Category: Poetry

When the counselor asked her
disciples to gather around the bucket,
her head crowned in clover stems,
we all wanted to be anointed.
The Pentecost of chapel steps and snakes
expelled from little cabins
lined against the trees:
this was our church, our induction
into something greater
than youth group on Wednesday nights
where a teen with a bible taught us
to renounce sex, rated R movies,
the devil in a hot pink romper.
When the counselor dipped her hand
in the water we thought baptism, the bonfire
lit with praise hymns and acoustic guitar.
None of us imagined the goldfish,
its body of shingled scales,
such orange iridescent delight.
To be brave for the lord is to
combat any fear
How do you say no to a soulless tail,
the hand reaching out to say
you could be special too?
How she called on us
to grab the soft round and place it
on our tongues like communion,
like the body we cannibalized
week after week. This is the memory:
feeling the heart rate pulse
against my thumb,
the way my throat closed up
then pushed the belly down.

 

Last October my mother clipped out
an article from the New York Times

 

about why millennials love plants and
I mocked her for the old-fashion. She

 

sent me a letter every week in the
month of June, although I had since

 

left the city, because I didn’t
pick up the phone. My mother

 

writes things on paper that she
would never say out loud. Her

 

letters read like the Book of Proverbs
and she always doodles on

 

the envelope. She says things like No I wouldn’t
take care of your cats but if you have babies

 

then give them to me. I grow older and further
from her portrait of my future

 

life lived. Too far to see
the disappointment crinkle

 

on her eye corners. Close
enough to hear a sigh over radio waves.

 

“Tree-huggers refuse to admit
Mother Nature can be
a bitch, or very blind
or simply is,” my father insists,

 

though he hikes
the Appalachian every weekend.
I’ve never gone with him.
“We are always at the mercy

 

of our environment,” he claims,
tells me he outraced a prairie fire
in the Sooner state, more hurricanes
than he can list,

 

though he’s always been tempted
to get caught up in some disaster,
miss delivering whichever speech
he’d been on his way to give. “Nature is,

 

I suppose, efficient,” he says, a word
that shows up more than any other
in his writing except “trash,” “waste”
or “recycling.” His boss will use

 

his rhetoric against him.
He and I argue about anything,
spring, its length, time
and lusciousness after a brief cold spell

 

as opposed to a short orgasm of color
after a long thaw. Storm-chasing.
A tornado will turn and stare
right at you, rain come down so hard

 

you can’t see the shoulder, but once,
and I believe the sentiment’s appropriate,
he saw a triple rainbow with my sister,
who shot an entire roll of film

 

beyond the Panhandle.
They were alone. Dramatic, yes,
even at home, even after a long night
of ordinary thunder and wind,

 

a tree uproots and smashes
my parents’ bedroom.
It must have all night tossed
violently in the storm,

 

and they slept through it,
except that once they woke
and saw it swaying, and swaying
was still the word they used

 

in the morning to describe
it was an accident they lived.

—A Golden Shovel after Katie Englehart’s “We Are Going to Keep You Safe Even if It Kills Your Spirit,” The New York Times, Feb. 19, 2021

 

No matter what the therapists say about dementia, how we
should know our half-blind mother can’t live alone, how they are
clear she can’t afford to fall—the only way to keep her going
on her own (not risk-free) is a scooter or a four-wheel walker, or to
move her to a place, they won’t say where—best to keep
the care type vague—helpful doctors will tell you
recommended choices: memory pills, life locked inside, a safe
space, always a mask, no rugs or dancing, hugs, even
if your loved one, if Mom, is vaccinated, if
we instead allow her finger-walking walls, her wandering, it
wouldn’t be the worst to drop and die at home, we’ll say—what kills
is a voice silenced or a vision atrophied, when all your
good intention stymies dignity, what we recall of spirit.

 

“All things are poisons, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”
–Paracelsus

During rituals of divination,
Mayan sorcerers and healers
induced risky hallucinations
with Brugmansia candida,
angel’s trumpet. The poison
in its white, waxy flowers
and dark green leaves,
ingested or absorbed through
the body’s mucous membranes,
causes convulsions, paralysis,
coma, and death.

 

To dilate the pupils of their eyes
and bring a flush to their cheeks,
fashionable ladies in medieval Europe
drank juice pressed from the berries
and leaves of Atropa belladonna,
the deadly nightshade.
To enhance their beauty,
they risked their lives with a poison
used since antiquity to alter potions
and tip arrows with lethal results.

