Category: Poetry

Natural Order

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.

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When God Is a Woman

How many householders meet in

a whorehouse?

 

How many mujras dwell in a kotha?

 

How many neonates hew to a bordello?

 

Like her admirers

the god is silent.

In her sinews

hides a hint of soil

from the yard of courtesans.

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What We Ate

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.

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Reflex

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.

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Maps

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.

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Reverie of Gratitude

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.

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Cocoplum

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.

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Delta 15: The Definition of a Circle in a World without Geometry

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.

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Saying Goodbye to Your Body

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.

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The Painted Skulls, Held by Wings, Glistened in Rain

 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.

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The Doctor Laments

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

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Two Poems from “open pit”

These poems are from Villarán’s forthcoming collection open pit.

 

he likes to stare at walls

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

 

the world is waiting in line / at target

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

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Levitations

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.

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On the Megabus from DC back to New York, 7:00AM

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.

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The Body Riddled with Bullets: A Five-Part Pastoral

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

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Three Poems on the Anniversary of Hurricane Maria

The Room I Cannot Enter

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

 

 

No Matter Where I Go, I Carry You With Me

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.

 

 

Ode To My Latina Machete Heart

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.

 

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Clauses

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.

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Reunion Ode

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.

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The Illinois & Love, This I Know:

The Illinois

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?

 

 

Love, This I Know:

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…)

 

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His First Night Home

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.

 

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Two Poems on Love-Play

Roles

It was late, & you were

wearing your widow suit,

black of 1870s chic,

loaded with bustle.

I did my best Doc

Holliday—Val’s version, cock-

sure & half-goofy. You

laughed. I laughed. Val

would’ve laughed if he were here

watching me paw at your corset,

pull the strings to tighten it.

Moments like this,

we feel happiest,

field mice exploring

magnificent catacombs

of a dusty closet.

I act out in otherness;

you dress up the same:

not faces of whatever

force invented us,

but what we make

of ourselves

when we’re at play.

 

Let Me Be Your Dream Dunce

Bright-eyed desperado on a mission for disaster.

 

Snow-cap climber heading for the peak

 of Mt. Oh-no-one-goes-there-ever.

 

View-taker who topples over the railing of the boat

 into choppy waters you barely save me from.

 

Let me let go of rope, map, & stars—

 

I’ll walk into danger as a fawn

 not fast enough to flee the mountain lion,

 

tell you philosophies of nothing while we sit

 in your dream-Jacuzzi in our clothes.

 

Let me be clumsy, cuss, rant, & stub my toe

 on a jag in the earth,

 my forehead once more on the jeweled moon.

 

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Inventory of a Black Girl & Gourmet Ars Poetica

Inventory of a Black Girl

Model Made: April 27, 1992

Quantity

 

 Item

 

 Details

 

 Value in USD

 
2 Lungs full of broken glass When I cough little bits come loose
And scrape against my teeth
I have learned to bleed quietly		 0

 
27 Bones (in right hand) Formed from statues and statistics
I vote on which ones to break		 0

 
4 Failed deaths Each more urgent than the last 0

 
1 Mouth full of matches Only sulfur passes through these lips
Only fire is respected
I am used to swallowed ash
And burned tongue		 0

 
2 Stolen songs The first, when I was born
The next, I haven’t been told		 0

 
0 Deeds done right (in the world’s eyes)

_____________

 

 Not Applicable

 

Gourmet Ars Poetica

My poems taste terrible, too many chewed up

Metaphors and overcooked analogies.

They need more salt, less narcissism.

More technicality, like practicing to how perfectly

Poach an egg, or be consistent with verb tenses.

 

I need a bigger pot with a sturdy lid

To contain this wild free verse.

Maybe throw it live in boiling water,

Like lobster.

Garnish it with pretty diction,

Say it’s modeled after the classics.

 

One day I’ll be the Gordon Ramsay of the page

Dragging syntax from hell into my notebook.

I’ll subvert entire stanzas into submission,

They’ll say: “Yes, poet” and “No, poet”

And “That’s not the way I’ve been taught, poet.”

 

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Poems of Water

Shark Valley

We ride through the sawgrass, the only humans for miles,

as evening glistens in the shallow water,

 and thousands of white birds

 and gray birds

 and black birds
 land in the mangroves

 to roost for the night.

