my body to a blade. Weapon for nothing. Recall my first diet, 66 pounds, my proud refusal of a fist-sized milk carton. My mother’s sister at 40, spooning Gerber peaches into her mouth at the family table. Recall the game my mother taught me when I was a teenager— —find someone on the street who has my body— Now without her how I will sharpen. Will be vapor. Smoke. Furious at the world for nothing. Rushing down the year’s dark corridor, street unspooling every morning, tracking miles. How I craved my mother’s judgement. Be vapor. Be smoke. Be blade. Remember how it feels to desire nothing, not even touch’s static. Remember why emptiness still comforts like nothing else. I will shrink myself down to where I don’t matter. Thumbelina, tight and safe in a walnut shell. Yet grief thickens everything. Even the imprint of my body. Who’s keeping count.
Category: Poetry
Two Poems
How It Is Now, How It Was
as a boy panning the stream behind my house
for the minnows that drilled
down the current in schools. They moved as one—
muscular, thick, sequined—
so if I dipped down, I could nearly scoop
handfuls of their bounty up
to my chest like some dream of my hunter ancestors
lost in the currents
of my DNA. I imagine desire like this.
But whenever I stabbed
my hand into that glacier water, they dispersed
at once, every one. And this entertained me
until the day I did catch one, held its slim, jeweled body
inside my fist. The thrill
of its tail flickering inside my palm
like candlelight, like a snake’s forked tongue
until I unclenched my hand to let it go and saw
it was already gone.
Nurture
As souls in heaven, before inhabiting their bodies, children choose
their mothers. I heard my mother say this exactly twice.
Once after we had fought in the car to cut the silent ride home.
And once on the phone with my aunt after my cousin shot himself
through the mouth. I was born after a summer solstice
under a new moon. Rain thickened the green outside my window.
Above my crib two portraits of angels hung.
Holiday 2
Winner of the 2021 Humboldt Poetry Prize; originally published in TFR 44.2
On this day that in my childhood we celebrated Christmas
I found myself this year on the Gulf of Mexico
with the sea gone as leaden as clay. It seemed to heave
with an inner dislike—at least from where I stood, three stories up
from the beach, a few expensive yards in
from the sand, the humid spray blocked
by the floor-to-ceiling windows,
and the barely moving palms. I was making
a dinner from my childhood. An egg batter you poured
in hot oil and closed inside the oven for a full
twenty minutes till inflated to crisp gold,
plus a wad of beef crosshatched and pressed with flour and salt.
As it cooked, I read my son the story of Midas, how
he wanted the idea of everything, and the lesson was
that everything was dangerous. Darwin wrote that late
in life he’d lost his taste for poetry, for the fat copy of Milton
he was said to take with him on that first trip, still particular
for all the living parts of earth and mind. The couch
I sat on thinking this was as long as the yachts
we’d seen that day at the marina. In their moorings
they were lined so tight and tidily they hardly bobbed, each the same
synthetic just-washed white and dark blue lettering.
We looked at all their given names. We saw some people walk their dog,
step off their bleached wood deck, onto the plastic dock,
as their small thing scampered merrily into the nearby grass,
the people calling after, calling after. Our boys ran ahead.
What is it to live at this cushioned here and now, these privileged
boundaries where everything that could be said, remembered,
can yet still lie ill or unexpressed: the page I read about the girls
who shaved their teacher’s head and stabbed at it with scissors,
the ink they poured upon it, I was scared to tell my husband
how it haunted me, it followed me all day, such cruelty,
and then the nothingness of ocean and the light’s jewels rippling on it,
at least on these high days when the sun shines.
Faith Test
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.
Analog
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.
Value-added
“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.
Relative Risk
—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.
Poisons and Medicines
“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
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.
Two poems
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.
the reckoning
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.
Gravida 3 para 1
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
When I Am Dorothy Gale
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.
Your Name in F# Major
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 Death Is Another Dimension
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.
Prayer with Burning Barn
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.
Stanley’s Bowl
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.
A Greek Myth
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—
Graduate School
My mother was mortified when she heard:
No curtains? How do you live without curtains?
All thanks to my sister who insisted on visiting:
a plot to see what San Francisco had done to me
after half a semester. Just how many rooms
does this apartment have anyway? “Flat,” I said.
“We say flat here. Like in Europe.” LA DI DA,
my mother sang. But no TV, Mister Fancypants?
Five roommates and not one TV—uchh. Had I
given up God, denounced the religion of things,
uprooting myself from her sane Long Island?
I just wanted to study poetry, in “a room, with
some lace and paper flowers.” Like Stevie Nicks.
I just wanted to be a Gypsy. Hadn’t she began here?
Opening for Janis? And Jimi? Writing her songs.
If Stevie had curtains, she likely tore them down.
To wear as a shawl. When my mother mailed some,
I said, “But I’d rather watch the city.” To imagine
the orange bridge stretching behind the rows
of grubby Victorians, to listen to the pigeons
on my roof cooing to orgasm each morning.
I stopped there, sensing my mother’s threshold.
No TV—did ya ever? Likely addressing my sister,
the rat. I assumed she hadn’t mentioned my neighbor,
his slow-mo strip tease in the frame of his window
every dusk—just for me. My sister blew him
a kiss when I refused to let her snap a photo.
“Even this city has limits,” I explained. My mother
threatened a TV for my birthday. “But I need to read.”
Life without commercials, canned laughter. Besides,
hadn’t this been her plan? An educated son, a man
of the world, her little boy in a room with a view?
Two Poems
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
Watching Sermons on Facebook Live
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.