i don’t know
if i’ve ever been happy
joy for me, a Rectory
built next
to the real thing
i try, i do
i shovel the front steps
i feel the proximal chill
Category: Poetry
Two Poems
A Patient’s Family Asks What Do I Know
In the ICU, my friend washed another friend’s
face with the serum and cream samples
they hoarded from Sephora. She sloped
and shaped his eyebrows like calligraphy.
The nurses envied his stainless skin,
saintly, like he hadn’t made a perfect O
on an imaginary dick to teach me
about efficient blowjobs. When I die
I know my friends will be dragged
up in sequins and blush, will cut cake
with their contour. But I know death
has always picked my more beautiful
loves over me. What a lucky bastard, to burn
a candle in wild fire. To make breath
into moan and song. How we learned
hunger and feast from our own fabulous
bodies. I don’t know much of anything.
I don’t think as much as do, as much
as want and miss and admire. I hope
you have love letters for my friends.
I wouldn’t blame you. Those handsome
boys. But I’d say find another messenger
because when I see my boys, my girls,
I will kiss them, and perform nothing
else, forever, for so long we will be reborn
as trees joined at the trunks, a set of summer
winds over sweaty sunbathing hunks, a handful
of hard candies melted into rainbow.
Cadaver Lab
I figured it’d be months without laughter.
Understandably. On pelvic dissection day
my friend Amelia whispers I’m sorry,
girlfriend before starting the saw.
Another friend unknowingly holds
his cadaver’s hand during the biggest
incisions. Classmates I don’t even like
point out veins and nerves to spare me
hours of inhaling fat and fascia. Then
one group finds a penis pump and we decide
yes he meant it as a surprise and the boys
fist bump his cold hands. Another group
shares their cadaver’s perfect pink polish,
another has fresh, unwrinkled ink
across her chest. Like tiny treasures
for us. Of course no one donates their body
without a sense of humor. Of course the body
is a gift. We admit on dissection days
we all leave hungry, specifically for chicken.
I booked my calendar with hook-ups
as if to practice how the blood flows
while it can. One boy I brought home
had a scar down his sternum, a souvenir
of a heart condition. He apologized
years after the incision healed, like the scar
didn’t pucker like lips. I imagined the lights
baring on him, how so many lucky
hands got to press against his skin.
God Ain’t Here & Tourniquet
God Ain’t Here
This house we built with its abundance
Of suffering, a hundred sealed windows.
Where do your prayers find you? No, no!
The waters keep on running in this hell &
The birds were all plucked of their tongues
As if saying to all the quiet, tongue-less birds
Who’s to save you now when your rituals
Are plunged deep into the tall, red ground?
He walked for miles down a narrow hall
With no doors. His feet grew tired. He fell
To his knees without a tongue to give voice.
Foreign body, those aren’t his hands no more.
He’s building this house. God ain’t here,
Just a procession of breathing wings
Trying to find their way out. There’s no escape.
Prayer by prayer trapped in a wooden box
& spilled over Just one more time, one more.
He’s breaking a nail into his wood, one by one.
The waters keep on running, spilling into him,
One by one. He continues to drown with his
Sealed off mouth. Not a prayer to let go of.
No. Not now. Not ever. He’s too tired
Building a home with broken glass & raw hands.
Tourniquet
Not quite out of the woods, he’s got a funny
Walk. Tender was the word I ought
Not to have used but I’m here with twigs
Scattered throughout my hair like a myth.
Wanted dead, I coughed up blood while
The man fucked me with a handful of Lubriderm
& a pocketful of change.
My voice sounds different with so many
Tongues locked inside of my mouth.
This isn’t about sex. This is about the tender
Crunch of each step I make moving toward
Something. But, first, more spit.
After, I zip-up my pants. How’s that for conclusive?
I have a pocketful of coins: the fruits
Of my labor. My thighs, mango puss.
See me differently. This tourniquet hurts.
Stop, you’re hurting me. There’s the clearing.
Open Season
Like any good strategist, you keep an ethical
distance, stepping over milkweed and turning on
the radio. It’s hard to tell when you’re approaching—
everyone wears an orange vest over her coat.
Cooking without speaking, I feel like an actress
playing a wife—soft cheese with honey, pickled
cabbage, pale tomatoes from the roadside store.
The pond is frozen and the snow has no content.
I understand the animal only if it’s packed
in Styrofoam and thawing on the kitchen counter.
Even then, some parts are too much for me.
The bulbous head of the hydrangea hits the window.
You come in. We eat marrow and cartilage.
I wanted the snow to be like snow from television—
fat and legible. How rarely I feel I am anywhere.
I hate the animal when it looks like what it is.
After Daddy
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
–Genesis 2:24
Every mornin I ask Mama,
Why do your eyes look like torn
screens? I say, Mama your flies
are gettin in the house again.
I swat at my ears, then
lift the toilet lid and find clear
wings floatin, black bellies pinned in
still water. Go on and pee, she says. Don’t
need to flush ‘em first.
When Mama scoops her coffee
grounds, she buries a family alive
while coughin antennae up onto
the shelf of her molars.
Says it tickles when she bites down.
The dog snaps at the air.
Each time he catches one, we three circle up
and howl. Our songs blanket the buzz through
the afternoon and shimmy the ash in the mantle
urn. By then we’re good and exercised,
arms quivering from reachin, palms gut sticky.
