Across the forest, we sit
in a deer stand shaped like a heart.
A cry comes from the center of the woods
like wind blowing through a doll’s head.
There are birds that come out at night
just to be devoured by other birds.
I can’t make things happen faster
than they’re going to happen.
I know that now.
If your thick arms come out
of the shadows only to light smokes
or hold my hand expertly in yours,
I need to accept it.
At the diner, I sit with Freud
open on the table before me.
It’s rude to say clueless, but
clueless, the waiter won’t let
me sit with my book and coffee
half-filled. He brims it. Chimes,
A velociraptor stubbed its foot.
Pauses. Now it’s dino-sore.
I’m bored of Freud, it’s true,
but not bored enough to flirt
with you, I think, but don’t say.
Ha. Can I have my check?
which he brings with his number,
You’ll want to keep that receipt.
Freud on the sooty bus, I can
say that I have made many
beginnings and thrown out
many suggestions. The receipt
stuck between two pages,
bookmarking desire and lack.
Our embargo lifted its hands
off my eyes yanked my chin towards
the colorful architecture of your face
and left me alone with you, strange courier
of my DNA you, an almost-familiar place.
Hello, Cuba, hello father, may I call you that?
If a homeland offers no house or apartment,
if there is no familiar front door acting as a veil
between day in and day out,
if there is not enough monotony
from kissing the same faces goodbye,
if every family has its scent
and I can smell ours
then I am still an outsider your hija Americana
sitting finally at your table
cradling a cup of coffee like an egg in my palm.
Do not speak directly towards me
Do not be silent let me bask in your accent—
my first words were pale, vast land and highway,
mouth dry with Tennessee cornbread, Mom’s
bleached wooden spoon stirred in shug-uhr
but at school I liked the feel of Spanish
in my mouth, en mi boca like ripe black-skinned sweet plantain,
butter-soft and fried, r’s rolling in a hot pan of my saliva.
Before you called me daughter, I had proof
tuyo es mío I am not yours but what’s yours is mine
so stop stabbing the heron’s belly,
as if repeated stabs will wake it from the flies.
I mean what I say,
when I talk of permanence like permafrost
or ancient arteries of the earth’s underbelly,
spilling from volcanic pores. A woman, did you hear?
Crated homing pigeons
and biked them to a Tokyo market,
when her tire hit a rut in the road
and the cage fell loose. Nine birds died on impact,
while her most treasured, still alive
but blinded by headlights,
hit a fender and blew open—
feathers falling like snow. For months,
the poor woman wore grief like a wet wool coat
and wept through the deadwind of winter. She’d set the table
each evening for two. Wait for the backdoor to swing
and shut
and the sulfuric smell of sorrow to come in the kitchen to eat.
Tristessa, she’d whisper,
and the ghostly girl locked behind thick black bangs
would look to her left and say nothing.
—
When I was a boy
I had a habit of carelessly sloughing bark
from a Eucalyptus. I loved its salve and
layered it like glue
over every burn left by my father’s lighter.
And though that tree numbed each wound,
resulting in an able-bodied boy, one who’d go on
to live like most other boys,
I carried with me two things:
scars without witness and the tree’s sick tinder.
Many moons chafed into years of dissolution
and worms hollowed its core. Violent winds blew.
The old tree tilted, fell loose from soil, then split in half.
For months, it ghosted an aroma so thick
the fallow fields became places to pray, rub wounds
and feel cleansed. I felt cleansed. Opened my mouth
and ran nude in the rain. Its fading ointment
coating my throat and my tongue.
—
Which leads me here with you, son.
This heron, no different
than the three dozen floating out over the estuary,
was once a winged creature maneuvering winds
with precision. It was effortless. Swooping
soft beach for sand dabs then arrowing back toward light.
It’s sick, I know, how Man manipulates beauty.
But listen, son, listen: I’m asking you
to set the weapon down and look toward ocean.
That storm coming close
is big enough to rip this beach from coastline and swallow it.
High tide will swell and splash over the barriers
built to guard the street. Perch will fill medians like manna.
The poor will come collect their rations.
Wave hands toward thunder and praise it.
I’m asking whether you’d like to keep gazing at records of lost time,
or undress and wade these choppy waters,
our bodies weightless as breath.
Let us pretend there is no mystery in strawberries,
that we know precisely what floods the flesh so enticingly red,
coloring summer with a crimson flush, a violent bloom
amid the cool earth greens.
Let us knowingly say the unabashed hue comes
from ripeness for eating, and there is no more meaning
to the deep red so like our hidden internalities,
which we feign ignorance of while complacently stroking
the shield of our outer flesh.
