Category: Poetry

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.

 

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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).

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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Two Lynchburg Poems

Riverside Park, Lynchburg

At Riverside Park off Rivermont Avenue,

Katy and I sit on a boulder viewing

the overcast valley where classmates

died leaping

from the 200-foot train trestle.

Every day my body betrays itself into

believing it’s dying, believing the pastor’s

words that homosexual boys

are destined for death.

Katy lights a cigarette as a canopy of leaves protects

us from the rain, says, “I wonder what it feels like to know

you’re going to die.” The train whistles

in the distance.

My mom pretended to die for attention

after she left me. For once I don’t feel her

absence in my body. For once

I feel kind of okay, like I won’t walk

up and down a foggy

Court Street at three a.m. in front of the Episcopal church,

crying and begging

God to make me straight so my father

doesn’t leave me too.

We walk back toward the car in the rain,

listening to the train chug pass in the distance

along the riverbank.

In the clearing between the path and the forest

a gathering of fireflies twinkles in the twilight, my prayers

burning in the trees.

My arms around Katy who, after smoking,

smells like my mom plummeting to earth

on a meteor.

A tear carves down the tracks of skin and leaps off

my jawline. My body simmers to smoke,

little fires,

this figure of ash.

 

[Driving away from Lynchburg]

Driving away from Lynchburg, realizing

the Blue Ridge is my home but not

where I’m meant to live,

a tiger swallowtail smears across

my windshield in powder yellow.

I too have wished to feel the painless

end, but a windshield

nebula requires a life, brittle

as the swallowtail’s chitin wings,

one the mountains can’t afford to lose.

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Insomnia

Night works a dark purple down the loom.

Again, I watch dawn unravel those rows,

 

a weaving and unweaving no less coy

than Penelope producing her burial shroud.

 

Please let today end. I am desperate to feel better

and know days will trudge past this point with me in tow.

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Two Poems

Breakfast with My Spiritual Advisor at Sunny Side Café

His first job out of school was working

as a hospital chaplain at Mercy,

sat bedside with the dying

 

for a living, and he tells me what

it was like to wait for the joints

in their fingers to go loose like he

 

was letting the fish steal the hook to swim

back off into scripture with.

Out down the road

 

the early service releases and a ringing

tower sends off the congregation

with the old, irregular style bell

 

ringing that signifies to me an actual

human is somewhere down there tugging

one end of some rope that crashes

 

a lead tongue against the hollow insides

of cast iron. You hear that, I say,

pointing with a slice of bacon to the air,

 

and he says they’re an expression of joy

meant to help us forget our sadness

for a minute or so, and I say

 

it’s there though, pointing at my heart

with the bacon, the sadness, even

when we let ourselves forget it,

 

same as it’s always been,

the heartache and the thousand

natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

 

He says he prefers Blake

over Shakespeare any day of the week

when it comes to either sadness or joy,

 

To see a world in a grain of sand, he says

and a heaven in a wild flower.

When the ringing quits

 

I say I prefer Frank Stanford, which

is a damn lie, but I don’t tell him I actually

prefer my wife’s hair slinking down her back

 

though I do, or that I prefer sneaking out at night

for a cigar on the porch in early fall,

or that I’ll always prefer to bury the light

 

and put on the darkness like a pair of wool socks

with a hole in one of the big toes

over Milton or Jesus or Sappho.

 

There are houses so broken

they aren’t worth fixing, and sometimes

that’s exactly how I feel. Waterlog turned

 

to dryrot turned so useless you couldn’t

sink a nail. Sometimes my wife whispers

she loves me from the other room and all

 

I hear are bells. Other times, there’s only

a lonely wind passing through the storm door

whispering almost nothing at all.

