Category: Poetry

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

life lived. Too far to see
the disappointment crinkle

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

A Robin at the Bus Station

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

 

Fall in Languedoc

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

the magic number exposing how the trick is done,

light shifting from the blonde assistant to hands

concealed in the dark. the advertiser’s golden ratio

of aggregate melanin. the progressive tipping point

where the cool is lost from chic restaurants, the polish

from AP classroom. where they no longer feel

embarrassed for confusing Eunice for Jackie

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

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

silent blue-eyed glances. the not flaxen straw

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

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

one.

 

When the nurse asks if I have a surgical history

I begin to form the word of my uterus and its

 

drawing out, consider inviting her into the recovery room

filled with women giddy from their return to somatic

 

solitude, then into the smoke-filled apartment with its

futon mattress and warm bottle of retsina, reward

 

just for time, passing from before to after

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

 

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

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

 

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

the surgically aborted, ripped from stories

 

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

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

 

The curtain comes crashing down

and there I am, ruby-footed and murderous,

doing it all for the bloated shadow

of a little man. How foolish I have been

again and again, poppy-cocked

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

of a giant, tease me into storming

the castle to take what I never lacked. What is

more incarnadine: the glitter of these

shoes or the myth of blood now on my hands.

I look at the man and he looks back,

the fury of being caught pinking his cheeks.

I am not the heroine, and I know that

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

the fading of his theatrics, and if he did,

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

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

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

a cotton ball on fire, a thrown voice

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

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

A flamingo of a man in a pink-blush tux

plunked a single piano key repeatedly

 

for nearly an hour.

By the end of the evening

 

I heard such gorgeous silence

and sobbed. My mind

 

was in brambles and the notes he pecked

all hatched like eggs at once.

 

Every flap, every cheep

became your name and I became

 

a mockingbird. I said your name

as if I were your brother and just caught

 

you snooping in my desk

for the cigarettes I kept hidden.

 

Then I said your name

with the reverence of a child

 

learning his mother existed

as before-mother for the first time,

 

reconciling one identity with another.

Now I say it like we just met,

 

introduced by a mutual friend

we later admit we never liked.

 

I’m trying to commit

the syllables to memory

 

without making it obvious. Hi,

it’s nice to meet you. It’s nice

 

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

I say it so often it loses meaning

 

the way cotton candy dissolves

so humbly and quickly

 

into a glass of water but the water

is delightfully altered, and I don’t remember

 

your face anymore

but you’re in the swirl,

 

and I drink and drink and

stay, please, with me, I am chapped,

 

chirping, I’m spun, oh sugar, oh

sweet, your

 

name, oh your name, your

sweet, invisible name.