Let us declare the finger-stains of picking are superficial,
and are washed away when our hands are clean;
that the strawberry juice has not already penetrated below the dermis
so that our own blood runs redder,
intoxicated and giddy with the inbred sugar of fruit;
let us feign that we see no connection
in the perfect way a single strawberry nestles in the human mouth,
to bring memories of feeding lovers and butter light,
romances that never were, and cool saucers in the evening.
And lastly, let us make believe
while the fields are still heavy with the lush season of ripeness
that the bruises on the tender skin do not hurt us, too,
that we don’t notice time playing decay on that succulent red.
Let us insist to ourselves, assuredly, continuously,
that our own hearts are not already burst
as the short-lived strawberry loses its firmness on the earth.
When I’m watching the street fill up with leaves when dusk morphs
to a waxy flickering to a phone pinging dad I’m inside this bar
I’m line dancing I’m filled with holes for the man with the Glock
releasing the safety must be orgasmic and a background check
equals emasculate one day is like another and then it’s another
school café yoga studio church another concert hall another
outdoor space for cold bodies quiet like a pile of unlucky armadillos
when a friend arrived two days before the one at the synagogue
when he said I have a right to carry to sleep with it to fuck it
the pasta went from hearty to heart riot though I wanted to handshake
a civil understanding on the footprints leading to a glowworm cave
of mourners to the police officers’ eyes the line dance toward
the hearse that my pain string was taut that our country’s pain string
is taut that our country is electric like a frying pan with a frayed cord
always a fray away from fire
Glow in the dark stars tumble
into black, their light hanging
like the feet
of a man tied to death. I trace
the outlines of memories and pull them
to my nose, they smell like
patchouli and my father’s
velvet coat. Gray shapes
dance to the window. Are they
the ghosts of my dead dogs
or the angels I overheard
my mother asking for help? Or maybe just
teenage headlights, sneaking back into their parents’
driveway. The laundry
room moans and shakes
behind a poster
of New York City’s face. The dryer thumps
against my wall. Round
round round. Clothes rise
and fall
like the air lifting up my chest. My mother’s
Elvis T-shirt. My father’s white
briefs. The noise goes
in circles. Up
and down. Taped on the fridge
is a photo dated two
days after my birth. My mother is holding
my head to her chest, my feet swing above
Elvis’s bleached teeth. And I still remember
my father
getting nervous and shouting
and shutting
the door when my brother and I found
him in his white briefs. Rise
and fall. I focus on the dark
and the noise and the clothes
that make the
dark warm. Up
and down.
Rise
and fall. Round
round round.
I want to pull my knees to my chest
and make myself small and see
through like the balled-up sheets
of cling wrap I find in the drawers of my mother’s
kitchen. But I don’t do that
because I wouldn’t be small
or see through to the people
sitting across the table. They would still see
a girl with uncombed hair
wearing a baggy t-shirt she got free from a bank
because she never learned
how to not be ashamed
of her breasts. And they might find it strange
if this girl slipped her feet from
the mud-painted rainboots
that keep her weighted
to the government-bought linoleum,
and then if she pulled
her feet and the hand-knit socks
that held them up to the seat of her chair,
and what if her neck let go
so that her forehead sat balanced between
the tops of her knees.
Yes, that would look strange.
Instead I move my left thigh
over my right and tie my calves
into a knot. I can’t see
my legs beneath the table
but I imagine them as the twisted strings
of green and pink
taffy my father pulled from his suitcase
whenever he was afraid
that he’d been gone
for too long. Throw away
your wrappers, he told me. My mother yelled
when she found them
rolled into worlds
and tucked inside
the corners of kitchen drawers.
and my sister seven, tensions boiled over
in a game of hide & seek
& I slapped her. Thwack.
Her head shook while streams on her cheek
loamed into deepening red.
She didn’t talk to me for a week.
No chocolates, no sorry, no nothing.
I even did her homework for a day. Still nothing.
She finally spoke when she found me
crying in a corner after India had lost a cricket match.
Today, years later she isn’t picking up my calls
& I’m here wondering if she’s busy
or simply pissed with me.
I haven’t seen her in long & in this hour of prolonged dusk,
I’m trying to summon facts on her.
But as I pace on my balcony, phone in hand,
watched by a sun rasping blood across a browning sky
all I gather is the colour of her slapped cheek.
And how on reconciliation after a week, she had said
I just wanted to see you cry.
I spot you in the cafeteria sitting with a faceless stranger
while I await my dosa at the desolate counter
you sip what seems like watermelon juice although
I’m sure my blood is just as gruesome and thick
that must be how your cheeks are so red and faint
like blushes of sky at dawn attracting birds of fury
and strangeness unknown I see some wrens beak you playfully
the crimson spreads through your neck like a field of clover
the stranger inundated with anticipation he crosses his legs
underneath the table when you let out a laugh
I head back to work my appetite punctured my spirit flensed
my dosa tray trembles in the tremors of discovery
buried fears don’t nibble they swallow
I try to tell myself it was probably someone else
but I find incriminating evidence when my colleague points out
continents of sambar on my white converse shoes
Free again, my panther
life takes off fast—palmettos
and snakes in the path.