We talk and stay silent at once as we ride

and imagine wading into the grass

 through knee-deep water
 until we were far enough

 that everyone we’d ever known, everyone we’d loved
had forgotten us. And if we sat down in the water

 until our clothes fell away, and we sang

 to each other like the breezes across the tall grass,

going nowhere, and the minnows nibbled our bodies

 so gently it felt like a new kind of love,

 what could we say to the shadows waiting for us,

arms crossed and scowling, as though they owned our darkness?

 

Love Poem

The names we’ve never spoken, that define us to ourselves

like the rhythm of a river caught inside a stone

smoothed by that river, as it falls toward the sea.

 

*

 

In some other life, I wove grasses and lay down.

In some other life I made a nest, and slept

dreaming like a river, as it slides toward the sea.

 

*

 

How many years did we search to find our lives?

How many years do we have before we leave?

The singing of a river as it falls toward the sea

 

*

 

is a mind without thoughts, pure being, like the breeze

that wakes in your attic, or underneath your bed

and stirs up the dust, while you’re thinking of the sea

 

*

 

and hugging your wife, who’s dreaming in a language

that doesn’t have words yet, and gleams in her eyes

when she wakes in your arms, smelling faintly of the sea

 

*

 

and sunlight in the breeze as it moves through the bedroom

then back out the window, like life itself must leave

the body that held it, or like a wave far out at sea . . .

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Two Poems of the Living Past

Anatomy

Today I eat lunch with the anatomy skeleton

hanging wired together in the art room.

We shake hands. I want to kiss her,

because the bones are real,

and maybe she would bloom out of her decay,

cicada-like and ancient.

 

A quick, perhaps forgivable glance at the pelvis

confirms, yes, it is a she, and I name her Charlotte

because I like the ring of it.

Leave her body to science?

No, never to science. But to art, maybe.

What color were her eyes, I wonder,

lurking like embers in a heap of bones?

 

So old, at least now she presides here,

mutely telling the charcoal-drenched artist,

This is all you are, so look.

And if I sit here often enough, insisting on Charlotte,

maybe the name will rattle something awake

in that bone cocoon, knit muscle and skin over that blank,

and she will blink in slow, lush approval.

 

Rain in Glastonbury

The abbey’s ruined arches jut from the ground

like giant ribs. From beneath them,

this fine mist seems just the thing

 

for atmosphere, camera perfect and on cue.

It mutes every sound—the tread of our rubber boots,

the tour guide’s practiced tones.

 

And the bronze plaque marking King Arthur’s grave,

where he is not buried,

stands quietly matter-of-fact in its lie.

 

We snap pictures. Sure,

with the mist, this could be Avalon.

It isn’t. Maybe that’s why somebody

 

tore down the abbey years ago and used the stone

to build that big, faceless house on the hill.

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I Tell My Twin Sister if I Come Back after I Die,

 it sure as hell ain’t gonna be to visit

as a pesky fly, obsessively orbiting her head while

she kneels, nose-pinched, to de-poop the litter box.

 

Or a squirrel, like the one she calls Mom

whenever it pauses halfway up the maple

to stare through the kitchen window as she lights

a cigarette: I know, I know—I promise I’ll quit!

 

If we’re granted the power to return, to embody

some other kind of creature, why would it be

those two ducks who claim her pool every June?

 

Okay . . . so if they are Grandma and Grandpa, 

what do you think they’re trying to communicate

through the shit and feathers you skim out daily?

 

You remember how they loved to swim, she insists,

when I suggest it’s the endless supply of breadcrumbs

she scatters, not reincarnation, bringing them back.

 

Well, if I return, I assure her, it’ll be as a bear—

not at all native to her suburban town—a big one,

who claws a perfect M for Michael into the side

of her shed. So there’s no uncertainty it’s me.

 

Oh my god! Don’t you dare, she says. That shed cost

a fortune! But . . . feel free to carve it into the maple.

 

What makes you think I’m going first anyway? I ask.

Has that fly you call Pop been telling you something?

 

Clean the litter box for me, she says. And ask him yourself.

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Fantastic Voyage

My father’s silver Chevette pushes past refineries along the turnpike,
fields and farmland tucked back behind the Raritan River bridge.

