Two Poems: 2001 & Barbie

2001

There was no space odyssey.
Instead, more than towers fell
in the city where I live.
People were still counting
paper scraps in Florida
for the sake of a flawed process.
People were still dying
in Gujarat’s earthquaked cracks
in Ghana’s stampeded stadiums
and in the summer of the media
calling shark attacks on Santa Rosa
a national security threat.
The Taliban’s advent, McVeigh’s execution
for destroying what seemed an entire city.
I had just turned seven.
For my birthday, my mother
bought me a Beatles CD.
Later that year, George Harrison died—
my favorite one, the one
who sang about how all things must
come to an end. But
how were endings possible
in a new millennium? New
Wikipedia, where we learned
how to summarize. New Nokia,
new Madonna, even language felt
refreshed: A.I., iTunes, OS X, Xbox.
It was the first time I broke my arm
in two separate places. I visited the zoo
and watched the animals roar at each other,
and at themselves. My mother dispelled
Santa Claus, perhaps a year too soon
for my imagination to take. I cried
until I received extra presents
for keeping the secret from my sister.
I saw myself in the Backstreet Boys,
in the highest rated Super Bowl in history,
as Harry Potter, whether philosopher
or sorcerer. Everything still felt possible
to a seven-year-old, who had just
heard about the first tourist in space
and thought it was an odyssey.

Barbie

I comb my hair with a small hairbrush.
I no longer walk in nature. And when
I sit on the front porch, sipping
whatever’s left from the mason jar
filled with all that last night, I flick
the maggots from my skin.
The parked car outside the house
sits with its tarped over cover since before
I remember. I remember
playing dolls with my sister
while my father wedged a football
into my hands, and said
you must throw as far as you can.
Open wide, my arms onto the wheel
where I learned how a man
drives five miles above the limit.
It was cold that first Kentucky,
where I first kissed masculine lips,
wet as leather, chapped the way
we hid from what we learned
in locker rooms. We grazed the sides
of our heads against the Cypress bark.
While we leaned against its trunk, I saw
pigs in the distance, wrestling
in the nightmud. They cannot know
how soon they will be separated, then skinned.

Share

I Wake at Four & Drive to the Mountains

To leave the inner critic on the empty street beneath my windows.

To outride the arrows, or slings at least, of civic life.

To put the forces separating me from my daughter—the moderator

in elastic-waisted slacks, the decree signed

by the liver-spotted judge—in the rear-view.

To look ahead and see the world’s impersonal love song again

lifted from night.

To know the song is about the attention we give the wild,

unfixable everything we love yet is always already

indifferent to us.

And yet to see the sun rise, like a couched friend, from blankets of fog

in the lowland orchards.

To see the fields of our anxieties cut and gathered in silos.

To hear the wind wrap us, undeserving, in the sun’s resolve

to sustain us another day.

To stuff a campsite into my backpack and somehow walk ten miles.

To feel the weight of our basic needs shouldered across streams,

over hills, up crevices.

To remember having walked the home-forsaken trail before.

To realize I’d compressed memory of all this pain—all but the sacrament

of red, gold and orange leaves

above river bluffs.

Only here do I realize I must have forgotten just how many uphills,

just how fucking much elevation hurts.

Here I think such thoughts as our sapiens ancestors ground as many miles

over mountains each day.

I wake and drive and walk to think: Perhaps the downhill mortar and pestle

of our patellae almost crushes recall

of profane elevation.

And to meet the inner critic, somehow already at the top, and

to accept his message:

You wake at four and drive to the mountains

to accept the body’s pain as the cost of all the beauty there is to see.