 

Art Fair

I came to meander through open-air booths erected

in the name of self-taught metallurgical fiends

who curl lengths of iron into abstract lawn décor,

 

in the name of grade school art teachers

who scrawl feverish landscapes into the night,

in the name of potters who breathe and bellow fire

 

into backyard kilns, in the name of woodworkers

who turn burlwood into bowls for still-life prints.

I came here because there exist people with second lives

 

that last longer than the first, and because we all

eventually fall into the shapeless crowds who wander

these grassy lanes like ghosts who’ve fallen

 

into portraits tacked in museum galleries. If I fail

to bargain down a smear of moon oil on canvas, just watch

me move in on that bloodwood cutting board,

 

or that hand-twined chandelier, because there’s a price

in my head that’s incapable of change and all it takes

is a bit of small talk and to look someone in the eyes.

 

I once convinced a man at a roadside fireworks tent

to knock ten bucks off a 12-pack of Mississippi Gambler

mortar shells so I could paint the night with more color

 

than you can imagine, and he just sat back into his body

and his impossibly quiet lawn chair. Just sat back down

into a life defined by a carnival tent of powder and fuse.

 

Listen, I came here to feel a rougher art rush through

each one of my eye’s billion vessels, because color

and form, and because far from the Louvres

 

of the world artists still find ways to fashion

grief into the arcades of other people’s hearts.

Because somewhere near these tents meat smoke rises

 

from pork fat spit into embers, and because somewhere

there is a moveable stage upon which a bass player

slowly unlatches his case, and because soon enough

 

the lights of this art fair will begin to dim, and each

one of us will drift back to the silence of our homes

where we will each unearth from slumber the stud-finder

 

level, hammer and a single nail in order to hang

an image upon the dining room wall

where before there was nothing, until now.

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Santa Maria Novella

Florence, Italy

 

Outside the Santa Maria Novella basilica, I draw belief

in God for hours on a bench and local and foreign

visitors watch me watching faith. We all stare down

 

the church. Revisit and retrace an object

as if it can save the millennium, as if it can save me.

I am drawing to you, Love, in straight black lines

 

as a spectator’s wrinkles deepen. Who is on the watch

for angels and Satan as millennials take self-portraits

filtered to Beautiful for hours in front of the church?

 

As if to follow as if to Like as if to Share as if to Friend

as if to Capture as if to Block as if to Leak. Is this social

media faith’s purgatory? Please believe in my selves.

 

Inside my real body, frescoes. Frescoes and sketches of

now dead little i’s and little u’s then purportedly loving.

Love™ – a façade as flat as the green and white lines

 

mapping the face of the Santa Maria Novella.

All one hundred people in this square freeze

to view order for seconds and minutes and hours

 

and the lovers kiss and hold it as if Love’s relics

as I wonder who will be discarded upon homecoming as

if trash blown up dew-slicked streets of East Walnut Hills.

 

u and i kissed and held it for years

in America to peel off the monochromatic

color scheme on Satan’s dividing palette yet

 

my image you displayed for no one. Unaffirmed,

unshared, you ghosted me. Our love—my grave.

 

Behind the basilica, the sinking sun births shadow-

twins, keeps loneliness company. Couples go silently

away. Nights, I pretend to be Loved™—paint God.

 

Where the tour

 

Where the auction

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Like Fireworks, Far Off

As if chrysanthemum fireworks flaring

gold, blue, red—brief, phosphorescent

amoebas throb, pulse. Next, a galaxy

of green stars spins out of existence.

Then, a flurry of supernovas

 

flare and fade. After, a comet-like

streaking ends in a white flash. All the while,

a far off chorus of oohs and ahs

mingles with some last applause.

Then, for a moment, it seems like dawn.

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The Doctor Looks at My Blood Work

Says: There are blacksmiths in your eyes.

Maybe this explains the forging.

The way I flatten heat. Bang

earth against answer until

I call it knife. Nodding to bellows

in their muddy howls. Told them

chemistry separates from slag.

I speak in gardens. Interrogate

the estrogen and her rising weeds.