The beautiful sea grape
is aging like it’s winter;
leaves of talkative platters,
some big as my hand, still
grow heart-red veins
but have gone soft
and pale at the edges.
My very last husband
sheds his brave persona
and slithers into the bamboo
for good. Leaving
him there, I remember
that on nights like this,
thousands of baby
sea turtles hatch
and make their determined
way to the water. Life
goes on, the planet sings,
unaware of all our betrayals.
The waves swell
and collapse. I hear
the corks and lantern-lit
shouts of new wedding
feasts all over this ringing
world. If champagne comes
in midnight blue, I’ll toast
their tight bouquets of joy
as clouds bubble
against the sky in
their incessant kissing
with the moon.
Glowing sand pushes
up from every step
like sifted white
hills of cake flour,
the only light for miles.
Please also see Russ Kesler’s review of Susan Lilley’s book Venus in Retrograde, in which this poem later appeared.
(for Alan)
Peonies are blooming
to the point of collapse.
They lean into each other
with nothing to say.
Gracing lawn and stones,
thousands of fragrant petals,
extravagant as wings
relinquished.
To make final bouquets, I take
every flower that does not dissolve
at touch—late blooms, buds
surrounding first display—
pinks, bold and blushed;
shameless yellow;
white, center-stained
with crimson.
Every vase chipped
or cracked I fill;
vases on every table
in the house. I leave
the lawn scattered
with petals and stems.
I wait for the scent
of this dying
beauty.
I’m a little more prairie than you, Mom.
Grew up a stone’s throw from winding,
forested trails. Trees arched over gravel
roads, and the place in the powder sky
where their branches met, a cathedral ceiling.
You buried downed birds in shallow graves,
in a vacant lot by your apartment. I watched
a whole deer decompose in a field. Made a school
project of her. Every quarter, on my class trip
to buckthorn country, to the task of weeding-out
invasive plant species, I saw the same doe
sink deeper into the ground. Drew her outline
on a worksheet more and more skeletal
with each visit to her muddy bedside. Mom,
you too have watched the seasons change.
Your childhood rotted into caretaking,
like a sun-bleached cordgrass giving
its whole self back to the ground.
When you were seven, you started buying
the family’s groceries each week—
cans of beans stacked in a bike basket,
cradled by cornstarch and white flour.
In elementary school, all my teachers
had the same four-pronged chart
of the seasons: spring turned
summer, then a gentle decline
into fall and a snowman
smiling through winter.
Nothing in nature actually follows
this pattern. A field mouse breeds
too many young, swallows
half of them back into herself.
Not loin chops cooked Moroccan style,
palm-sized, presented like gifts
simmering with harrisa-spiked hummus,
nor the shoulder placed atop a small knoll
of onions and peppers, flavor brimming
in each slashed sinew, but the heart,
that muscle which, to me, still seems untouchable
in the hierarchy of organs. In French curry
we ate what once beat in the smooth body
of the lamb, the taste of iron coiled
around our tongues like a rope swing,
the meat perfectly tender to chew
on a dilemma: better to waste nothing
or keep one thing sacred, worshipped
as we do our own ventricles?
And as we swallowed I did not think
of the lamb force-fed with a stomach tube
in a barn in North Georgia, its legs wobbly
on an altar of hay, but a hundred other hearts—
Nefertiti’s pulsing wildly for the sun god Aten,
Napoleon’s stopped briefly at Waterloo,
and those closer, more real—
my mother’s stepped on like an amaryllis
in a field swollen with weeds, my brother’s
heart, desires I’ll never know, humming
like a complex engine, its pistons
clogging with blood, and so forgive me,
little ounce of lamb, for taking
your heart on a piece of jagged
ciabbata, and when I say I forced you down
with water, believe me when I tell you
I took only the slightest pleasure
and that I did not clean my plate.
Fumble on the big screen, everyone
up in arms. My daughter grasps my shirt
while nursing and can’t let go. Across the room,
my mother applies Chapstick without taking
her eyes off the screen. It’s Christmas. Everyone believes
in miracles and wants to hold the baby. My grandmother
sits at the table holding a doll. Beyond her, a train
slips through the snowy field carrying—what? Time
moves backwards on the field. Less than a minute left
on the clock. My grandmother’s lips barely close around the red
spoonful of Jello with coconut. A marshmallow falls
from the spoon in all its puffed-up,
childhood ecstasy. The game is nearly over. Pins
and needles. The tree is heavy with color
and ornaments of beans and children’s faces.
