought you knew.
Guess what, I’m strange to us both. It’s like
I’m not even me sometimes. Who am I? A question
for the Lord only to decide as She looks over
my résumé. Everything is different sometimes.
Sometimes there is no hand on my shoulder
but my room, my apartment, my body are containers
and I am thusly contained. How easy to forget
the obvious. The walls, blankets, sunlight, your love.
notes
dear suicide
how is the war? is it eating?
tell me of the girls charging
backwards into dumb tides
death’s wet mouth lapping
their ankles, knees, eyebrows.
tell me of the sissies like drunk
fireworks, rocketing into earth
afterimage burned into river
& cement memory.
how is the war? does it have
a wife? does she know how
the bodies got in her bed?
dear suicide
i know your real name.
i bind you from doing harm.
i enter the room like a germ.
i say your name, it is my name.
the walls cave around me like a good aunt.
the window hums. the door rocks me.
the dresser leaves to go make tea.
the room knows my name.
it binds us from doing harm.
dear suicide
where are you keeping my friends?
every cup i turn over holds only air.
i jimmy open a tulip expecting their faces
but find only the yellow heart.
what have you done with them?
yesterday i took my body off
beat it on the front steps with a broom
& not one of them
came giggling out my skin
yelling you found me!
not one of them i called for
was already in my hand.
dear suicide
you a mutual friend
a wedding guest, a kind
of mother, a kind of self
love, a kind of freedom.
i wish you were a myth
but mothers my color
have picked ocean
over boat, have sent
children to school
in rivers. i known [ ]
who just needed
quiet. i seen you
dance, [ ]
i would not deny you
what others have found
in the sweet mildew
behind your ear. i know
what happens when you
ask for a kiss, it’s all
tongue, you don’t
unlatch, you suck
face until the body
is gone.
dear suicide
that one? i promised him
i would kill for him
& my [ ] was my [ ]
& my word is my word.
dear suicide, where are you?
come see me. come outside.
i am at your door, suicide.
i’ll wait. i’ve offed my earrings
& vaselined my face. i put on
my good sweats for this.
i brought no weapon but my fist.
dear suicide
you made my kin thin air.
his entire body dead as hair.
you said his name like a dare.
you’ve done your share.
i ride down lake street friendbare
to isles of lakes, wet pairs
stare back & we compare
our mirror glares. fish scare
into outlines, i blare
a moon’s wanting, i wear
their faces on t-shirts, little flares
in case i bootleg my own prayer
& submit to your dark affair.
tell me they’re in your care.
be fair.
heaven or hell, i hope my [ ] all there
if i ever use the air as a stair.
Forecast
Today, I’m taking my father
for more tests, his eyes
failing even as we walk
out into the knee deep drifts.
Like his father before,
he takes two shovels from their hooks,
the particles of his hands
sewn somewhere in mine,
so much of him
silent in me as we walk
the bright hemorrhage of white.
He starts at one end,
I start the other, each scoop
unmaking the snow, which has taken
over porches, stoops, skeletal trees
hedging the road. Soon,
he won’t be able to make out the handle
he’s gripping. We don’t speak,
piling the crude heaps,
first him, then me, the black
grammar of railroad ties
announcing the perimeter.
The weatherman calls for more–
seven inches by nightfall–
but the old Chevy rattles
as I rev the engine,
my father leaning to scrape
the windshield clear of ice
until he’s certain I can see.
Bitch Instinct
Before this day I loved
like an animal loves a human,
with no way to articulate
how my bones felt in bed
or how a telephone felt so strange
in my paw. O papa—
I called out to no one—
but no one understood. I didn’t
even. I wanted to be caught. Like
let me walk beside you on my favorite leash,
let my hair grow long and wild
so you can comb it in the off-hours,
be tender to me. Also let me eat
the meals you do not finish
so I can acclimate, climb into
the way you claim this world.
Once, I followed married men:
eager for shelter, my fur
curled, my lust
freshly showered.
I called out, Grief.
They heard, Beauty.
I called out, Why?
They said, Because I can and will.
One smile could sustain me for a week.
I was that hungry. Lithe and giddy,
my skin carried the ether of a so-so
self-esteem. I felt fine. I was
fine, but I was also looking
for scraps; I wanted them all to pet me.
You think because I am a woman,
I cannot call myself a dog?
Look at my sweet canine mind,
my long, black tongue. I know
what I’m doing. When you’re with
the wrong person, you start barking.
But with you, I am looking out
this car window with a heightened sense
I’ve always owned. Oh every animal
knows when something is wrong.
Of this sweet, tender feeling, I was wrong,
and I was right, and I was wrong.