From space this earth is more red

than any astronaut will speak.

In the dirt, the iron begs to be born.

I kneel before anvil and pray.

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Three Months Without Razor

or the scratch

calling from behind

without kiss of water to skin

without the graze of a finger

or palm to cradle a smile

but love—at times—

like winter

ends abruptly

and with a blade

the pores shocked

and opening

their wide mouths

once again—

without arrest—

dancing with the sun

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Earth’s Weight

He knows we uproot burdock

and hack down the musky trees of heaven.

He knows we kill mosquitoes,

but spare the killer spiders. He knows

how cats and opossums look

when they get run over: slick loops

of veined intestines, bulged eyes

and choked-out tongues. He knows

the living die, but do not want to die:

worm tugged thin from dirt to bird;

hooked fish muscling for the water;

scared pig scuffing against the ramp.

He knows we humans die, and kill

our own. He knows what soldiers are,

what warplanes do. He is four

and he also knows numbers:

a hundred and twenty-five pounds,

his mother. Sixty minutes, one long hour.

Three million people, the city of Chicago.

He’s four, and lately wants to know wars:

“Tell me a war, Daddy.” I name one,

and he wants the number of people killed.

The Civil War: six hundred thousand.

“Is that more than a thousand?

Can you count that many? Tell me

another war.” And another. He pays

attention. Vietnam: more than two million.

World War Two: at least forty million.

“That’s a lot, isn’t it?” Later he’ll ask, “Why?”

and we’ll talk about money, land, hate,

and following orders, but right now

all he wants is the name of a war

and the numbers of the killed—numbers

so vast you couldn’t count them

in a single lifetime, like the number

to tally earth’s weight—a number he loves

to tell and tell: six point six sextillion tons.

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birth of venus

Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, c. 1485.
The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, c. 1485. The Uffizi, Florence, Italy.

 

tidal women splay tempera  

the conch pigmented against turquoise waters 

her body sea-bound in paint and bone  

she wears herself in brush strokes 

 

zephyr and aura blow embryonic seawater from her shoulders 

spring’s hora rushes to mantle her newborn curves  

renaissanced she crashes borders architected  

as venetian lips she cannot speak through 

 

her body imaginative

almost cadaverous

 

she speaks around 

she gazes as she is gazed upon 

her nakedness to nudity 

 now pornographic 

 now classical 

her body tidal 

 

father her your words 

your chipped teeth 

your plaster-rotted frescoes 

in your marbled mausoleums 

she speaks you back  

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Starlight

I bring the watered-down wine to my mother’s lips

hold the plastic cup at an angle, tilt the straw.

Pleasures remain, and we practice them.

The body in water.

The anticipation of spring.

Hummingbirds.

 

Above the deck, a string of lights levitates

below the sunshade like a globed consciousness

working only in the night.

Below the deck—small animals,

bundles of rustling nerves.

How many worlds?

 

How many dimensions hiding

in our perceived walls? In the dark of summer

we watch insects give themselves to fire

and we take in my father’s stories with more wine,

more water. When it is time, we will rise together

on the homemade lift into the living

 

room. We will wheel down the hall and

my brother will cradle the arc of my mother

in his arms and lay her to sleep in bed.

This is the geometry of dying—

and our grief is a closed circle

concentric in its company but radiating

 

like the fire does, and the glass festoons do,

and as all light will, arriving

from anywhere and touching anything.

O, the starlight—

when moved by a turbulent atmosphere—

how it spreads.