 

I strain my neck to catch glimpses of skyline, growing larger
with each exit. I mouth exotic names on signs—Rahway, Weehawken.

 

We begin the long, slow, curving descent to the mouth of the tunnel,
an impatient caterpillar of cars with glowing red eyes, inching

 

towards a collective cocoon. At the entrance we pick up speed, my pulse
quickens in the half-light. Everything’s possible below the surface:

 

 The white-tiled walls are relics from an ancient civilization.
 The curve of the ceiling is the belly of a massive river-beast.
 We are passing through a half-world on the way to a new planet,
 the invisible NJ/NY line is a strobe-light stargate.

 

The road twists, slopes upward—leaning in, we slingshot forward,
there’s no turning back: the glow of the City is just around the bend.

 

The cocoon splits open and spits us all out: fresh butterflies, bright wings.
Drenched in golden light, the City’s an endless meadow to flit about.

 

We bury our faces in it, we drink its nectar.

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Nomads

In the night sky, Arabs see al’awa’id,

the Mother Camels, a pattern of stars

that seem to gather around a calf

and protect her from hyenas.

 

In the life before this one, daughter,

I might have carried you for just over a year,

and delivered you to your first slow,

searing desert breaths.

 

The camel mare is the only mammal

who does not clean her infant

after birth, nor bite through the umbilical cord.

 

Another cord binds me to you;

it runs from brainstem

to lumbar region, with nerve roots,

dorsal roots, ventral roots,

 

the peripheral butterfly columns,

and the cauda equine (horse’s tail),

motor supply for the perineum

that brought you into light in late

September, a desert sunflower,

 

your eyes dolly-blue, to gift me

my happiest autumn.

 

A calf is born with eyes open.

Did you know camels always face the sun?

 

Their lovely long eyelashes

and their tears protect their eyes

from sand and grit and blindness.

 

We were nomads, in that other life;

maybe that is why I do not see you

as much as I would like, but we are bound

to each other nonetheless.

 

You’ll find me waiting in al’awa’id

even at the dawn of my next life.

 

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Vanity

Hairpins on the vanity—

I’ve lost count.

 

Fellow suburbanites,

the pedestrians outpace the growing

 

traffic, hair hovers above cul-de-sacs

like tentacles. Go out,

 

get stung. Letting the touching

do its work, I venture into

 

wires. I feel like a lover.

I feel sorry that sex

 

rarely happens in public.

Not that I’d be looking for it,

 

only stumble upon a couple

of fellow loners trying

 

to prove to their neighbors

they aren’t lonely.

 

No other way to convince

the jury, unless

 

a man grabs a gun

to blast billions of bullets,

 

and satisfies himself

that he can live without

 

Homo sapiens.

Nearby, imperious crows line up

 

on power lines. Momentary silence

before their firing squad of gazes—

 

spare me—I’ll return home—

the hair—accidental curios

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Poems about What We Call Things

First Name

My mother calls my name with three

short a‘s tangled in roots of dandelions.

 

Gold tufts that grow no matter who tries

to pull them up. These a‘s hide in the black

 

crescent of dirt under my nails and swallow

my s’s when my young tongue is learning

 

how to say my name. My grandmother calls me

to her kitchen stool with three glass-blown

 

a‘s perched on my vertebrae: all feather, royal

red stretching a thread the length of my spine,

 

drawing me up tall and narrow. These a’s

are helium on the roof of her mouth. She

 

inspects my nails and scrubs the moons clean.

 

 

Those ducks in the baseball field are plastics bags.

 

The caterpillar

on the window frame

is chipped paint.

 

That old maple tree

melting through chain link

is your neighbor’s

 

outstretched hand.

The alarmed flight

of sandhill cranes

 

is your window A/C unit.

The man thrown

into the street

 

is a stop sign

swept in headlights.

You are not waiting

 

alone at the bus stop

is an oak tree.

A raccoon curls

 

into the storm grate.

You uncross your arms.

The crow looks up

 

from his preening.

The man blossoms

in your chest

 

and before you shout

he does not step off the curb

into the green light.