All the Dead Boys Look Like Me
Last time I saw myself die is when police killed Jessie Hernandez
A 17 year old brown queer // who was sleeping in their car
Yesterday I saw myself die again // Fifty times I died in Orlando // &
I remember reading // Dr. José Esteban Muñoz before he passed
I was studying at NYU // where he was teaching // where he wrote [ ]
That made me feel like a queer brown survival was possible // But he didn’t
Survive & now // on the dancefloor // in the restroom // on the news // in my chest
There are another fifty bodies that look like mine // & are
Dead // & I’ve been marching for Black Lives & talking about police brutality
Against Native communities too // for years now // but this morning
I feel it // I really feel it again // How can we imagine ourselves // We being black native
Today // Brown people // How can we imagine ourselves
When All the Dead Boys Look Like Us? // Once I asked my nephew where he wanted
To go to College // What career he would like // as if
The whole world was his for the choosing // Once he answered me without fearing
Tombstones or cages or the hands from a father // The hands of my lover
Yesterday praised my whole body // Made angels from my lips // Ave Maria
Full of Grace // He propped me up like the roof of a cathedral // in NYC
Before we opened the news & read // & read about people who think two brown queers
Can’t build cathedrals // only cemeteries // & each time we kiss
A funeral plot opens // In the bedroom I accept his kiss // & I lose my reflection
I’m tired of writing this poem // but I want to say one last word about
Yesterday // my father called // I heard him cry for only the second time in my life
He sounded like he loved me // it’s something I’m rarely able to hear
& I hope // if anything // his sound is what my body remembers first.
The End and the Beginning
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
Three Words Most Strange
As I utter the word Future,
the first syllable has already slipped into the past.
As I utter the word Silence,
I shatter it.
As I utter the word Nothing,
I create some-thing; being bursts out of non-being.
Hunger is a Bride
A grave that doesn’t fill.
Wing starved, she can only throat.
Birdseed in someone else’s bed.
A body bouqueted
and budgeted. Hunger hangs like a dark
chandelier. She’s sick with glass.
Hunger takes a body like a vow.
A list of small violences
to have and to hold.
An anniversary
of knives. I slaughtered
the tallest tree just to find a ring.
Still hunger sits at the edge
of my bed. I surrender
in small bites.
Today I’ll Sit Still
Today I’ll sit still.
When my dog shuffles over and offers me
his fleas and his soul, I’ll turn away.
To everything I’ll close my eyes,
slice the darkness and eat it.
I’ll refuse to give money on a platter
or a wet kiss under the moon.
Today I’ll just sit
and say No to everyone and everything.
To the book on my desk, its sad tale
of abandonment, remorse and death;
I’ll keep it on the tip of my tongue
like a lukewarm dime.
No to the daily mail with its greasy fingers,
no to the telephone and its humming
through the carcass of a sparrow,
no to every projection of the self.
No to me, this preposterous accident
who speaks of the “self.”
Today I’ll be anti-social.
Today I’ll grow into myself, be the river
of my blood, the sky inside my eyes,
the maze of my ribs, the dust that settles
on my heart. I’ll let my bones sink
like pebbles in a pond.
I’ll let my feet grow roots and be an extra zero
on the checks that I’ll refuse to write.
Wiri Wiri
The language holds us together.
How you are bathed in it
till you tire and run
or are pushed away from the tongue
by parents who’d spare you the hurdles they jumped.
The language pulls us apart.
How we are bathed in it
made to never forget,
reprimanded for not speaking it
by parents would not be left behind.
¡En esta casa se habla Español!
¡No se habla el wiri wiri!
Demands for the sounds
From that singular place
with it’s undeniable song.
You, If No One Else
Listen, you
who transformed your anguish
into healthy awareness,
put your voice
where your memory is.
You who swallowed
the afternoon dust,
defend everything you understand
with words.
You, if no one else,
will condemn with your tongue
the erosion each disappointment brings.
You, who saw the images
of disgust growing,
will understand how time
devours the destitute;
you, who gave yourself
your own commandments,
know better than anyone
why you turned your back
on your town's toughest limits.
Don't hush,
don't throw away
the most persistent truth,
as our hard-headed brethren
sometimes do.
Remember well
what your life was like: cloudiness,
and slick mud
after a drizzle;
flimsy windows the wind
kept rattling
in winter, and that
unheated slab dwelling
where coldness crawled
up in your clothes.
Tell how you were able to come
to this point, to unbar
History's doors
to see your early years,
your people, the others.
Name the way
rebellion's calm spirit has served you,
and how you came
to unlearn the lessons
of that teacher,
your land's omnipotent defiler.
If I Were In Charge Of The World
If I were in charge of the world
I'd cancel oatmeal,
Monday mornings,
Allergy shots, and also Sara Steinberg.
If I were in charge of the world
There'd be brighter nights lights,
Healthier hamsters, and
Basketball baskets forty eight inches lower.