Share

To My Fellow Submitters

A found poem from sample rejections saved in “My Submissions,”
completed in response to a writing prompt given at
the Sandhill Writers Retreat, May 2019

Dear

Our poets’ community is lucky to have you

Good fortune in all your future writing

Declined

Cannot offer

We enjoyed having the chance to read

Many excellent entries this year

The team wishes you

We wish each of you the best in finding publishers

All the best

Unfortunately

The sweat and the perseverance it takes to put together a submission and send it out, naked

Declined by

Not Selected

A strong and competitive batch

A complimentary copy of this year’s

We regret

We are grateful for your ideas

We encourage you to submit again in the future

We are unable to provide individual feedback

Thanks

Best

Appreciate the dedication to craft

Thank you for choosing us

Hope that you and your work succeed in finding a home

You’re now one step closer to getting that acceptance you’ve been looking for

Sincerely

In peace and poetry

Share

Things You Left in Accra before Moving to the Bronx

Grandma and her weak leg,

your sister at 18, still with one good iris,

your mother’s British jewelry hidden under the bed,

the places in the carpet you soiled with urine,

all the red dust,

your seat at Calvary Methodist Church next to Marie

who’d always chat with you when someone talked

about Jesus and his power to bring you all the things you needed,

your gymnastic booty shorts (your mother sent

them from America because the heat in Accra overwhelmed

you but you still wish you’d saved some for America’s winters),

warm Tea Bread sold at the YMCA between 6:30 am and 7:30 am,

the scent of air conditioning and ice cream at the SHELL gas station,

Grandma with her good English,

Mercedes and Pamela, your neighbors who borrowed everything from salt to ladles,

Asaana, Yooyi, Aluguntuguin, Nkontomire,

Living Bitters, Mercy Cream, Lion’s Ointment &

a Saturday listening to wind turn on pawpaw leaves.

Share

Summer III

Across the forest, we sit

in a deer stand shaped like a heart.

A cry comes from the center of the woods

like wind blowing through a doll’s head.

There are birds that come out at night

just to be devoured by other birds.

I can’t make things happen faster

than they’re going to happen.

I know that now.

If your thick arms come out

of the shadows only to light smokes

or hold my hand expertly in yours,

I need to accept it.

Share

Analysis

At the diner, I sit with Freud

open on the table before me.

It’s rude to say clueless, but

clueless, the waiter won’t let

me sit with my book and coffee

half-filled. He brims it. Chimes,

A velociraptor stubbed its foot.

Pauses. Now it’s dino-sore.

I’m bored of Freud, it’s true,

but not bored enough to flirt

with you, I think, but don’t say.

Ha. Can I have my check?

which he brings with his number,

You’ll want to keep that receipt.

Freud on the sooty bus, I can

say that I have made many

beginnings and thrown out

many suggestions. The receipt

stuck between two pages,

bookmarking desire and lack.

Share

Father Tongue

Our embargo lifted its hands

off my eyes yanked my chin towards
the colorful architecture of your face

and left me alone with you, strange courier

of my DNA you, an almost-familiar place.
Hello, Cuba, hello father, may I call you that?

If a homeland offers no house or apartment,

if there is no familiar front door acting as a veil
between day in and day out,

if there is not enough monotony
from kissing the same faces goodbye,

if every family has its scent
and I can smell ours

then I am still an outsider your hija Americana

sitting finally at your table

cradling a cup of coffee like an egg in my palm.
Do not speak directly towards me
Do not be silent let me bask in your accent—

my first words were pale, vast land and highway,
mouth dry with Tennessee cornbread, Mom’s
bleached wooden spoon stirred in shug-uhr

but at school I liked the feel of Spanish

in my mouth, en mi boca like ripe black-skinned sweet plantain,
butter-soft and fried, r’s rolling in a hot pan of my saliva.

Before you called me daughter, I had proof

tuyo es mío I am not yours but what’s yours is mine

Share

This is what it looks like, son,

so stop stabbing the heron’s belly,
as if repeated stabs will wake it from the flies.

I mean what I say,
when I talk of permanence like permafrost

or ancient arteries of the earth’s underbelly,
spilling from volcanic pores. A woman, did you hear?