My grandmother tightens her fingers around the hanky
she has always held. Eventually, there is nothing
left beneath the tree. Everyone kisses the baby.
They each slip a finger into her palm,
and she struggles to let them go.
What do I do now? There are no maps
No brushstrokes gesturing to where I could have gone,
Whimsical curlicues pointing my way.
No celluloid images flickering my history at me.
“To become who you were meant to be, you have to kill the past.”
Is that what I have done? No phone calls with my parents for nine years.
Who gave me the right, one other human children never had, to
Sever that bond? To act like I’m made of metal, wielding a light
Saber that manufactures their consent. How many years
Am I allowed to stay this light? No burden
Other people roll their eyes and put up with. “Oh, Dad.” “Mom, please.”
When she decided nothing could stop her pulling me
Into her bed. When he explained how I would always deserve
Being cursed. “Beyond the pale?” But what if we were always
Too far behind the dark? Dark behind dark,
Moving where people couldn’t see.
I would like to invite you over for butternut squash soup. I am excellent at making this soup, and I leave out the heavy whipping cream, but you won’t even miss it. The recipe recommends using an immersion blender, but I’ll tell you that my regular blender works just fine. You make batches. The color is burnt orange. It is pure autumn, the brand that Keats promotes, though whenever I read that poem, I think, it could end after the first stanza. That it doesn’t: a giant bonus. I would like to invite you over for mashed potatoes. I did not skimp on decadence this year, after Ken made his with low-sodium chicken broth. It would be nice if those were worth eating, but I fear they are not. I don’t like to pretend. I am aware that Thanksgiving is a problem: the pilgrim narrative can’t hold up much longer, what with Columbus’ reputation gone south. My job ignores him, altogether. That’s alright: I like my work. I even like cooking on a morning like this, when time is not a Harley driver with a doctored muffler in my blind spot. On the other hand: the noise makes me aware of their presence. To all the Harley drivers: I would like to make you butternut squash soup. I think it would cause less lane-splitting for it is a patient soup: close to a puree and distant from a broth. A friend once said of a clam affair: more a bisque than a chowder, which represented his general state of disillusionment. I do not feel that way. Certain things have gone egregiously right to balance out the egregiously wrong. The word reminds me of Spanish for “y”: i griega. Why oh why oh why oh. For the month approaching Thanksgiving, we receive emails from the local rescue mission, reminding us how little it costs to provide a family a meal. I give $180. My husband gives $250. I give another $180. It is a quiet competition. There are worse contests. I cannot invite everyone over for butternut squash soup and mashed potatoes, though I have enough of the latter for 24. The recipe called for 10 pounds of spuds. This year, I am following recipes. My son is now making a key lime pie. He will zest his knuckles within a moment or two, with 007 in the background, making love to a supermodel. He asks if I watched James Bond movies as a child. I said, they were too sexy for me. Twice today I drove inland and back to the coast. Both times the sky was whole driving east, and in tatters as we drove west. My approach to the fat content in my potatoes was ecumenical: one stick butter, one package cream cheese, one cup milk/heavy cream. Fair is fair. Tomorrow, a feast. I would like to invite you. My mother would say: “Genug shoyn.” Enough, already. As I peeled the 10th pound of potatoes. Seriously. We have more than enough. Be here close to noon, as my sister-in-law makes an artichoke spinach dip that disappears quickly.
The neighborhood used to be a beach.
The streets run with clipped grass and trash
and potting soil when it rains—
a network of temporary rivers.
The landfill passes for real land most of the time
but fat Floridian storms bring up the truth
about the sea level and a neighborhood built
for families growing faster than the city.
The trees were planted to hold the ground.
The coastal forms are highly tolerant of salt.
The place is big and cold, with stiff rooms
for a quiet mother and two sisters living
in too much house, the space that’s left
from a bigger family. The father is dead.
The rain pulls ferns in through the cracks
in the white stucco. The kitchen blooms
while exhausted pool floats fill with water
and then with tadpoles. The hammock grows
green mold in the crosses of its ropes
and leaves wet diamonds on their backs.
The dog is tied to the stove.
The heat steams the jalousie slats.
The doors swell too big for their frames
but the girls never try to leave anyway.
The Rycoffs have planted blood-red batface along the edge of the walk.
They will get all the hummingbirds and butterflies
Next year. Push play. Of course I have to mention how my mind
Does not want to mention
This entire night, underscored by Wilco’s lines
“I’d always thought that if I held you tightly /
You’d always love me like you did back then”
Omits, as Mayakovsky would call her, the target.
My son, Bay, and I, walk past Thing 1 and Thing 2.
How many ballerinas
Does one expect to see walking the streets this late at night?