 

Our ancestors felt more closely
than we the embrace
of science and mystery.
We are still looking
for the boundary.
Chemicals crossing
the blood-brain barrier
create effects in the brain
that achieve results in the body,
altering perceptions
of pleasure and pain.
Reliever of illness
or harbinger of death
is a matter of degree.

 

Digitalis from foxglove,
lily of the valley, and oleander
strengthens the heart’s contractions
while causing blurred and double vision
and hallucinations.
Taxol from the bark of the Pacific yew
destroys cancers of the breast
and ovaries but harms the liver.
Although it induces nausea,
vincristine, an alkaloid
from Madagascar periwinkle,
is the reason why most children
with leukemia now survive.

 

For the stomach spasms
I suffered as a child,
I was prescribed a daily dose
of a chalky green medicine
containing belladonna alkaloids
and phenobarbital
to prevent nausea and relax me.

 

Derived from salicin
in willow bark and meadowsweet,
aspirin reduces inflammation,
eases headache, and lowers fever.
Years ago, my great-aunt, sick of life,
swallowed the entire contents
of a bottle and bled to death.

Grief is a sudden room.
After flailing around, breaking
all the furniture inside it for years,
you can think you’ve shut
the ancient door behind you,
but the latch hasn’t worked for aeons,
it will just pop open anytime
you open a window, elsewhere
in your mind. No matter. The room
will arrange itself in your absence
and wait for your return.
You’ve never seen such patience.

A Robin at the Bus Station

Newly loose with death,
I can imagine her stomach, the give.
I bring her an oyster shell from the shore,
prop her head. A pine branch blanket.
You taught me how to care for the dead like this,
how to get quiet in their moment,
early January, no other willing witness.
It’s big work. And even I step away,
whisked back to life by the bus,
where in front of me a young man
video chats his girlfriend, who cries
the entire hour-long ride as he slumps
further into his seat, humming short responses.
A whole bus of us listen to her pleas,
and despite her foreign tongue
I can feel the ruptures, the cold valleys.
I press a warm thumb into the sea
spinning past the window. Bleached shell,
pine branch, stuttering connection.
With these tired hands, we can only
build beds, soft spaces to land.

 

Fall in Languedoc

Officials in Japan are running out
of storage space for the ocean water
used to cool down Fukushima’s
nuclear cores. Tens of thousands
of tons, all newly radioactive,
with talks of releasing it all back
into the ocean. Across the globe,

 

we fill a tractor load—two or three
tons of grapes—in four hours
with a team of eight. What would
a hundred tons of our juice look like;
a thousand? I try to measure the ruined
water in tractorfuls, but run out of room
in my mental valley. How diluted
does a radioactive ocean have to be
before it stops killing everything
it laps up? How much longer
will the waters stand us?

 

Here, the Hérault’s been low
all summer, thirsty, only two storms
filling her throat. The gorges dried,
scratchy. Her rocky bottom cuts
into my kayak’s belly, though
the carp are fat, the seaweed
an impenetrable forest. Here, slung

 

between the map’s bright red pins
that mark each nuclear throne,
I imagine the steel drums planted
beneath us, beating out a cold,
toxic tune. The foxes are hungry.
Tourist-trained, they visit us
at picnic hour, panting, patient,
catching grapes in their skinny mouths
swarmed by flies, fleas trampolining
from their fur as they polish
avocado peels of their fatty linings.

 

From a too-hot summer, the vines
have fried, harvest light this year.
The last fat bulbs were stripped
in the night by wild boars, though
Christian is diligent in his midnight
rounds, has caught half a dozen
perpetrators already. At lunch time,
he brings me their pink meat
in a small Tupperware, cut
neatly into strips.

CPH said, “too many” can be as few as three—

the magic number exposing how the trick is done,

light shifting from the blonde assistant to hands

concealed in the dark. the advertiser’s golden ratio

of aggregate melanin. the progressive tipping point

where the cool is lost from chic restaurants, the polish

from AP classroom. where they no longer feel

embarrassed for confusing Eunice for Jackie

for Miki. Julio for Erik for Hugo. where “diverse”

slippery slopes to “awkward,” “ghetto,” “overrun,” or

silent blue-eyed glances. the not flaxen straw

breaking the tolerant’s back. it’s a quaint thought.

but experience shows “too many” can be as few as

one.