Mama, is this called slap-happy?
She tells me to go wash up for dinner.
She prays: God, bless this food to
our body. Bless those who cannot be
with us today. Amen.
I pinch a maggot outta my
pie and wonder how many get
past our lips unseen.
Every night, as she’s fallin asleep,
I lean in slow and close
and I tell my Mama,
Mama, I think we got ‘em all.
bye bye
—after “American Pie,” sung by Leslie Cheung, a Cantopop star who died jumping off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong
boys always
haunting the gas
stationed at
the kum & go
come around yelling
happy july, all
these lives you haven’t filled
in all these teeth
a faith so deep you can
die in it, like a boy so
high up he thought the
swimming pool was full
and god willing, he
dived in it. in a
preemptive strike, patriotic, partirons
and party on! miss 中国
in 中西部,
i dismiss
their existence, a flotilla
with more in common
with a root beer vanilla
concoction than the
spanish armada, though
that too was a whipped
cream loss. dq stands
for disqualification—three
strikes & the cup is half
mosh pit half military
campaign—god is in the
good fizz—& the bottom
(beyond the caffeine &
fresh sugarcane) is concrete.
Garbage Day
Out the window a squirrel’s noshing on a quesadilla,
paws clasped around a tortilla shard as if mid-prayer
its prayers were answered. I’m making dinner again:
salmon filets like flagstones made from moon,
a cube of butter in the skillet spreading its skirts
while on the cutting board an onion heretics the air.
The truth is sometimes I call your name because I need you
to come look at this, look at how alive I am,
and sometimes how alive I am can only be seen
by what’s happening around me: two people cheering
for a dumpster-diving tree rat, one’s hair
waterfalling onto the other’s shoulder, joy
like a school of minnows swimming overhead—
another glorious day where we have nothing to bury
besides our appetites. Listen:
the dishes in the sink aren’t going to elope
tonight. Let’s admire the sky’s tablecloth,
its chorus of spilled salt. Let’s clasp
our bodies like two hands praying
and crisp the edges of grace.
The Night My Number Tripled
in my recent bloodwork chart, I saw it and I fled.
Panic ripped through me like sallow gas
and as an animal would,
I must have believed
I could hide from my own leaking math. Pregnancy
or tumor—those were the options
and I wasn’t sure which one I wanted
less. Around and around I went
in my apartment parking lot as if pursued
through carmine alleyways. Oh, my blood
and its mutable omens. My brain and its end
of days. It didn’t matter
that the dusk was beautiful in the early
rainy season when the sky takes
on the plush and tropical hues of stone
fruits so I could remember that I lived
in a place far but not too far
from the ocean. Magnolia flowers sat
primly in their teacups. Gray and white
birds shone where they flew like lights
off moving water. It started to get dark.
My parents couldn’t find me.
My boyfriend was asleep
halfway across the world. I walked as if to leave
behind my body, though I understood
I had to receive what it offered me.
So this is what it means
to be alone, I said inside myself
and to myself as a violet wind pushed through
the palm fronds above me, initiating a sound I recognized
like the rustle of dry grasses
before a storm, as the first
stars opened their eyes to nightfall
the way an apocalypse can mean
to reveal.
Person of Interest + Sad Boy Public Relations
Person of Interest
山旮旯 or san ka la—a cantonese phrase meaning a place in the middle of nowhere
that’s where we met
千里眼 & 顺风耳 are two folkloric figures in china—together they’re unstoppable
顺风耳 can hear the subtlest of sounds, carried over great distances by the wind
i’ll be discreet, the coast is clear
千里眼 can see over great distances, span thousands of 里
confuse oresteia with osteria, smooth me over royal jelly
a 里 is a unit of measurement also found in korea & japan
conquer me royal navy, come here my possibility tuna
a metaphor for an impossible distance is 十万八千里 (108000里)
state college is an hour & a half from harrisburg. that’s the distance i would go for you. you drove 5
hours to see your ex
in mandarin, li (里) sounds like li you (理由)—or reason
a commie obsessed with me, commie eye candy, who wudda thought
给我一个理由忘记
hey, low sperm count
kiss me open mouth, swift like taylor
the critics have spoken: i’d rather be alone than settle for the bare minimum
rejecting you seems like the easiest thing in the world (you want to be discarded)
you play too much but seduction is a game for two
i hope one day , we are merit ,
young buck , home skillet ,
Sad Boy Public Relations
1. CONSISTENCY
u type immaculate to me—do u hate me
2. NONCHALANCE
untangle urself for a moment & cheer me up
3. CHARM
ur prodigious
a savant
ur gf’s so dumb she thinks contemporary music means the beatles
4. DRINKING
u obfuscate
cling onto flimsy girl
5. EFFORTLESSNESS
i kiss two fingers pinched together
pretend it is u
6. ATHLETICISM
the closest u got to sports was athlete’s foot
i feel u hard as pear
7. DISCIPLINE
hold me down
tell me u don’t like boy
8. PUBLIC SPIRITEDNESS
seel me like a hawk
i can be tame if u give me what i want
That’s Often the Hardest + Diva
That’s Often the Hardest
Now and then I turn a corner in Brooklyn
and I see something lovely.
