the soul tends to hide deep beneath the blues • & pain has chosen to call blues beautiful • & pain could not have seen things differently • when someone owns a thing we call it their possession • & yet what do we call it when some sinister spirit has entered them? • of curtains that are mostly drawn • of a blues felt more intimately with the eyes closed • slow song for a masochist • a gentle tapping of feet • bassist under collagen of bones • bassist of a chest-deep beating • & some no longer look their friends in the eyes • others have not noticed themselves becoming islands • sunlight as a clarity reflected by water • moonlight as uncertainty reflected by water • drown under sounds of a profound saxophone sorrow • soak in softening passages of pain moving through the body • a falsetto waters the seeds of anguish • protruding from the mouth • the roots of a soul reaching for light
Category: Poetry
Cool Side of the Pillow
Have you ever heard the sound of a screen door
closing old-timer slow?—Inching madness to the edge
of its seat?— Think of shoes on the wrong feet.
And how fingernails scratch the chalkboard
to test your impulses. When the dog shits
in the house, and the house isn’t yours.
Lost keys. Bad haircut. Bad ink. Bad poem.
Broken tooth. Ulcer. Speeding ticket.
Bad job. Foreclosure. Your ovaries tied.
Boyfriend sexting someone else.
Your kid hates you. Your dying friend has
no insurance policy. You’re addicted to soap.
Boss screaming down your throat.
You burnt the turkey. Is it worth mentioning,
that moss has no roots?— We know something
has been tampered with, when the seal
is broken. Only one thing to do, don’t surrender,
turn over your armor, dream a little dream.
Murphy’s Law
30 rabies shots, my uncle got
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, they
say—what can happen, will—Which is what
my dad was thinking when he passed the pub
so aptly named on the day they sawed
through my skull. This is the perversity
of the universe. You go outside
to catch your breath and butcher’s knives wink
in every window. Miles’ trumpet intones
So What while atom bombs dream of flouting
their dormancy. The night before surgery,
I lay on the plush hotel bed, staring
at a room service form. When I was
little, I was obsessed with opulence.
I wanted filet mignon, lobster
delivered to my imagined penthouse
as I watched cartoons: a toddler bobbing
along the steel girders of a nascent
skyscraper, pianos crashing down, turning teeth
into sonatas. Sometimes you have
to confront the world’s malice like a mouse
who’s been burned too many times by spring-
loaded-cheese. I remember assuming
the hospital’s food would be suspect.
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-
salted soup, but, I thought: that’s only
if they don’t slice into my temporal
lobe. If they don’t accidentally
give me a lobotomy, or cut my
head clean off. I’ll be lucky to gag
on pot pie while mom scrolls WebMD.
Two Poems
On Our Date I Forget the “Birds of Prey” Exhibit is Closed Sunday
Grace is just life
caught in the throat. Imprinted
and broken winged.
Crow hit by my Toyota, muddy.
Peace and rehab three-syllable words
when slurred. Grace of certainty
in the sun’s smallness—small enough
to set behind your hand,
yet still lift like a hand
on her waist while facing a dark nerve.
Her to touch, a crow
not very much a crow, wingless
who must hop from branch to branch
as crippled form of grace,
as chapel wind is pious, bows
in gospel like fletching
post-launch, inalterable flight.
Who dares claim the feathers
of such a fucked-up bird for
violence?
Rhetorical questions claim
power from the empty, ellipses
lit like street lamps, spacing
regular pools through dark.
Anyways you forgot
your walking boots. Leave
like the cut that gliding scissors
pass. You came into this life
like chains deliver the flightless.
Like silence delivers a stillborn grace.
Touchpoints
The wanting child breaks a bowl
before he loses his first tooth. Research says
we regress before moving forward
the way white tides marshal themselves
before they break. A circle
opens into a spiral and the trauma
opens into an echo. But I don’t wanna
echo. But despite the begging
watch the hitting segue into bars
and showers full of right heat. The way
washing becomes a sloughing
or a person becomes a lesson.
On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen
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.
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.