 

 

Maiden Name

When I marry, I lose half the syllables

in my last name—a decision to sell

 

the dining table in a yard sale

because of who it reminds me of and not

 

because it isn’t sturdy. Unmoored

my signature sinks below the line

 

on my grocery store receipts

and cuts the paper dolls holding hands

 

at the wrist. None of us knew the West

Virginia tobacco farmer whose name

 

we’ve practiced. We hardly know each other,

but when I had all my syllables we appeared

 

like sisters. You can see we all have the same

square hands, are missing the same teeth.

 

I crowd documents with various combinations—

the given, sold, and stolen names—as if lifted

 

from the shelves of an airport gift shop.

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Three Poems

DROS

Ten days later, after the mandatory

state waiting period, I pick up my gun.

The dealer gives me shit, says I didn’t bring

the right kind of second i.d. “A gas bill,”

he says, as if I’m stupid, “an electric bill,”

or a “house cable bill. Nothing else.

Repeat it.” I repeat it like a jackass.

My wife emails me the cable bill and he

still won’t accept it. Ambles to the back

to ask the owner. At this point, I know

he has it in for me. Something he doesn’t

like—I’d bet it was my wife having to

help me. I sniffed the misogyny on him.

Finally, his boss says it’s a go and he

halfheartedly slides the sword-silver box

to me, my dummy rounds, my box of ammo.

I’m thinking people like the gun dealer

are the reason I’m walking out of the store

with my new gun, a Beretta PX4 Storm,

people, who for no reason gave me shit.

People who just knew they could and so

they did. But it’s mine now, and more,

my gun-hating wife helped me buy it.

I place the bag, as if it were groceries,

in my trunk, merge into traffic, relieved.

 

Lane Nine

I never shoot on weekends, always on weekday afternoons.

It’s too busy on Saturdays, and busy at the range means

danger—at least to me: the slim, pretty girl on a date

who has the “shakes,” the worker warning her, “I can’t let you shoot

unless you calm down, okay?” She says she’s okay, looks back

at me because I’m staring. I am staring because I’m evaluating.

She can’t stop laughing. Her date is a clueless hipster

who had asked the worker earlier if he could he plug in his cellphone.

The worker said no. The hipster was lucky he hadn’t asked

one of the meaner workers; “lucky bastard” I think. I’ve

faced down the mean ones before, who made you feel stupid

for asking something basic about guns. But this guy was young

and cool and his girl was hot, so I guess he can get away

with appearing detached. His date continues to laugh.

She’d laugh even in the range; I’d later hear her through

my earmuffs. But until then, I wait and watch the large

Filipino family come in and take a lane. I hear them plan

a pig-hunting trip and a visit to Arizona to buy more guns.

They’d also laugh really hard inside the range. I look at the boy

with his father, a blonde boy, like my own son. No more than

ten; the youngest they allow. I’m thinking of bringing my

own son in. So I watch the boy who seems very relaxed.

I want my son to stop playing video games. I don’t want him

to turn into a man who loves video games, a man who can’t

tell the difference between the screen and real life, a man

who needs to ask where he can plug his cellphone in

at a gun range. At last, I get my lane: #9. I shoot three

boxes of ammo. My hands feel unsteady. I am nervous around

so many flaky people, but if shooting teaches you one thing

it’s how to ignore the world, how to violently separate

yourself from others—not in the literal sense of course,

but in a spiritual plane. Number nine is my lane.

 

Virulence

Novices go hunting

in the lining of true pockets,

the airplanes that breathe air

like human beings, if you know

enough, the copier flies American,

instinctually like a big bear

in the sky. Imagine that. Silently,

the stars make acquaintances;

they’re also new to the job.

And I do remember 1980

as a child, a young child.

The smell of my aunt’s Gremlin,

that hot, plastic scent of the

interior and the exhaust,

the thin palm trees that swayed.

Even then, always ruminating.

The smallish plot already

developing. And why should

it bother me? The inch-like

presence? No moon-landing

for me. No moon-lander. I guess

with every gun there’s an assault.

But this isn’t turning violent,

I have my dog with me

tonight, the kids gone, so why

write about that? The people

down the street have good

skulls, the people further

down the street have ugly

hearts. You can sense that

type of thing. Maybe it’s their

big ass house with no one in it.

Maybe it’s the fact I once

saw two tie-wearing men

playing b-ball in their front yard.

That type of thing doesn’t

make for close neighbors.

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