A cherry blossom, a blush-red brick,
children frolicking and finding something
to fight about. Unsuspecting, I’ll be
wearing my headphones, noise-canceling,
quite loud, listening to Donna Summer. A joy thunderous
will wake me from my wakesleep. A laugh,
a shout, a story told in excitation, coming
from one gleaming face or many with
the amber light of late day making the whole wide earth
look young.
When I see these stirring, affirming things
I cannot help but think you’d love them
were you here to see them, too.
Then I remember that you’re still alive
and all that I must do is call.
Diva
I’ve long dreamt of being Beyonce, waking up
to a view of the Alps in a pink silk robe.
I pick up the phone by my bed to let my
stylist know I’m awake to be draped in full glamor.
Traipse along marble floors to a kitchen filled with
peaches just ripe. My children would come greet me,
all smiles, having slept soundly. No radiator hissing
like a violent cat to keep them up at night.
I’ve long dreamt of the gas tank always full and
a driveway so that I never have to circle the block.
A pool when I need to cool off. A chef when I don’t want to cook.
But most of all, I want to sing
like someone beloved
in an outfit like a hymn.
To have people who love me
cheer just for standing before them.
To be celebrated. To be queen.
And after all that, I’d get to fall asleep
right when I lie down. That’s what I imagine it’s like.
Full Moon to Monday
College cracked the fantasy wide
open. All our Pretty Woman dreams
flatlining in the bottom of some frat guy’s
basement. Memories of the “talk” and how
she left out the part about surgery. The stitching
and staining and then, there’s recovery.
Came home for break still soaking through
the gauze of this girlhood and all our moms
could tell. But no one spoke the truth.
That you can be six shots in and his hands
won’t reek of meat. That his toothy grin won’t
be dripping with blood and shit. All the songs
he’ll play in the dark corner or the back seat
of his car will be foreshadowing. But you won’t
remember a thing. You won’t ever know it
happened. Cause molly is the new pick-up line
and he’s got those for days. Nothing mom said
about chivalry and not putting out on the first
date prepared you for date rape drugs and scalding
hot showers to rinse the blood off.
Vanishing after you texted and told him
you were pregnant, and the shame slut-walked
all over Facebook. That innocence we knew is gone
like hope the RA isn’t hooking up with freshmen.
Somewhere between t-ball and toga parties
the rules changed from checking yes, no,
maybe, to him marking his criminal territory.
At least then you had the right to choose
or feel like you had options. But here, now,
you’re left to break and mend, stitch the wounds
to not spill the secrets, sober your sorrows
and be back before Monday’s 8 a.m. exam.
Autumn Evening at the Laundromat
Bug$ R Crawlinggg ↑ The Wall or iz That Me???
It’s not winter/it’s now spring/what is outside wants to come in/buds glow fuzzy like buckskin/
your classic pacifier your bottle of booze/cayenne anger/yellows the bruise
watch
me
sink
into the mattress/between my legs you’ll stroke the sadness/I black my eyes like Cleopatra/the
closer you get/I’m a charming disaster
shut
the
curtains
neighbors can see/you’re snorting white powder off your key/Cupid push the arrow
through/watch your lips strobe red to/blue/house/hardcore/trance/electro/6am put on early
techno/let sound pulse you away
never
let
the
beat
decay
days are melting into days/your life goes missing at the rave/go out searching for who you
were/recycled hipster/identity blur/sadness breaks the drug numb surface/your body now an
despair circus/stop/pill-pop/24-packs/Molly/cocaine/panic attacks/
newspaper
searching
my
zodiac
for
a
sign/consult the Ouija one last time/down on my knees/begging stars to align?/should I leave my
strung-out VALENTYNE???
To answer
your question, Mr. Hughes
it explodes
flings its syrupy shrapnel
beyond the neighborhood walls
hot with the day’s oppression
But later
much later
it locates its fragments
to weight itself against the night
It becomes
Mr. Hughes
the promise of every dream dreamed
It becomes
in the blackness
its own shining sun
Another Day
—a found poem: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
I feel the bruised cry of birds in my body
when I wake.
Thinness rushes my pink imperfect heart
and I am cast down at another day—
hands and feet and body.
Here is idleness, brown water, disgrace.
The sun is yellow and laughing
leaves stir and patter across the lawn
and I long for darkness and sleep—
its brass thud, its pirouetting slam.
I lie here and watch the bedroom
harden into night.
Metaphorical Ghosts
There are so many ways to describe
the fact that we die and are reborn
countless times: the New Year’s resolution list,
the myth of a phoenix rising from ashes,
the box of hair dye and the scissors, the poets:
dying is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
But no one ever talks about the ghosts.
The dead ones that that turn your bones
into a creaky, old haunted mansion.
And no one talks about how frequently girls die
in a lifetime. Girl after girl after girl after girl.
Some of them are mischievous and hopeful,
frolicking in your ribcage like a child who thinks
everything will turn out all right.
Yet some of them are screaming.
And when you hear the way she cried out,
again, it keeps you up at night. You don’t know
how to escape her, banish her,
remove her like a threatening mass. But some of them
you encounter in the night like lost strangers.