 

When the nurse asks if I have a surgical history

I begin to form the word of my uterus and its

 

drawing out, consider inviting her into the recovery room

filled with women giddy from their return to somatic

 

solitude, then into the smoke-filled apartment with its

futon mattress and warm bottle of retsina, reward

 

just for time, passing from before to after

it. I begin to form the word, but the word—its roundness, its flat vacuum

 

of a face—swallows its own tail. After the medical abortion

I imagined a fish, small fry flapping, and still in some Boston Harbor

 

it haunts a stand of seagrass, is haunted in turn by its half-sibling

the surgically aborted, ripped from stories

 

too. Sibling’s sibling I do not speak of, my double-standard shame, my

ill-gotten fishlet, in my mind I hold you in loving kindness and say no

 

The curtain comes crashing down

and there I am, ruby-footed and murderous,

doing it all for the bloated shadow

of a little man. How foolish I have been

again and again, poppy-cocked

and clumsy, letting the boom of a voice, the cast

of a giant, tease me into storming

the castle to take what I never lacked. What is

more incarnadine: the glitter of these

shoes or the myth of blood now on my hands.

I look at the man and he looks back,

the fury of being caught pinking his cheeks.

I am not the heroine, and I know that

too late. He has no power to give me, after all,

the fading of his theatrics, and if he did,

I understand he’d keep it. We all fell for green,

called it real. There’s no place like money.

There’s no seduction like a beast of sewn-up skins,

a cotton ball on fire, a thrown voice

that tells us what we want to hear. Which of us

escapes? He told the lie; I did the killing.

A flamingo of a man in a pink-blush tux

plunked a single piano key repeatedly

 

for nearly an hour.

By the end of the evening

 

I heard such gorgeous silence

and sobbed. My mind

 

was in brambles and the notes he pecked

all hatched like eggs at once.

 

Every flap, every cheep

became your name and I became

 

a mockingbird. I said your name

as if I were your brother and just caught

 

you snooping in my desk

for the cigarettes I kept hidden.

 

Then I said your name

with the reverence of a child

 

learning his mother existed

as before-mother for the first time,

 

reconciling one identity with another.

Now I say it like we just met,

 

introduced by a mutual friend

we later admit we never liked.

 

I’m trying to commit

the syllables to memory

 

without making it obvious. Hi,

it’s nice to meet you. It’s nice

 

to see you again. Hi. It’s so nice. Your name.

I say it so often it loses meaning

 

the way cotton candy dissolves

so humbly and quickly

 

into a glass of water but the water

is delightfully altered, and I don’t remember

 

your face anymore

but you’re in the swirl,

 

and I drink and drink and

stay, please, with me, I am chapped,

 

chirping, I’m spun, oh sugar, oh

sweet, your

 

name, oh your name, your

sweet, invisible name.

 

If I meet Michio Kaku, I

won’t ask him about supernovas and black holes, about

New York or California, but

about his pond of fishes;

How they live two-dimensional lives

unaware that there is life beyond

water.  We can’t breathe without air,

Dr. Michio Kaku. We

 

can’t breathe even without the love

of our loved ones; the stomach churns, the heart

beats so fast when I think of my mother; in this

limited three-dimensional existence of

social media, and nuclear bomb,

Elon Musk Brand colonies in Mars, it is

hard for me to breathe if

I think about the moment

when the doctor woke me up: we have

been looking for you; your

mother is no more.

 

Did he really say your mother

or patient number something-something? Did he say,

your wife, to my father who was lying in the bed

against the wall? She lived a glorious life, she lived

an abundant life, I said, hugging him with one hand,

but not asking him to stop crying. I didn’t say

it is okay because it wasn’t; I didn’t say

it will be okay because it never will be.

 

That was five years ago; life was different then;

winter, less harsh. Deaths, not so common as today. How

worried I would have been about her

now, if she were still living, in the world

of rationed care? This year,

when caregivers need care, while

an invisible killer sucks away our souls.

 

If I meet Michio Kaku, I will ask

about dimensions. He said once,

that we are like those fishes who live

in two dimensions, we are like those fishes

who can’t imagine there is life

beyond water. I will ask if death is another dimension

where good people go. Of course, the

people we love are always good.

 

Do people who leave us, watch us

from this dimension? Like we watch

protest marches, hot delivery post-men,

from our balconies? Or is it a new life

where you are born at the same age

you had died, and you appear

in this world as you were?

 

Dear Michio Kaku, if

death is another dimension, is it in this world

of rivers, deserts, mountains, meadows?