Death is always on the prowl: the near miss of Rusty
By the Home Depot truck in New York City
Brings the near misses back today:
My idea of the soul is a dance party with palm trees
Wrapped in foil. Dancing is flying and the music
Always sounds like the first time you heard the Talking Heads
Combined with the second time you listened to Velvet Underground’s
Self-titled album all the way through.
My third eye takes naps. Nods off without warning.
Right now, I am asleep with two eyes open.
The hunchback of Notre Dame answers the door of the house
At the corner of Harbor Cove and River. The inmate, in his prison
Stripes, holds his one-year-old son, also in prison stripes.
The scantily clad prison guard swings her billy club.
Oh never to be stuck in commuter traffic again.
We all learn, eventually, “don’t read the comments.”
Minions have taken over the neighborhood.
A witch doused in gauze cackles
From her corner of the walkway; a skeleton sits on our bench
Doing its best impression of William Logan, right leg
Crossed over left, right arm stretched out to the right, skull
Tilted to 11, chin and right toe pointed to 4.
A bottle of hand sanitizer, almost empty, cranes its neck
Over the edge of the second edition unabridged Webster’s
New International Dictionary, 1958.
Paul Manafort walks by dressed up as a train engineer.
The Rycoff family, dressed as the knights of the round table,
Ring the doorbell of the largest house in the neighborhood.
The head of the HOA, a former porn star, shows up at the party
As a 2007 IRS tax audit of Jeff Sessions. A guy with a bonfire
Wheel in his driveway hands out Heinekens. Push stop.
The definition of a circle in a world without geometry
Sources its etymology from the fleeing prisoner, innocent
Despite all the charges, born in Candé, France, a short drive
From the Collège de Combrée where he learned
How to love an older woman. Where she and her sister
Took him after the school day was over, but time allowed.
“Never trust the living,” said Juno, played by Sylvia Sidney,
In Beetlejuice.
The line, a set of lines, intersecting Sumi lines, outline
The idea of the face of a ram, ink drops like mistakes, like eyes,
Like the image of planets in a solar system, like orbits,
Like the beginning moment that determines the weight of a line:
Samhain, the stray red balloon, the “somebody start something.”
I dressed as a wolfman, Bay, a wolfboy. We howl because we howl.
This is the root of how the moon turns us. The skeleton in the red shawl
Escorts us to the courtyard. There in the 18th card, an owl in the tree
Sees two wolves calling down the partial moon.
There in the distance the Sierras wait all winter.
A mastiff dressed in a tuxedo walks by, pauses.
Throw it in the forest before it starts to spoil.
Let birds shit it to obscurity.
It won’t be missed. Not by you and not
by the man on the train whose hand
you grabbed by accident. The lights flickered
and you let yourself get carried away by fear.
I don’t know you, the man said, excused
himself away from you. Everyone forgets eventually.
Even the boy whose disappointment you captured
on parchment paper and hung in your bedroom
for years. His body is far gone from your bed
and slowly yours will be too.
Think of it as an extended vacation,
a sweet Valium dream.
You’ll be reborn, a swamp-monster,
slick and diamond-tough.
You’ll tear into an avocado and eat it,
pit and skin and all. And you will have forgotten.
That’s the only way to keep living.
There is shadow
of a sparrow
left on the window ledge
weeks after the poor bird
had been removed.
The sun melted
a permanent silhouette, tufts
of feathers, and a faint point
of beak still visible
with three days of rain.
Something is wrong.
I had a dream
where I said
this is a dream.
I’m certain
no one noticed
except my father
who knew I’d try
the salted rhubarb
and pomegranate seeds
that wept on my fingers.
Beets turn
into sugar sweetly
on the verge of burn and
I am guilty with happiness
of a kind,
where I survive
as a bird,
an egret
strange and white as my
father’s mustache, a telltale
for his murdered brother.
I don’t say
I’m happy,
a sort of guilty luck
that I love because it fleets
never follows, ripe to the point of rot.
What if nothing moves
still as sleep and my breath
is not enough?
I dream I am
as steel as a swallow
brazen head near bow and drink
its forked tail a salute
between death and habit.
The definition of egret
is wrong,
if I don’t hold
the long legs in absolute stillness.
Tonight, I find a cat
near the shore. Let him eat,
he will eat, he will return to
animal, not pet. I say, here
kitty, kitty. He reveals his belly
to me and all who continue to pass.
I have met people like this.
Three egrets stretch
above me in an arm full of rain
I am older now than my Uncle
dead at 36
all of history caught
in those white wings.
He too was killed for his
feathers, a plume of decoration
in a woman’s hat.