That girl that walked the pier barefoot
in a fluorescent bikini with other girls,
that girl who hated herself so much
she had no understanding of the power
of her body. But the water’s rhythm, hungrily
tonguing the sand, spoke its subliminal language:
the eros that promised it would erupt in waves
within her body underneath a boy’s body. So that
when the boys came along, sunned and shirtless
in their glistening madness, and told the girls
to jump off the ledge, chanting, do it, just do it,
don’t think about it, and the idea of drowning
passed briefly overhead like the shadow of a seagull,
she leapt in. And the boys laughed, caught it all on film.
And you know she made it to the surface again,
gasping life more forcefully than ever,
and the water droplets on her body
were proof of her glittering courage,
toweled off a beat too slowly by the boys,
and you know it was fine—it was, yes, it was fine—
she survived, she giggled, she gave the boys her number,
so who then is this young girl that just coughed
salted sand onto your poem with seaweed in her hair?
Sun & Air
Sun
In Oregon once, the acolytes in saffron
sweatshirts and idolatrous medallions
made a vow to grow roots and change
address, to elect the man with the sunset
sport coat to serve as mayor and recast
community codes, to pull a nail here,
an ordinance there, the streets signs
of their Christian neighbors taken down
to make way for the Sanskrit of their master.
At last, the real estate of consciousness
was growing. Less in communal rapture
and rage that climaxed in bewildered tears
than the watchful stillness that came after.
Surely there was nobility in this.
The lotus of their suffering flush, effulgent.
Somewhere a ribcage cools in a field,
stoned on love, that kind that lifts the fog
above its place on earth, but after that,
what? The new human, the archetype
their teacher promised, what they were hoping
to become, what they feared the locals
in hunting gear and office would destroy?
And can you blame them. Say a torch
broke the glass of your hotel in Portland
or a long sleeve poisoned the salad bars
of your town cafés. Who would not feel
some shadow of their partisan nature fall
into the arms of your frightened kind.
I have been that child, that prideful victim
of my own outrage. Call it the fitful
cleansing of a birthmark, the forever
failed extradition of histories of abuse.
Call it shell-shock; or war; or call it
what it is, salmonella and kerosene
and the scarlet seam of the unclean
lesion breaking, but do not call it new.
Puritans of permission raise their cries
as Christ does at the altar, disseminating
wine with a bitter summons to forgive.
Submission and refusal. How better
to survive the next ice age or spiritual
contagion: a thicker coat, warmer meal,
a feast day between tribes; how better to live
and let live than deep inside a system
of guards to wave friends and family through.
The body of the chosen is a body
after all, and so in need of water, harbor,
seasonal fire and the couriers of sleep.
It shrouds itself in skin, as Bibles do,
and great redwoods, and the new human
laid beneath their limbs, a child of heaven
awakened from a scare to find herself,
transfixed, in a crystal of estrangement,
christened in the amber of dusk and dawn.
Air
The holier the stone the more like stone
the power and resolve that laid it, there,
in the heart of the contested common.
The last of the temple King Solomon built.
So say the faithful in their signature black
though doubtless they understand: to build
a wall is no king’s work, but that of servants
who will go nameless, and if another god
claims his prophet hitched here his horse
with wings, there is little to say to make
a god recant, revise, or otherwise move,
to abandon a place like that. The prayer
whispered or tucked into a hole in stone
might be, in installments, one long prayer,
incanted under the breath, and if it helps,
it helps, it mortars, mends, transmogrifies
the dullness of loss that makes a stone a stone,
a holy land a calf whose gold is blood.
*
Every comic dies now and then, but then,
if called, they rise, and folks remember best
the deeply wounded ones who made them
laugh like friends. I am thinking of you,
Greg Giraldo, who told Joan Rivers once,
You used to look your age, now you don’t
even look your species. And then her face—
wounded, tightened, paralyzed, stitched,
healed and babied with the finest lotions—
gave way, and I saw a little white light in
her teeth, a bit of joy, however nervously
touched, beyond the scalpel of this affront
or that desire to be young, I saw her death
in the arms of your addiction, the one
that took you too damn soon, to sit in heaven
and roast God, as your best friend put it,
as if nothing were sacred where everything is,
and each cold mask crumbles into laughter.
*
When I think of idols that have died,
I think of the toy my father saved from
his childhood, how it reddened his shelf.
Beside his picture with the governor,
a small truck with no one in it. It served
as proof of the boy I never met, never
understood. He had so little child
in him, let alone the sentimental kind.
You should always keep one reminder,
he said. I always did, always thought
he loved me better when I was small.
Look at me, said all the rusted places.
And when he left us, they said it again,
look, but what they revealed remained
an empty promise. But I could see it,
touch it. It had wheels. Hollow places.
When I think of death, I think of this.
And it flew into walls and drove right through.
A Hollyhock… + The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog…
A Hollyhock That Once Belonged to Stanley Kunitz
Later that week I found it in my right side
pocket. It had begun to bloom, blue. Tissuey soft.
To the bottle of carbolic acid went your father.
To brain plaque, the weed of forgetfulness,
went your mother. Still you felt a fondness
for the natural thing, you loved even the mulch,
and the flower of the mallow family, hollyhock.
Come in, you said. From one specimen of the garden
you cut me a sprig, which I pocketed. Banished
from light, from you, from its princedom, a small
Gautama. Then I forgot it was there, down
there in the dark, doing its precise work anyway.