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Poems of Cruelty and Compassion

Poem with Too Much Rope in It                     

After the opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

 

I’m thinking of humans who cut the testicles off other humans, who string up

their fellow humans and laugh. Of people who set other people alight for the crime of

uppity, for the crime of gay, for the crime of, I refuse. I’m worrying about

my fellow humans, who can hang a pregnant woman upside down, disembowel her,

leave the fetus dangling—

 

I’m thinking of the many loving humans I know. Sheltering humans. I’m worrying

about how many people after the war still thought Hitler’s big mistake was

not killing all the Jews. Wondering, too, about those who hid entire families in

a few small rooms, risking the murder of their own. How do we reconcile this—

the fervidly brave, the fervidly cruel. Happy informers. The disbelieving informed. Them

and Us. Who did this to you? I want to ask victim and perpetrator—

 

I want it to be someone’s fault: twisted leaders, bad parents, beatings.

Or maybe it’s a Darwinian experiment. Something coiled in our genes. Here are

the conditions: let’s see who lives, let’s see who fouls their soul. Either way,

I walk down the street with affable people who would do these things—dangle

suffocating humans from branches, drag them behind jouncing pickup trucks and laugh,

roast alive the very humans who maybe—in another life—they dearly love.

Is there a life in which I’m laughing along with them?

 

Knees

Tomorrow, my father gets his foot

cut off—too much pain for too long—

time for another divorce.

 

For years, he declared

he was too old for this.

Maybe he was too young.

 

What a shiver—sickness,

wheelchairs, walkers,

canes. There’s been talk

 

of complications,

of a cut above the knee—

like the hem on a sexy skirt.

 

But he will insist, he says,

on below the knee. March—

a bit of snow clings

 

to the ground, but in his garden

he’s planted spinach already.

By my front steps this morning,

 

the hyacinths just beginning

to bulge out of the ground

remind me of knees—

 

how green and incipient

we can always be.

Below the knee—

 

all the things

he has done,

has not done,

 

could do,

can still do,

on his knees.

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3am

Sleepless, I walk A1A, right down the middle, feeling the road warm under my bare feet. Street reflectors glow orange, like little matches that light the way. Waves crash, and a distant car echoes this way or a frog chimes, soft reminder I’m not alone. Sometimes I walk until the sun touches the horizon, and blue jays warm the air with lust. At home, he sleeps on his right, arms and legs curled around a pillow. Yesterday, he teased: How does it feel to want? Sometimes the moon is a gold thumbprint in the indigo above a dark ocean. Sometimes nothing more than a slice through sky. Sometimes stolen, gone with clouds thick as dreams.

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Two Poems

Lowboy

My mother called

the antique mahogany dresser

that held her daughters’ underwear

in the hallway that ran

from her room to ours

 

a lowboy. On top of him,

she set an antique clock

that chimed every hour,

counting our lives for us.

 

At noon, I drank

in twelve bells, counting

ten on my fingers

and tapping my heart twice

with my pointer finger.

I was a child in love

 

with ritual but

I never questioned

my mother’s—to house

her three daughters’

multi-colored snake pit

of lace and satin and cotton

in the same wooden box,

 

stored where other mothers

treasured silver knives,

miniature spoons, and linen

they knew how to fold

into birds that posed on bone

china plates as men took

their seats at fancy tables.

 

Ours was a blurry childhood.

Our mother did not believe

in separating the strands of anything—

she threw every kind of utensil

into one empty, unlined

 

kitchen drawer. Her necklaces

struggled in a level of tangle

she’d never live to undo. We got lost

in the spice cabinet, could never

find the flavors we craved most

and our water would boil over, stain

the black sheen of the stovetop

 

as our books leaned against each other

in a confusion of genre. Surely

our illustrated Cinderella yearned to pry open

the pages of my mother’s art books

where women spread their legs, refused

 

to don lingerie. My mother hurled

her apprentices’ unmentionables

into a place that reeked of a forest

before it’s been selected and sliced

by the town’s strongest men.

 

We idolized her, but questioned

what life was like at other houses

where dinner parties twinkled

as we watched them, barefoot

from the street with our hair matted

into braids from the previous week.

 

The plates and saucers soared

to each guest like clockwork

as they gripped their forks,

licked their lips and leaned back.