For our kidneys cratered
like the swollen moon
For the way time hangs
on our bones
For our confused lungs, blooming
white and yellow destruction
For our exhausted hearts, roused
to expansion by want and need
For the loss of the ancient stars
in our blood and marrow
For the mines of our bodies
that generate iridescent crystals and stones
For the dark shadows shifting
in our souls
And our inability to escape them
These poems are from Villarán’s forthcoming collection open pit.
you were born in davis
in a small inflatable pool
in april
during those first weeks, you would often wake up crying
in the middle of the night. without really knowing how
i would pick you up from the crib and hold you tight against
my chest, until you calmed down, and fell asleep again
i liked staying like this for a while
staring at the darkness
that would become the wall
imagine us in the car a sunny day the windows down
driving to the beach 88.3 driving and all those cars next to us driving
always in movement the highway is always full because the more
lanes we build the more cars are attracted to the smell of concrete
and white arrows painted over seemingly endless black surfaces:
the original infrastructure of future battlefields
imagine thousands of small highways running inside of you
all those cars driving somewhere taking something someone like us
perhaps to the beach with your mother so we would have the cooler
and the tent the umbrellas and the surfboards imagine all those cars
going somewhere taking something driving someone imagine all that
movement all that continuous movement the displacement dislocation
bodies inside metal vehicles on black surfaces running
imagine thousands of small really really small
a huge conveyor belt a network of swollen arteries imagine an open pit
an open wound the skin rupturing imagine your leg imagine your arm
imagine my leg imagine my arm
a big bag of tendons and ligaments necrotic tissue a bundle of nerve
tissue imagine bags of plastic inside your stomach lining your
intestines and climbing up your esophagus through the larynx
the lack of oxygen
imagine these huge pond type structures with plastic geothermal
liners stretching across the mountains dissecting the mountains
becoming the new mountain the only landscape leaching ponds laid
out in endless geometrical patterns
imagine every single muscle every fiber every synapse every neuron
needed for you to type with your right index finger:
n. n. n.
the letter n
imagine thousands of small highways pulsating inside of you
imagine it never stopping
thousands of small highways and the cars and the people and the things
and the places they want to take those things to because that’s what we
do we go places with things and we use metal vehicles that travel on
seemingly endless black surfaces just imagine all of this happening all
the time all the time happening all the time always
this highway
there’s no outside
this open pit
this wound this rupture this crevice inside body this highway all the time
always
what i’m trying to say miqel is:
just imagine thousands of small highways always running inside of you
imagine everything that’s needed for this to happen
all the time
always
now imagine an open pit a large open pit in the middle of a valley
surrounded by fractured mountains
i think that’s how it works
we have that pit
we keep running: faster faster faster
birds die and their stomachs are filled with plastic
whales die and their stomachs are filled with plastic
the united states economy gets a billion-dollar daily shot in its arm
imagine your arm
i’m thinking of mine
we have that pit
and we fill it with these things
we keep running faster always faster
now imagine us at the beach, imagine it being sunny again but not
too hot, imagine the sky punctuated by a few curious clouds, your
mother would be smiling, she’s beautiful when she smiles
it’s still happening
i don’t know what it is
i’m not sure what to do about it either
but i know it’s happening, all the time, always, relentless
we have that pit, it’s open, really open
and things are exploding and people are breaking and burning and dying
and we’re distracted
because we love the sand
the salt in the water
the cool air
My father dies in the morning
& a candy jar
in the middle of the house
wants also to be empty
objects in our living room
float like hot flies,
blue couches clutch the ceiling
& the coffee table whispers into the wall
The people, the fallen people,
the loved ones, my loved ones
sitting in the patio
we still laugh at the joke
about the giraffe.
We may cry in our fluorescent rooms,
when no one is looking.
We may be strong, we may, we may
but first we will tear our own
skin from our own skin
first can we go find
the other side where he went
find that place is not empty too.
Newly conscious in Union City,
that so-Jersey place with all-Spanish signage
my parents grew up in and around.
We drive by a huge blue-logoed highwayside gym
that used to be a Toys R Us.
My brother and I often begged to go
when we still lived nearby. That spot
housed all our dreams.
Here my eyes clock
the person next to me’s left knee against my right one,
its tenderness
a babe
of our mutual rest.
How rare to feel cozy with a man neither friend nor fuck,
face half-viewable, stubbly, his skin a few shades lighter
than mine, a small, thick left hoop earring
I think is diamond.
I imagine his mother wears
or wore similar ones,
that he respects women.
I imagine we are two brown queers sharing this row.
How we might otherwise have met awake
at Papi Juice
Bubble T or some other
Brooklyn brown queer party.
Man and his are, of course, projections
much huger than the rest;
also can’t recall if I saw them wearing two earrings
when they first sat beside me in DC,
or which ear is the gay ear. Still asleep, their legs shift away
and our babe slips down the gap.
for Emmett Till
On September 23, 1955, less than a month after Emmett Till’s lynching,
his killers (who would later openly admit to the crime) were acquitted
by an all-white, all-male jury in Sumner, Mississippi. Those killers
died in 1980 and 1994 without ever serving a day of time.