The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog That Surrenders Is
The tongue hangs fat to lick the air,
gray and dry as a gag. Your whole life
you panted after whojustcameherenow,
a bone over there you could smell before
you could see, the wide patch of yard
and a figure of a hart darting in a feral
blur through trees. The joy when some
hand behind you lets go and sends you
running down the open snowy road,
and you are yourself again or for the first
time. Though now what use is there
to tense the metal leash. Now to learn
to work the new trick: one who waits.
It was long ago you learned to stand
off. You learned to stand for nothing.
That was the beginning of your training.
That was when the sky was your whole head.
Now to go on. And to go on. To become
the sick mule, the tagged skin, gnawed bone.
To learn the first art with more willingness,
and then to sit, lie down.
The Future is Trashion
Act Now + more
Act Now
When I’m low, I hang out
with the slugs and sugar ants,
I ignore the emails, You will run out
of storage in the cloud.
The clouds
will always make space for me,
I already live in a fog
and there’s always room for more
photos, a virtual bookcase.
As much as I love
being able to type my sadness
to a stranger, my screen sometimes
reaches out and puts its hands
on my hips—stay here a little longer.
I know I’m brave
when I leave my earbuds on the table
next to my cat. And when my stomach
knots, it’s because I’ve hit reply all
and now Dick knows he’s living
out his name like a job description.
This is when I know
I need to stand up and stop
being another head without body, a mind
plus fingers typing. Sometimes
when I’m walking down the street
a neighbor runs up to me to tell me
how Crossfit is working for her,
I press Skip ad until I see the real-time video
of Max, the dog who lives three doors down
and is dealing with depression
because his owner just died.
This is when I reach down
and wipe the goo from Max’s eyes,
and realize how much happier I am
when I sit in the middle of empty road
under an unlimited sky
holding a dog who has no idea
why his owner isn’t coming home.
If We Had Better Lighting, Our World Would be a Soap Opera
Global warming is more than me leaving
the heat on 80 degrees in the guest room.
There’s a shadow on our planet’s lung
and the narrow road is what we drive now
because half of it has slid into the ocean.
We are living longer, but we’re doing it with less
sex and friends. The view from here is gorgeous,
but who to share it with? I am watching the world
turn, all my children becomes all my adults.
I try to count our steps to the grave—5, 100,
1000? More? I’m less than optimistic.
I’m the character who is drinking wine
at noon in her nightgown. The soap operas
are failed decisions and mistakes are real life
choices. Global warming makes my cheeks
flush. Climate change is another way
to introduce myself, to undress and dive
into the ocean that wants to swallow me.
Let me cry dramatically before the scene ends,
let the director drag me to the shore.
Sunflower, What Have You Gotten Yourself Into1
Tonight a neighbor told me how climate change
was a hoax as we stood under an orange sky
from the smoke of wildfires and when he coughed
because the air quality was not good enough
for his lungs I said, It hasn’t rained for years
and when the birds started falling from the sky
he said, That happens sometimes, it’s cyclical.
God bless the confused, I said to the waves
reaching over into our yards, to the oceans
so warm the icebergs are the ice cubes
the barista places into our lattes, this should
cool it. And at night when I walk home
in a tank top because what was once a winter
is a mild spring, I lean back and watch the bats
circle and eat up whatever insects we have
too many of and I think my god, we fucked this up
so quickly, as I admire the moon that almost winks
at me, as if it knows how many years we have left.
1Title from a line by Kim Rashidi.
Cooing & Longing
Cooing
A bird perched on the fence for a minute—
its cooing brought me out of the house.
There was so much color on its feathers.
Its beak didn’t jut forward but bent downward
like in most of birds of prey, but this one didn’t prey.
I couldn’t feed it so it left sooner
than it used to when you were here, no grains
to litter the compound with, but then
there was no kind of fodder in the house.
It was the kind of bird that knew its beauty—
perhaps a special thing for its species.
I had thought it would cut me some slack,
but, like you, it didn’t, fleeing on instinct;
like you, it left a trail of leaves in its wake.
Longing
I remember the first dry season I spent
in that house you lived in until you died.
Harmattan almost bent you double,
dragging in its dusty perfume across miles
and into every room, sparing nothing
so much so I never knew I would ever
be so expectant of rain; even the birds,
the animals were having a hard time
of all the charade that was the weather.
Even the wooden shelves cried as they cracked,
their grains warping into undulant hills.
I was addicted to the city life.
I tried to hide my feelings because
somehow the weather benefitted you.
You had never so stood at the window
with such longing, in your eyes, to be outside.
I looked into your clear brown eyes and tried
to will the young agile person I knew
who would walk miles with me merely to see
what the landscape was like at the moment
because, for you, no one stepped into
the same landscape twice, for you the wind
was always changing something, eroding
either the soil, or the trees of their leaves,
the rain would always wash something away;
even the cities could not escape this.
It was like a process of aging.
Sometimes the wind brought more than dust
and its empty smell: now a sweet smell
but one which you doubted: maybe it was
the smell of bodies carried over miles,
maybe the dust was part of their bodies.
I knew it couldn’t be real yet I let
myself to imagine it, as scary
as it was, for didn’t we hear about how
the rivers, though how dried up they were,
still vomited tumescent bodies
from their silvery bellies, about how
the beggars didn’t wake up in the streets,
their stiff bodies curled up like balls of wool?