 

Perhaps every woman in our house

was jealous of each white,

monogrammed linen cloth,

how it rested gently

in the warm lap of a man,

how it got to be lifted

by experienced hands

toward his hungry mouth.

 

I Told My Mother I Was Attending Church with Anthony Steele

It never occurred to me that anyone would know me like I know myself.

 

The first time a boy put his tongue between my thighs

was on a wooden picnic table. It was Sunday. Broad daylight. I was

 

splinterless on his father’s boat as that boy named after metal,

named after taking without someone’s knowledge,

 

ferried me gorgeously out to an unnamed island he knew would be deserted.

I plunged the steel anchor into the crest of the shore and our bodies broke

 

away from the boat, leaping into the dunes where we lapped salt water

off each other until we were dry again. We hid behind palm fronds like

 

the ones laid before Jesus as he rode to his crucifixion. It was exhilarating

to be laid gently on a wooden altar. I turned my head and studied

 

a circle of gray stones where ash danced, flitted away from where

a fire once roared. Sizzled. I wanted to burn, so I covered my eyes

 

with my hands to shield the light. I don’t remember either of us praying.

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Trauma Bond in March: After the Miscarriage

for Chelsea

 

The tulips have flowered too early.

I cover the beds in white sheets

to keep them warm.

 

Frost pulled down from the stars

will soften

into a remembering

 

by morning. I am no mother

to the flowers or anyone.

It’s spring

 

and the world feels more delicate

than before.

Winter clipped. New wings lifting.

 

Doves adoring the sound

of their own song.

I have been told

 

some plants bloom once then die.

Flight is the answer,

though water can be an answer too.

 

Everybody (body) a vanishing act.

Seed without root.

And now the petals fall,

 

wishes to love

and love-me-not.

And now, the sound of distant laughter

 

enters my open window,

like ghosts. Softer now,

gentle weight of these small bones.

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My First Time

in honor of International Women’s Day, March 8, 2020

 

The memory buzzes under
my skin like neon—in my young
twenties, before I understood
my daily risk of harassment
and humiliation, before I had
grievances, before I knew I was
entitled to grievances, I was
at the gynecologist, wrapped
in a johnny, lying down
on the examining table
for my first such exam,
knowing in the observing part
of my brain that a nurse
was supposed to be with me,
afraid of what the doctor
might find, and he entered
the room friendly, an older man,
asked me a few questions,
and then commanded, slide on
down here, Margot. I’m gonna
fill you full of cold steel.

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On Hearing of Yellowstone’s Latest Swarm of Earthquakes

Part of me has always wanted

the world to shake every morning,

just so I felt alive. Only minor tremors,

of course, nothing elaborate. A fallen

fence maybe, or a few globs of fruit

dropping in the field. That way I’d know

daylight again. I could feel it. I could

draw the blinds and run my hands along

a cracked window pane—that slice of life

that makes across the glass a flowing river.

Outside, the parking lot could fold a little,

ripple like a cornfield in Kansas. One streetlight,

every morning, could crash into the street,

that’s all. And listen, don’t get me wrong.

I don’t want pain or loss or the crumbling of

city hall. I only want a modest nudge to say

hello. I want to know the world is here,

and so am I. Yes, so am I.

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Bite Me

 I’m reading a non-fiction piece by a cable TV tech

who says she told a customer that she needs

 to get into the basement to run a line, and the customer

says, “You can’t go in the basement—it’s a mess,”

 and the cable TV tech says, “Look, I’ve seen it all,

so unless you’ve got a kid in a cage down there,

 nothing will bother me,” and the customer pauses

for a beat and says, “Not a kid.” Just then

 the phone rings, and it’s a friend who tells me

 

 he’s thinking about taking up fox hunting

but hesitates when I ask him if there are foxes

 where he lives. I tell him to go ahead, though:

this way, he’ll have all the fun of fox hunting

 and none of the barbarism, presuming some other

prey appears, of course, like geese or skateboarders.