Crated homing pigeons
and biked them to a Tokyo market,

when her tire hit a rut in the road
and the cage fell loose. Nine birds died on impact,

while her most treasured, still alive
but blinded by headlights,

hit a fender and blew open—
feathers falling like snow. For months,

the poor woman wore grief like a wet wool coat
and wept through the deadwind of winter. She’d set the table
each evening for two. Wait for the backdoor to swing

and shut
and the sulfuric smell of sorrow to come in the kitchen to eat.

Tristessa, she’d whisper,
and the ghostly girl locked behind thick black bangs
would look to her left and say nothing.

—

When I was a boy
I had a habit of carelessly sloughing bark
from a Eucalyptus. I loved its salve and

layered it like glue
over every burn left by my father’s lighter.

And though that tree numbed each wound,
resulting in an able-bodied boy, one who’d go on
to live like most other boys,

I carried with me two things:
scars without witness and the tree’s sick tinder.

Many moons chafed into years of dissolution
and worms hollowed its core. Violent winds blew.
The old tree tilted, fell loose from soil, then split in half.

For months, it ghosted an aroma so thick
the fallow fields became places to pray, rub wounds
and feel cleansed. I felt cleansed. Opened my mouth

and ran nude in the rain. Its fading ointment
coating my throat and my tongue.

—

Which leads me here with you, son.

This heron, no different
than the three dozen floating out over the estuary,
was once a winged creature maneuvering winds

with precision. It was effortless. Swooping
soft beach for sand dabs then arrowing back toward light.

It’s sick, I know, how Man manipulates beauty.
But listen, son, listen: I’m asking you
to set the weapon down and look toward ocean.

That storm coming close
is big enough to rip this beach from coastline and swallow it.

High tide will swell and splash over the barriers
built to guard the street. Perch will fill medians like manna.

The poor will come collect their rations.

Wave hands toward thunder and praise it.

I’m asking whether you’d like to keep gazing at records of lost time,
or undress and wade these choppy waters,
our bodies weightless as breath.

Share

Strawberries

Let us pretend there is no mystery in strawberries,
that we know precisely what floods the flesh so enticingly red,
coloring summer with a crimson flush, a violent bloom
amid the cool earth greens.
Let us knowingly say the unabashed hue comes
from ripeness for eating, and there is no more meaning
to the deep red so like our hidden internalities,
which we feign ignorance of while complacently stroking
the shield of our outer flesh.
Let us declare the finger-stains of picking are superficial,
and are washed away when our hands are clean;
that the strawberry juice has not already penetrated below the dermis
so that our own blood runs redder,
intoxicated and giddy with the inbred sugar of fruit;
let us feign that we see no connection
in the perfect way a single strawberry nestles in the human mouth,
to bring memories of feeding lovers and butter light,
romances that never were, and cool saucers in the evening.
And lastly, let us make believe
while the fields are still heavy with the lush season of ripeness
that the bruises on the tender skin do not hurt us, too,
that we don’t notice time playing decay on that succulent red.
Let us insist to ourselves, assuredly, continuously,
that our own hearts are not already burst
as the short-lived strawberry loses its firmness on the earth.

Share

Thousands and Thousands of Thousand Oaks

When I’m watching the street fill up with leaves when dusk morphs
to a waxy flickering to a phone pinging dad I’m inside this bar
I’m line dancing I’m filled with holes for the man with the Glock
releasing the safety must be orgasmic and a background check
equals emasculate one day is like another and then it’s another
school café yoga studio church another concert hall another
outdoor space for cold bodies quiet like a pile of unlucky armadillos
when a friend arrived two days before the one at the synagogue
when he said I have a right to carry to sleep with it to fuck it
the pasta went from hearty to heart riot though I wanted to handshake
a civil understanding on the footprints leading to a glowworm cave
of mourners to the police officers’ eyes the line dance toward
the hearse that my pain string was taut that our country’s pain string
is taut that our country is electric like a frying pan with a frayed cord
always a fray away from fire

Share

Category: Poetry