I tried to find things to love in this place
but couldn’t, rather reasons to leave
were monthly stacking. Minna was almost
like this and each day the people I stayed with
tried to convince me to cut the place some slack,
I took a piece of my clothing and quietly
folded it and threw it in my traveling bag
until one night I realized it was full.
The Murder Hornet
can fly sixty miles in a day
& decapitate its prey
quicker than licking
honey off a thumb.
Size has its advantages.
& its costs. My mom
told me early I’d pay
for the size of my heart.
You feel too much, she said.
You want too much.
In the Love Addicts Anonymous
meeting, a white man in a gold ascot
said, I need to be devoured by love.
Devastated, I added, swallowed whole.
Murder hornets are efficient killers,
but is any torture more elegant
than chasing what you’ll never catch?
There was one time in my life
my heart felt right-sized,
quiet, & I was so at peace
I was invisible. The robin
thought I was a chair or tree
the easy way she cleaned
her feathers near my feet.
More often my feelings swarm,
a storm surge, how water alone
can warp metal, level a village.
When I keep feelings at bay
I appear okay, recalling
how Gulliver’s giant size
made him too dangerous
to keep.
Tomorrowland & Man’s Dominion
Tomorrowland
I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on land.
—Wernher von Braun on humanity entering space, Los Angeles, 1955–1957
Some days after work, I’d rent a speedboat
from Long Beach and hop it out to Catalina
for an evening dive. What a thrill every
time, the chill of sliding through blue skin,
descending down the long teal folds of fulgid
kelp. A bright humming brain of gold baubles
lifting braids to the sky like a praising willow
swaying in the sugared light. I was almost lost,
weightless and wondering through the ocean
with no one following me but the moon as it
rose to look upon its navel. Omphaloskepsis: to
consider the divine inside the belly. When Jonah
was ankle-sunk in stomach acid, he was learning
the volcano’s wrath that gave birth to land. I could
spend hours floating in the whale constellation,
that dark, starry sea of seas. The umbilicus of space
that ties us to the womb of ocean. I wanted a rocket
to break through the egg with its tooth, dislocating
heaven and earth’s denotations. When we first
fumble around in the moon’s cratered belly, what will
we call our new lexis? How will we learn to be in
the universe but not of it once we leave behind our
world? The mystical isn’t in the ecstasy of floating
through space, our fragile bones eroding, but in
bearing the burden of our attachment toward a
center. Peter met Christ on the water because
he wanted to be like him. I designed Lunetta to churn
out gravity for the future to meet the cosmic Christ.
Man’s Dominion
And don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there [space]. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and
he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.
―Wernher von Braun, 1958
Standing at the edge of the Yucatan
jungle, I felt an urge to just run
blindly into it. The adrenaline was like a
timpani drum roll, paving the entrance
for the brass. I hired a guide, and as we
pushed through curling palms, ferns, and
snagging vines, I swear I could smell the jaguar’s
urine on the trees it had sprayed, hear
echoes of the animals that had fled before it.
I could hear a mosquito filled with a pyramid
of blood. When we saw the jaguar,
I became quiet as space, holding every
sound against the butt of my rifle.
Like when I held the liturgy candle,
planning each step so I wouldn’t spill the wax,
trying to pretend no one was watching.
His fur was glistening jet oil, his gaping mouth
a range of snowcapped teeth. The God who
framed his symmetry pitch-dark dared to
lock my limbs into their grooves
as well. He meandered through the lushness as a black
hole against a canopy of stars, his gold eyes
moving like jumpy flying saucers
in a child’s sloppy flipbook. I aligned
the crosshairs half a meter ahead of him
and pulled the trigger like a prophet
releasing a message before the people were ready.
My throat felt as if I had swallowed too
much water. I strode through the mist
toward my trophy, the graceful carcass already
hazy with flies. I had my guide put it in the jeep
and drive me into town to have it skinned.
Pollarding & Animal Spirits
Pollarding
In this unwitting dawn. In the begonia
I put in the poem because of its incantatory
sound. In the vine I thought was a sweet
pea—to put a sweet pea in the poem—
but was actually a weed, common vetch.
In the still early summer heat like gentle
pressure on the forearms and wrists.
A trio of military planes screams overhead.
I squint into the glare and the leftover
cosmetic product on my hands flashes
in a type of dim recognition. Wash it off. Who
is going to read about botanical misprision.
There’s a war on and I am the yellowing
pages of Bishop’s National Geographic.
There’s always a war on and its location
is not a function of place but of people, plucked
for the vase or the oven, wilting or burning or
eaten as a delicacy. The word of the day
is upward. The word of the day is all cops
are bastards. Who am I to say what we should make
of the clay at our feet, minor gods with shovels
and grass seed, with kilns and molds, the joints of
our fingers curling around some texture, releasing
it in the checkout aisle or through the window
that backs the checkout aisle.
After adrenaline, a comedown just like any
other high. You’re sitting on the floor in a hoodie
and biting all the skin off your lips. Outside,
the day continues to mulch itself, there are
robins, someone is invoicing someone else
for another order of rubber bullets.