 Or your own thoughts: isn’t being startled

by some idea or feeling that you never knew

 you had in the first place just the best? Think how

 

 smart you feel when you’re crossing the street

or walking through the woods and suddenly you see

 how the coadjutant power of an atom is determined

by the number of hydrogen atoms that it combines with

 or what Kant meant by the categorical imperative

or why your mom stayed with your dad even after

 he kept getting arrested, especially that one time.

“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room

 for other occupations,” says Emily Dickinson,

 

 and surely that’s how people felt at Elvis’s first

stage show, because here was a kid who wasn’t

 playing country, said producer Sam Phillips,

and he wasn’t playing rhythm ‘n’ blues, and he

 looked “a little greasy,” and the venue was “just

a joint,” and the audience was a bunch of

 hard-drinking folks who weren’t about to settle for

a tepid performance, but they didn’t have to,

 because their reaction, said Phillips, was “just

 

 incredible.” I’m so happy that those people

had that experience. It must have been

 the best surprise. I think probably the worst

surprise is to have a heart attack during a game

 of charades, because either people will think

you’re mimicking someone having a heart attack

 or else you’re doing an absolutely terrible job

of acting out the scenario you’re supposed to be

 acting out, such as transcribing a Beethoven

 

 sonata but in a different key from the original

or knitting a muffler to give your granny for

 Christmas or Hanukkah, if she’s Jewish.

This one woman said her biggest surprise

 was when she woke up after an unsuccessful

suicide attempt: she’d checked into a motel,

 put a plastic sheet on the bed, lain down,

and swallowed what she thought would be

 an overdose of pills only to be found by

 

 the housekeeper the next morning and wake up

a few days later in a psychiatric ward. “I was

 very upset I had failed,” she said. Not me,

I say. Kill yourself and you miss out on

 the eight million little surprises that happen

every day, such as the time last week when a tiny

 slip of a student came to my office to drop off

some work, and we chatted for a minute,

 and it turns out she’s a German major,

 

 and when I say why German, she says, “I want

to be a butcher, and the best butchery schools

 are in Germany.” Take that, you village explainers

who say that humanities degrees are worthless!

 Lucky student. She’ll be in Germany for a year,

and after that, who knows where? Anthony

 Bourdain says, “Travel changes you. As you

move through this life and this world, you change

 things slightly, you leave marks behind,

 

 however small. And in return, life and travel

leave marks on you.” Bourdain is also the guy

 who said, “Your body is not a temple, it’s an

amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” Someone

 who always enjoys the ride is Percy, the neighbor’s

cat, who comes over every day to bite me.

 There I am, having coffee on the deck

and reading the newspapers, and Percy settles

 down between my feet and looks at them as

 

 though he’s studying the menu board at

a McFriendly’s and trying to decide whether

 he wants the Chocolate Chili Cheese Dog

or the Big Bubba Bacon Bomb. When my friend

 who wants to take up foxhunting gets off

the phone, I start reading again, which is when

 I learn that the cable TV tech goes down into

the customer’s basement and finds, not a kid

 in a cage, but a man, and actually a happy man

 

 at that, if “happy” is the word you’d use to

describe someone who is paying the householder

 to lock him up and starve him and beat him

regularly or whatever it is that a sex worker

 does to someone who takes delight in

a leisure-time activity that wouldn’t exactly

 make my heart leap up with joy, but then

there you have it. Oh, go ahead and bite me,

 Percy. You’ll only surprise me if you don’t.