If I were in charge of the world
You wouldn't have lonely.
You wouldn't have clean.
You wouldn't have bedtimes.
Or "Don't punch your sister."
You wouldn't even have sisters.
If I were in charge of the world
A chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts would be a vegetable
All 007 movies would be G,
And a person who sometimes forgot to brush,
And sometimes forgot to flush,
Would still be allowed to be
In charge of the world.
Essay on Craft
Because the butterfly’s yellow wing
flickering in black mud
was a word
stranded by its language.
Because no one else
was coming — & I ran
out of reasons.
So I gathered fistfuls
of ash, dark as ink,
hammered them
into marrow, into
a skull thick
enough to keep
the gentle curse
of dreams. Yes, I aimed
for mercy —
but came only close
as building a cage
around the heart. Shutters
over the eyes. Yes,
I gave it hands
despite knowing
that to stretch that clay slab
into five blades of light,
I would go
too far. Because I, too,
needed a place
to hold me. So I dipped
my fingers back
into the fire, pried open
the lower face
until the wound widened
into a throat,
until every leaf shook silver
with that god
-awful scream
& I was done.
& it was human.
brief lesson on marriage
I asked my wife
to check the hive,
to see
if the hive
were burning.
(I had
no wife, no hive.)
Yes, she said,
rising up
from where she’d
been
embroidering
a new wind. Then
—Yes,
she said again,
only this time
a bit more softly.
After You Left
I said fuck it and let another man name me his ship-
wreck; call my arms and legs masts
snapping apart in his wake.
For every piece I gave him, I demanded a secret
about the ocean. Outside my window,
an oak tossed its helicopters to the black roof.
He whispered: Listen. Something’s devouring the leaves.
Like this, he said, searching my mouth until I tasted salt.
Like this, his palms said, sinking to my hipbones
and the oak’s branches, swollen with wind, finished
their desperate scratching on the window.
Like this, he said again and again
and again his fingers forged riverbeds between mine,
and his breath came and went in the canals of my ear
like tides crossing each other, until all I could imagine
about ocean was that it once was still
water interrupted by something heavy
collapsing into it.
Dreaming Winter
Don’t ask me if these knives are real.
I could paint a king or show a map
the way home– to go like this:
wobble me back to a tiger’s dream,
a dream of knives and bones too common
to be exposed. My secrets are ignored.
Here comes the man I love. His coat is wet
and his face is falling like the leaves,
tobacco stains on his Polish teeth.
I could tell jokes about him– one up
for the man who brags a lot, laughs
a little and hangs his name on the nearest knob.
Don’t ask me. I know it’s only hunger.
I saw that king– the one my sister knew
but was allergic to. Her face ran until
his eyes became the white of several winters.
Snow on his bed told him that the silky tears
were uniformly mad and all the money in the world
couldn’t bring him to a tragic end. Shame
or fortune tricked me to his table, shattered
my one standing lie with new kinds of fame.
Have mercy on me, Lord. Really. If I should die
before I wake, take me to that place I just heard
banging in my ears. Don’t ask me. Let me join
the other kings, the ones who trade their knives
for a sack of keys. Let me open any door,
stand winter still and drown in a common dream.
Requiescat
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Small Craft Talk Warning
All poetry is about hope.
A scarecrow walks into a bar.
An abandoned space station falls to earth.
When probing the monster’s brain,
you’re probably probing your own.
A beautiful woman becomes a ghost.
I hope I never miscalculate the dosage
that led to the infarction
of my lab rabbit again.
All poetry is a form of hope.
Not certain, just actual
like love and other traffic circles.
I cried on that airplane too,
midwest patchwork below
like a board game on which
mighty forces kick apart the avatars.
I always wanted to be the racecar
but usually ended up a thumbtack.
When I was young, sitting in a tree
counted as preparation and later
maybe a little whoopie in the morgue.
So go ahead, thaw the alien, break
the pentagram but watch out for
the institutional hood ornaments.
It’s not a museum, it’s a hive.
The blood may be fake
but the bleeding’s not.
The Pier of La Herradura
When I sleep I see a child
hidden between the legs of a scarred man,
their sunburnt backs breathe cold air,
the child faces me
and the pier’s roof swallows the moon
cut by the clouds behind them.
Sometimes, they’re on the same roof
wearing handkerchiefs
and uniformed men surround them.
I mistake bullet casings
for cormorant beaks diving
till water churns the color of sunsets,
stained barnacles line the pier
and I can’t see who’s facedown
on boats lulled by crimson ripples.
Once, I heard the man —
alive and still on the roof — say
today for you, tomorrow for me.
There’s a village where men train cormorants
to fish: rope-end tied to sterns,
another to necks, so their beaks
won’t swallow the fish they catch.
My father is one of those birds.
He’s the scarred man.