The symbolic vulture will not arrive
To hunch in the middle distance. Sorry,
I’m back now, I was on the patio this whole time,
my mouth is bleeding and the roar has faded
such that it might be mistaken for an air conditioner,
the mechanical hum of comfort
in deeply inhospitable environments,
a fueled and speedy monarchy, it’s coming,
I tell myself, get up, it’s well-rested and armed
to the teeth literally but also and importantly
for my purposes metaphorically, a giant blossoming
of dipshit noisemaking. It doesn’t have to go
to the office and it is responsible for the existence
of Phoenix, Arizona. I wobble on my feet
like a newborn anything. I am melancholic
about structures. Look: no matter what you grab
out of the kitchen drawer, it can be used
as a lever. In what follows, we’re on the side
of the ice, those tropical begonias be damned.
Animal Spirits
“If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.” —John Maynard Keynes
Enterprise withering on the vine. Enterprise left to rot in the sun.
Out of its carcass, a cooler wind—
/ / /
If the world is bad to you, you are sad.
If the world is good to you, but you know about the world, you are sad.
If the world is good to you, and you do not know about the world, you will not be sad.
If the world was bad to you but it is no longer, it is easy to forget about the world, and easy to
forget you were ever sad.
O dripping globe. What we’ve blamed
on the elements. On the accident
of our cells rather than the rapidity
with which we turn water to cement.
/ / /
The idea that the brain is the seat of the soul is older than most people think it is.
The history of naturalizing economic activity is exactly as long as you think it is.
We were made for money / / we were made of money
/ / /
Falling through a substrate,
the gentle “u” of the body as it faces upward. The hands and feet like a dancer’s, directional.
On the curb, a man turns over shovelfuls of dampened sand in a wheelbarrow. The sound is like
stiff fabrics hung too close to one another on a line. A recursive intimacy.
A brief and wild optimism, and then the grinding sludge of machinery, its unmatchable
excitation.
/ / /
A bull in the blood.
A bull made of blood, made of air, air carried in the blood air seated in the brain.
The brain a bull. The world a bull with its hooves on the world.
O beast that could be gentle. Asleep in the beige autumn of the shaken head, slow wading
through the pool of counter-liquefaction.
Abolish selling.
In the hand outstretched, these cool bristles
like a hand broom, a horned smoothness and the scent
of fields and a fire recently extinguished. This animal pause.
/ / /
Frenzied acquisition of undergarments,
small vases, linens, soaps, followed by the hatred of stuff—
/ / /
The dog on the surface of the water, the dog on the silver of the coin.1
1See Robert Burton, in Anatomy of Melancholy, on rabidity: “That in Hydrophobia they seem to see the picture of a dog still in their water” (222).
Invasive
Then there was no more singing.
All the lights in their throats cut:
the protest of evening wolves & black
bears nuzzling a parched creek for any-
thing that might sustain them another
white-skinned winter, those foreign
birds we never learned the names for.
Invasive, my grandfather called them.
Like the silver carp haunting our
local river. Bullfrogs & possums.
He called us natives after living
three generations on the same
hard land it took so much blood
to own. At the end of the path
the bullet takes to meet the right
body, the right body drops like
nothing worth losing sleep over.
It’ll cost two men three hours
to drag it home in one piece.
That wilder silence lasts but
a brief eternity. Before the unseen
choir shakes the forest. Again,
the same damn wolves & starlings. Men
still dragging. The season closing.
Its wiry legs kick & quiver in our hands.
Like strings. Song. Our song now to sing.
Long Marriage (Parable of the Skull)
Over years we lifted it sometimes
from its cardboard box, studying
the fifty teeth and gazing into the open
eye sockets, this possum skull we found
in our sixth year, half-buried in the dirt
behind the rental house. For decades, then,
we moved it everywhere we went,
and always it lay quietly, as patient as dirt,
and only now and then did I imagine it
dreaming that skin formed once more around
its body—the moon face and moon tail—
so it might waddle again along the river.
This poem was originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and was a runner-up in the Humboldt Poetry Prize.
Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them
I. CAGE ITEMS
This box should be fairly heavy. The door
never needs opened or undone. Bend the rim
into a square. Little danger to your
self—the room to be afforded him.
A looking glass hung up by a small chain—
your pet’s vanity exceeds belief. A
flimsily made affair is soon bitten
to pieces. Body of a cage. Many a
good monkey is killed by swallowing
fragments of glass. Rub on a coat of
maroon. A little ornamental topping.
Or Venetian Red, most suitable of
colors for a cage. All that remains
is to procure your monkey and put him in.
II. CLASSIFICATION
From the time my fingers were big enough
to manufacture fly-cages with hollowed
cork and pins—all other lines of
fancy well threshed out—Simians have held
great fascination. The schoolboy’s definition
is “the plural of monk.” Or humonculous.
Much is lacking in what might have been
told. I cannot pin. Great naturalists
have labored to show a relationship.
I cannot pin my credibility.
Below the average human idiot’s,
the head of a chimpanzee. I am drifting.
What might have been. A fertile source of
drollery. My fingers were big enough.
III. AILMENTS
Disease—Symptoms of Indisposition—
Quinsy—Good Riddance—a small apple
hollowed out—Toothache—Headache—treat him
as you would a child—Useful Article—
as you would—Broken Limbs—a human
being—Rheumatism—Rupture—Risk of
Being Bitten—first he should be en-
veloped—Treatment—in a bag—Costive-
ness—Biliousness—Monkeys Eating Their
Own Tails—a ready sale is better than
the nuisance—Excrement—the “Kill or Cure”
Treatment—treat him as you would a human
being—Simple Remedies—a small apple hollowed
out and plugged again is greedily devoured
IV. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Savagely grabbed, the hand that has fed and
petted him all along. The very moment
novelty is lost, sit and write off an
advertisement to Exchange and Mart,
Bazaar. I haven’t always had the heart.