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anxiety attack implementing grounding strategy

for and after Daniella Toosie-Watson

 

the curtain is off-white

the faucets silvery metallic made to twist

adjust pressure the tiles segmented

borders like the body’s edges   we are always

in contact with something even if

it’s only the floor and air the green

bath-rug’s damp fluff   my skin

is brown is brown is brown

is down on its weak knees   the sink

is white the tub is white the walls

white the window frosted and on top

of that a layer of condensation

outside it there is a whole world

i know it even when it is not visible

that it is true and open and full of contradiction

under my nails the grime houses

a whole ecosystem millions of active

cells molecules mitochondria dried skin flakes

waiting to dislodge to fall   the towel is tan

i am a tangled knot a pretend pretzel person

trying to regulate my breathing and inside

the chemicals sending me information

the ceiling is cracked the ceiling is cracked

i cannot reach it i stop trying

i breathe the breath has no color I breathe again

the breath of dinosaurs and stars the breath

mixed with the breaths of billions of people

the breath encapsulating my skin

the particles of air real even in the unseen gas

i open the window i do not consider leaving

the wind is moody and frantic even more

than i am   it is a violent shimmy of invisible shoulders

it blows the shower curtain right off the rod

i pick it up   put it back on slowly

segment by segment   dull rusty hook by dull rusty hook

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Vermont Getaway: Thirteen Gays Looking at a Blackbird

I. Okay, first off—it’s Onyx.
II. What, are you blind? It’s clearly Deep Noir.
III. Fred was just saying Black Olive or Licorice but I—
IV. Well, Fred makes everything about food. On our first date, he said my eyes were rum-soaked raisins. Chaaarming!
V. I should’ve said they were Blackbirds, darling. Two rum-soaked Blackbirds who shit on anything I have to say.
VI. Knock it off, you two. Can’t we just enjoy our lovely weekend away from the city?
VII. I saw a Blackbird once. On Fire Island. Or was it Provincetown? I dunno. But it was definitely at a Black Party—I know that.
VIII. Remember that drag queen who did pantomime? Wasn’t her show called Ballad of the Blackbird?
IX. She was doing Kabuki, imbecile. And the show was called Memoir of My Last Turd. I’d know, I dated her kimono designer.
X. Hey, don’t Blackbirds have a high frequency of homosexuality? Like giraffes?
XI. You’re thinking penguins. And that’s your last mimosa, Danny. You’re getting like really loud. You’ll scare the little guy away!
XII. Oh, he split ages ago. Soon as Fred and Jose started going at each other.
XIII. No! I wanted an Instagram pic. He was so sweet. That’s it—next time we drive up, I’m gonna build him the poshest birdhouse you’ve ever seen.
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Rice Paper Moon

The day seemed destined

to be an origami swan

except I misfolded it

at each step, its pleats

askew, a twisted coot.

I swim in circles of wishing

to reverse my mistakes.

Then simple midnight

slides me a new page.

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Three Poems from Time Life’s North American Wilderness Series

1/ The Indomitable Peninsula

Taken by astronauts with startling  f  o  rce
 
 
 So the string-straight lines  and calculated curves
 
 So the mirrors of rivers,
 
 The vast emptiness       of         the earth
 
 
 
 
 

Above the line
______________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

                                                                             Below
 
 
 

Empty

 parallels without rain
 
 
 
A moon landscape  of gigantic            invisible           bones
 
 
 
 
 
 

One night I camped in a grove of cardon
 
 
 

I could hear     the coyotes   somewhere       singing
 
 
 
 you and the light
 
 
                                                The  rose  moon
 
 
                             the giant  dark

 
 
 
 
 
Before this
 
 
                                   between the cliffs and the shoreline

 
 
 
 

there must once have been birds

 

2/The Icy Road to Olympus

Honest                l                                    y
 
                                        This is             Destruction
 
                 Out in the vague breeze
 
 

which drops down dizzyingly into the darkness at our feet
 
 
            it was from some-

              where out
 
 
                  here,

 
 

that
 
            h         e
 
                     Caught sight
 
 
                                  of the mountain
 
bright blue
 
 
                        and                  spread                    out
 
 
 
on Panic Peak.