I had once watched a short film where

people go after they are dead; it is like a commune,

similar to our world: a TV, a living room, people

who spew scathing comments or shower compassion,

but this world is crowded; the character we follow

is upset, confused, remembers her past life, and doesn’t

know how she reached here. She doesn’t know

what she remembers is a past life. What if

life after life is a crowded room

with a TV blaring. Mundane, poor,

full of absences.

 

If I meet Michio Kaku,

I will ask him these things. I will

ask him where dead people go. If

the dead are really dead. If

the world they go to is

really a happy world where

they rest; if they live next to us,

can see us, can help us, can bless us. If

they are in peace.

My favorite barn burned down today.
I loved it for its imperfections,
its usedness, the way it sagged
against itself. Postcard red
worn to gray. Today
as I drove by, flame
bit the spring sky.
A plume of smoke
visible for a mile.
A line of flashing lights,
traffic narrowed to a single lane,
hoses containing the heat
but stopping nothing.
Tomorrow’s commute
will offer a touch less
wonder. There’s a hole
in my future shaped
like an old barn.
I do not mean
to make more of this
than what it is:
a story about the body.

Every spring my husband and I discuss
the long-dead animals in the Cadbury commercial
running since we were kids: pig, cat, lion, turtle,
bunny. The wrong animals audition
to become the clucking bunny. This is the American
symbol of Easter, which I didn’t grow up with,
except for jelly beans and chocolate. (When my father
was a boy he would use a chocolate bunny’s head
as a goblet for his milk.) Instead I had the ten plagues,
parsley dipped in saltwater, buttered and salted matzoh,
opened door. Judaism is all about the symbols
and the stories and the food and the funny-sad. The minor key.
The tragic violin and exuberant clarinet, the klezmer absurd.

Vegetarians, my family put a Milk-Bone on our seder plate.
The Passover seder is the story of enslavement and then freedom,
and never forgetting that there were those who hated us
from whom we had to flee. And that when oppressors die,
we must not rejoice in their human pain. Sure, sure,
but who wouldn’t cheer as tyrants fall, as the waters
whale-gulp them down. Saltwater means tears, food is a story
of survival, and parsley means the green coming back to the yard.
The seder means, Here is who hated us and tried to kill us
and here we are still. Now, my sister chops apples and nuts,
brings the haroset in the yellow bowl that Stanley, our terrier,
once ate from. He’s there, just outside my dad’s kitchen,
our perennial digger and yard escapee, thief and planter of dolls
whose miniature limbs would protrude from the dirt, the tiny undead.

Stanley sleeps under the yard and not alone, long ago buried
and returning to us with the trees and grass and apples and spring.
We will not forget. I will not forget Charna, my grandma’s spunky friend,

jovial baker of mandel bread, and how she had survived the camps.

Grinning, she divulged to me and my sister how she told
the Nazis to their faces that they needed more food, thicker soup,
and her demands were met. What did she give up in negotiating this,
and what did she earn, a secret skeleton of steel and courage and love.

We also learned that the women fashioned and passed around
a bloody menstrual pad as protection, to try to ward off rape
by crafting the guards’ disgust. What seeds existed in her
that nudged her to ask Nazis for anything, to scavenge fabric
and blood and deliver it from woman to woman, clutched and folded,
a love letter, a ballad about generosity and pain, lantern-bright.

Where does this bravery in the midst of horror
come from, and how can we get more. Why is this night
different from all other nights, a question we ask ourselves
every year, when we should ask, How is this time different
from all other times, how is this agony different from other agonies.

When someone suffers, the Jew also suffers,
says the Passover story. And we want this to be true.
But between suffering and safety, there is a heavy door.
Closed. On this side, we eat apples and chocolate
and eggs full of candied yolk and drink simulated tears.
On the other side, all we can barely look at or hold in our
minds, the flame-ravaged house we could be chased from,
the thirst and loneliness of the exiled, the small hands
reaching up from yard’s cold mud that we see silhouetted
in the twilight and call broadleaf, dollarweed, thistle.

 

Mother wore a nightgown and peignoir, the white filmy kind,
walked barefoot out the front door and into our back yard
to sit in her crescent-moon-shaped rose garden,
her tangled hair caught in the rattan chair.

 

Those were the days when she got out of bed before noon.

 

O Etoile de Hollande, her favorite deep red rose—so fragrant.
Did she imagine it could be heaven, as she sat motionless
with her breakfast tray, melba toast, the loose tea leaves
floating in the china pot?