A passing menagerie generally
has a vacant cage. With an iron bar
a sharp and heavy blow. An exceedingly
human-like affair. As if we all of us
come at last to this. In skinning him
yourself you’ll find his hide fairly tough.
Put him in a natural posture. A bit
of dried moss, artificial leaf you might
purchase at the milliners. Keep him in full light.
The source material for these pieces is Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them, Arthur Patterson’s 1888 handbook, which was published in response to the colonialist British fashion of adopting exotic animals without any idea of how to properly provide care for them. These poems erase and rearrange the text into sonnet form. The poems were originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and were the winner of the Humboldt Poetry Prize.
There They Are
my mother, my father. Her skinny
blue wrists, his ear caressing a cigarette. In the beginning,
it is already too late, but there is hunger & no time
to waste. All they need are six hands, three mouths, a clockwork
yearning for locks of their own, windows square & fresh. In the beginning,
my cry breaks my father, who flushes red at my fall, opens my face in search
of his mother. Grasses, grasses on a country
road, hawthorn up to their waists,
aflame. The crying of no mothers. Temple bells hung
by the wind. An October without moons,
a feeling I’ve been here before. Dew on the page.
Windows billowing wax paper.
Fall’s charred eyelids. Toes pressing down my own wet
imprint. Begin the world without a bang.
Water, air, the Earth split into an egg,
elements halved for light. No mothers, just two figures on a bicycle
for one. A sweaty country road. Stoves that won’t start,
boxes of damp matchsticks. Strain of a blue wrist
untucking cigarettes from his lips
prayer of hands inside the ashes of mothers,
single finger curving to a hush. Careful,
hold the glass up to one eye, split the nucleus
with the other, explosions muted by winged lungs.
Put down my pen. Unfold my eyes. Count backwards
before legs, before longing, until I hit a snag in the web,
open, to find my palm full of tears.
Once, there were no mothers. Trace the outline,
one, two, build a family from hunger. Listen, a cry, mine,
dragging her mother’s last breath up the jagged washboard as he soaps
my throat clean, baptizing his mother’s blackened lungs.
My mouth opens to wake their beginning & just like that
blesses our downfall.
There, stretch the canvas, spread oil thin-thin
into our crevasses, what’s that in the distance? No mother,
not the moon, just six hands bent over a clock face with no opening,
porcelain spoons raised to another’s lips, tap – tap we widen
our insides until ink forks our edges. In the beginning,
an October without night. Windows torn
open with flashlights. Hawthorn dawning a mother’s last breath.
Let me begin again,
Some Mornings
Some mornings are not meant to be peaceful
they are full of tiny battles, body pains, and aches
coffee grounds spilled in the crack of tile
egg shells crushed against your spine
Some mornings are not meant to be hopeful
the sun’s tyrant gaze slips in through the gaps
the ceiling fan is a switchblade to the ear
alley cats scream their war cries to the world
Some mornings are not meant to be calm
the throbbing skull of a night, water-deprived
echoes inside itself, a reminder that the body
desires equilibrium and safety in this storm
No, some mornings are not meant to be peaceful
yet the day moves on, mixing with the night
the truce made since the dawn of time
where worries unwind, where thought dissolves,
where the world is reminded that dreams live
beyond the body and the body is a dream.
Echolocation & Proof
Echolocation
I begin with near-silence,
the droning refrigerator,
a dog barking far off.
You’ve just fallen asleep
as morning splinters
through the blinds.
He kicks off his boots,
braces himself on the dresser,
pulls at the leg of his jeans.
Something wakes you—
a knocked over jar of change,
a picture frame falling flat.
You must miss the feeling
of waking in the night
knowing exactly where
you are, hearing only
your brothers’ muffled voices
through the wall. Years later,
nights when my friends and I
stay up until dawn,
you’ll wake this way again
to laughter resonating
down the hall. One night,
to meet our girlfriends,
J. T. and I will sneak
to Arroyo Vista Park.
You’ll wedge a drumstick
in the window-track and wait
for our knock at the door.
After sending J. T. home,
you’ll say When it’s quiet, I know
somethin’ aint right. Because
this all feels close enough
to the truth, and because I have
no evidence I was made
the usual way—not even a picture
of you and my father together—
I’ve made this:
In splinters of
morning, you pull me from
his open mouth while he sleeps,
piece me together from handfuls
of his running breath, the small
sound of whitewater.
Proof
The fact is I was made
from what Whitman called
“father-stuff,” from a current
of you and from being held.
This—the raw physiology of it—
may explain why most fathers
think only of pushing their sons
into the world and most mothers
only of keeping them from it.
But the facts only tell us
half of every story, and never
the half we need. I have
a photograph taken just weeks
after I was born. I was
sleeping on your bare chest.
You were slouched in an armchair
with your fingers laced like rivulets
under my feet. These are facts—
even if you forgot, and even if all
I remember from being with you
before Arizona is the smell of
shop grease and dipping tobacco,
you once held me the way
a riverbed wants to hold a river.