Nonetheless, we can still convict them here.
i.
You don’t remember, except the most
Significant crickets,
Sway, clack, clack
Till was still in the high blue grasses along the Tallahatchie River
Along the Mississippi bullfrogs mark
The browning rust of bullets: drown out the night by organs of earth:
Groaning, moaning, under weight of blankets of glimmering worlds.
Tiller of men, women
waves from the swamps drown out scratching hands clank, clack of shovels
“Emmett Till did more than whistle at Carolyn Bryant”
Look: there is nothing not even mud to rub
into my eyes, into the ashes, among reeds and resurrections of night.
We float down the river, on principle,
toward hives of higher ground
The wastes devour him from Glendora Mississippi
to the Freedom Trail highway
Down in the dark water, under the dark trees
Like a spiritual homing
There is no double jeopardy in the swamp.
ii.
From Greenwood, MS, to Money, MS, signs travel
And I reach for the moon
Among the dark vines—
In the buffalo clovers, in the prairie fringed orchids,
Bleating from prairie chicken shrill
Asking heaven to bury the dead.
The dead never sleep.
They stare at small fires.
They stare in the miles of prairie and contemplate steel shells like embers
Gleaming in the moonlight.
At uninhabited grassland, the dead dance
And wait outside houses of horrendous men.
The dead are far off in the mountains.
The dead grow native tongues and cause men to commit suicide
Among shot up placards and sleepless nights, drinking,
And shiver in the bluegrass
Like stolen placards
Kidnapped in gunsmoke
With lutes of tallgrass.
From Heaven, tears of white women and cries of black boys,
The final preparations are made
In the hollows and big bison creeks.
The dead keep the culprits, their souls broken like body,
Ridden in damnation
He’s never gone.
iii.
heavy cotton gin fan tied
to the ten-year-old’s neck with barbed wire
floating down the dark church of the Tallahatchie River
Down in the dark water, under the dark trees
“Bye baby” and “Bye baby” outside the candy shop
Dragged delicately about
The black water skiff hulks and sandy shoals
In the Memphis night he, years later,
Would resurface
As not guilty, preening as a Meadowlark
Calling to be released in the tallgrass
In Ferguson, Missouri, hijacked
Outside a candy shop, “bye baby”
For Michael Brown, “I cant breathe” the air was too thick for Eric Garner,
The grappling hooks behind the gin mill
Could not even clasp the body
He’s gone.
“Bye baby,” the police are probing tonight,
For bodies of black children in the waters of suburbs
Outside, they won’t let me in,
A shiver in the tallgrass: Indian bluestem, Kentucky Bluegrass,
A marker rooted in justice against racism,
The sign vandalized
A white drunkard stares at the open casket,
They won’t let me in.
iv.
in cellars of haunted houses
no one talked about it
the cool dark green moss
subsumed the secrets
the diamond-backed watersnake
whips and dissolves a whisper of water
walter scott was stopped at a traffic light
no one heard the pops
the cellars of haunted houses
are like ancient cities of civilizations that crashed
built on brutality in Saint Paul, in Baltimore,
in McKinney, Texas,
in cellars of haunted houses,
whispers are drowned out by clank and crush of the cotton gin
like Eli Whitey’s patent, or Fones McCarthy’s invention
fallen on big heaps of black men’s backs
no one talked about it
v.
she recants
sheriff promises those things hunted down
nothing he ever did
could justify the blood of Emmett Till
only after nightfall, boys lie awake
wondering, wondering
The game show host announces the doors to our cultura are
language and food las puertas
son lenguaje y comida
y no tengo las llaves brain locked down when anyone speaks
Spanish too suddenly
In Puerto Rico, I want to crack myself open
an inside-out coconut, let español spill over my beloved island
where I learned to eat my plantains sweet
San Juan, Sabana Grande are where I see my face reflected back at me
in each shop, la playa, bars
near-perfect replica of my mother’s
In Panamá, when she was a child, our familia called her fea—
ugly girl, with our afroboricua smile
that is the mouth I want to know, the Spanish I stretch lips to reach
try
my friends urge
no sé la palabra para try but maybe
my mother kept the keys from me so each blade-
shaped word
could not cut through
forged me as Latina Jeanne D’Arc
her naked back a constellation of stab wounds
On Sundays when the children’s bodies are dragged from the Rio
Grande
they are reborn
yucca flowers, baptized in cool blue morning broken
by
dolor
is to run through the fence, barbed
wire laced in your gut,
no tetanus shot to back you up. As the doctor re-inoculates
me, decade since my last shot in the arm
raw with hubris, one more defense
against
desert borders,
bare feet
my choice
When I ask, how do I ready this womb to deliver another,
she says, you know this means you can’t go home
Si, I reply, lo sé,
I know,
there is not enough Spanish in this poem.