 

When I was in third grade my father paid me to make his breakfast
before he went to work early in the morning.
Bacon, toast, fried eggs, coffee—I served him
at the somber mahogany table
where he ate alone, wearing his Air Force uniform.

 

Much later, when my parents moved again,
there was no rose garden.
On good days, she climbed a stunted apple tree
and set her tray on the low gnarled branch in front of her.

 

My father pointed to the tree when I came home from college once.

 

When she came into an inheritance
she spent the cash on trips to Ireland and some Greek islands,
going by herself, never told me, and invested the rest
with hopes of getting rich but the broker swindled her.

 

Gone, except for this picture she kept of wildflowers in Delos—

 

She used to sing—I am weary unto death—

 

Elegy for Recording the Light

with “Victor Jacquemont Holding a Parasol, 1865” & a line from bell hooks

 

Do you ever get sad thinking that all the dogs

in old paintings are dead? ​More helpless

than the past is the bruise that carves

it into canvas & the root of martyr,

 

I learned, is witness. So I ​practice saying no

to dusk’s orange heel, poised above

my throat. As if existence has a bloodthirst

for testimony. As if stillness is a eulogy

 

I’m working up the bravery for.

Contemplating death leads us

back to love. It’s not that the dark

is thicker, but that in the meteoric

 

hours under a soup’s-ladle
of Orionids, I’m embedded with need

to pass sunflower atoms from my tongue

to your tongue. There are so many people

 

I will never see old: Most. My father

hiding in the blackberry field

lacing the sun to his ghost boots. After

you tell me about the island mangroves,

 

I gift you a jar of blackberry jam
from my grandmother’s land & remember

Monet’s admission that while

watching someone he loved

 

die, he spent up the time analyzing

the pigments in her eyelids, deciding

how to paint them. We​ can only learn

so much from squatting in the dirt

 

with capillaries hung like dried roses

to preserve in the shroud

of pages. I’ll spend a life failing

to befriend the fear that all of this glows

 

& ends: a faint slash of tenderness

before the sorrow festival.

 

 

Tallahassee Spring

I

 

Passing a rare live deer at the side
of the highway, far enough
in the grass to pretend it doesn’t know

 

the twisted necks & blank eyes

its kind are prone to, a lineage of split livers

ant-eaten like cupcakes

 

My mother says possums kill
by tunneling up through a creature’s ass

It’s true​. Kick a dead calf, a possum

peeks sheepishly out the bloated mouth

 

Hold my hand ten more miles & I’ll stop

myself from telling you, again, about the dead

bird in my Kentucky yard & the other
who landed to stare. Unflinching

 

Even the rabbits are hiding
long-eared ghosts—someone they swallowed

for safekeeping. What if we chose to forget

 

the impulsive deployment of knives, if we believed

honeybees were the only blameless beings

 

II

 

Birds & more birds
plow the bluegray morning
The shivery opulence with which we split

into a nest of hotbreathed animals

 

Splayed like iguanas in the daylight
Sometimes you are touching me
& I am thinking up ways to get ovened into dirt

 

Witnesses, too, are actors
in the grieving process. Driving
into Florida’s oblong belly, I memorized

new spells for desire: tying hair strands

around a bay leaf, then burying it

 

with both hands in red mud. ​If you have someone

who will bury with you, what we call tenderness

is simply the condition

 

Again I lay at your back, wearing

the face of the wolves that ate me

 

III

 

Who will tell the bees
the names of all the dead?

 

My friend’s mother says

she packed the hive in wool

 

but within days

she found them frozen

 

in breathless Arkansas winter

Huddled in a ball of ice

 

IV

 

When a leaf sprouts does it name itself

Preparation For The Rotting

 

If you love someone why not make them happy

without you

 

V

 

There is nothing so alive as crying
under purgatorial dawn filtered
through the clanking brogue of a train tunneling backwards

 

Watching briary porches on the brick tenements
slide away from us like futures
The whole sweet metal sow, inside its glass stomachs

I grow fat with wonder

 

How potato chip bags & dogs & daylight are all

made of dark space matter & us too, yes, your finger

 

hooked through my finger like the tiniest window latch, my heart

clinking between your teeth,
the smallest unlatched window

 

VI

 

I feel dying.​ Small children say this
Hothouse as fuck this Tallahassee spring
Slivers of broken lightbulb glittering the bedsheets

 

There was a woman sleeping in the road

that wraps around the cemetery
A stranger

 

Green green bottomland

wilding my sorrow
with unrelenting blooms

 

Let us look on one another
with the joyful urgency of cakebearers