 
 

3/A Land Defined by the Sea

 

       By moonlight the waves broke
 
 
               and sometimes I saw the    faint lights
 
 
    We rumbled        by
 
 
that old road
 
This book
 
 
The country        where       i      ve            l       i       ve       d
 
 
 
 
the Sequoia Sempervirens  where the children have been reaching
 
 
 
Listen.
 
 
 

                There are still places where you can
 
200 foot high dunes
 
                 here and there  engulfing
 
                              the lonely
 
                         line             and sky

 
 
the border  enclosed within sight
 
 
of the                          mountain            s
 
                                    that rise
 
 
along the    earth
 
 
and                         the                       bracket.           of the              water:
 
 
 
 
The west
 
an assemblage                  of               peaks,
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Olympic Peninsula           looped  by a highway,
 
 
 
      A ribbon
 
 
                       the         Ocean
 
 
 

                    a tiny tangle of time
 
 
 
 
                                     I was
 
                                                                   the        Salmon feasting ,
 
 
 
Invader                and wild             tide
 
 
 
What keeps so much                    wild                      is          the wilderness
 
 
                                                                                                                   around the perimeter
 
              Sky
 
 
                                  Horse
 
 
                          The bulk        of the peninsula
 
 
 
 
 
                Green
 
 

                                               increasingly

 
 
                                  cut over

 
 
 
 
 
 

You cannot eat your wilderness
 
 
    There is no way to       headquarter       a               river
 
 
 
 
      West across The Great Bend
 
              The       Blackberry               fallen           from nearby

 

The beach             at low tide
 
                                                     the water
 
                                     the          voracious         well     below the              road
 
                                                           that winds
 
                                                  around houses
 
                                                like ours
 
                                             lined with
 
                                                     trees
 
 
 

Quiet September
 
in the mornings
 
when it burns
 
 
 
just once,

at dusk,

 

we saw above the still surface.

 
 
 

Balmy or starry
 
 
Or

 
 

Agonizingly         bright

 

 

These three poems are the first in a series of experimental erasures of Time Life’s North American Wilderness Series. They, I hope, interrogate the books’ previously colonizing language and relay my own anxieties concerning major climate events.

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Two Erasures

In a few months another baby will get to the internet

Still sore and broken
after its husband did wrong
betrayed by the woman
the world.

 

I was secretly hoping
that his eggs made a litter
because the meltdown didn’t happen
there is new news
that years
will soon spit
newborn shit on their hands

 

To cover that it’s a ‘man’s world’
I’m certain, therefore delighted.

 

We are expecting a November
named yesterday.

 

From his yes and into his sound
like the name of a California town

 

Somebody spiked the table
with fertility.

 

Either knocked up or out
and now

 

that grumbling might be Jesse James

 

It might be America
baking in her.

 

“In a few months another baby will get to the internet” is an erasure from a Dlisted.com blog post on 7/9/14 titled “In A Few Months Another Baby Will Get To Call Robert Downey Jr. ‘Daddy.’”

 

We choose to smile in the face

1.

We choose. We choose to look at time.
We choose fives. We choose zig, else zag.
We choose a lot of things, but,

choose us.

 

Happiness is enough.

 

We choose to live—

purpose.

 

Your scent, your style: try these fragrances.
Secret escape.

 

Everything is better with purpose.
Find out why.

 

An empty box is filled with possibilities
(find the bottom).

 

This box is full.

 

100%.

 

Don’t throw it away, it’s too pretty:
a light manufactured by Saint Louis,
owned by
société de produits

 

or used with permission in a dry place in the USA.

 

2.
Go.
With absolutely everything.

 

3.
Purpose in 3 simple steps:
Step 1.
Step 2: pour purpose in a box. Refresh.
Step 3: Unwind. Throw some shoes.

 

You want to worry.

Trust us. You’ll love it.

 

“We choose to smile in the face” is an erasure from the text on the back of Purina Purpose Clumping Cat Litter 23-pound box.

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