If my torso is the transfomer toppled in Coamo by la tormenta
que comenzo todas las tormentas, pole splinters, sundered
lines wrapped around my neck, then my heart is the machete
mi hermano takes to the debris, hacks his way to power
once more. If my mouth is the cage closed on our stolen hijos
e hijas from El Paso to New York, then my tongue is the machete
struck to stone for one spark to ignite the final fire. If my feet
are the desert floor jagged with rock shards and sand scorch,
then my legs are the machete that have held mi madre up since San
Salvador, breaks through brush, past helicopter-light hunt.
If my arms are the closed gate between mi hermana and refuge, then
my hands are the machete, handle bashing down the lock.
This is how I bear this body forward, weapon honed by the white
man since I was una niña pequeña and now they will pay
homage to my machete heart, corazón de machete, your crimson
insurgent beats, those booted steps, you do not bleed, you burn—
your only stillness the song between, breath before the slash,
then the salvo, la fuerza, when they broke through the front door,
you were already gone.
when asked to get into it
when told not to care
when the committee asks
if I’m planning to have
children before
when told to speak up
when told to take it easy
when asked why
do I care
so much
when taken aside
when asked
(in a whisper)
if I was offended
when they don’t ask me to join
just because
when a man uses air quotes
around feminism
when a friend asks the barista
to make her iced coffee the color
of my forearm,
not the lighter inside—
the outside, it’s perfect.
when a friend asks about ass fetishes and Latinos
when the editor asks me to tone it down
when the editor asks me to spice it up
when asked if I’m okay
This poem begins our month-long celebration of
Hispanic Heritage Month here at Aquifer.
Watch for our print feature in the fall issue as well.
Do I know you, old friend? You were taken
off our asphalt ballgame expanse
where Sorrento and Parma roads met
before we were ten, to the North,
Edmonton, off my map of the world,
before Oswald shot Kennedy. Then,
you’ve told me, it was 40 below
when you landed without a coat, and found
that town’s kids could be heartless
as Philly’s where I stayed with Robert’s
and Elliott’s fists in my face. No escape
for either of us. Maybe you had more
boredom up in that numbing cold,
a near-paralytic stillness of frozen
lakes, cruel monotony of conifers
far as the mind could wander, a father
who knew only to quietly toughen you,
thicken your hide, and couldn’t. Maybe
I wound up more anaesthetized
by barrage, the din of the Market
Street pinball arcades, the ringing
thunder of bowling balls smashing
the pins under 54th Street, under
the roar of the one massive hungry kvetch
in the delicatessen above the lanes,
the howl of the great complaint
that was the real American anthem,
deafening song of never enough
belonging. I’d drift to its screech
refrains on the El down to 69th. How
was it for you? And do you know me,
after all these seasons, your silences
lonely as endless tundra, my screaming
riots of rights marches and acid rock
horror shows? Can we be the friends
we are? You’ve welcomed me
into your house, I see the boy
in the lift of your brow, that considerate
set of your mouth you learned
from your mother, and how you wait
for the kid’s heart to come out and color
the keys when you’re about to play
something for us on piano. You must
pick up on my frightened original
innocence in the blurt-and-pause
of my city-punk talk. And yesterday
when we ambled along the shore toward the old
observatory you showed me, I heard you
wonder as purely as who you were
when we sat on the swings in my yard
and joked, both of us already lost
forever, bedazzled alike under sky
wider than thought, secretly jazzed
to be recognized by one another.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile high
skyscraper dream had 528 stories,
and atomic powered elevators.
It makes you think of a caterpillar.
Maybe we are all one caterpillar,
and our apocalypse is a chrysalis?
My face was not my face
until it lost your trace.
Heartbreak is the power
to flower a flower.
Love is summer snow
& words are pajamas:
Fire won’t burn my hand
and miss, kiss, mere air.
Love can no more carry
my heart than a suitcase.
We have passed by
stand-ins & sentries—
There is the ‘one’
& ‘two’ or ‘three’
Never touch like we!
Walk on winter sand
we in we & in we?
(Wait, let me take a breath
& laugh today at death…)
from the hospital, I heard him cry
and lifted him from his bed
and brought him into ours,
and after his mother had fed him,
I rested him on my chest,
which rose and fell with him
until daylight.
And when I brought him home
from the hospital again,
after the social worker persuaded him
to let her call me, and after he told me
he thought he was ready to quit
using, I was afraid he might
sneak away in the night,
so I had him sleep beside me,
where all night long I heard
his labored breath, felt,
his legs beat against the sheets:
that sparrow, stunned
by the window’s false sky,
trembling in my hands,
catching its breath until
it fluttered and flew away.