across the first continent.
100 years / 100,000—collapsed
gesture learned, the mark
of wanting to make marks in the surrounding
objects to say: what?
X
what once marked the body?—too much
pressed into bones—
ancient value feels hopeful, the Blackest millennia
so vindicated. an ochre block & a herd of cattle sweep across
hyperbolic
pastoral, a history
in skin in blood in everything alive a disturbance
THE RULE OF OPULENCE
Bamboo shoots on my grandmother’s side path
grow denser every year they’re harvested for nuisance.
Breezes peel blush and white petals from her magnolia,
lacing unruly roots in the spring grass. For nine decades
she has seen every season stretch out of shape, this past
Connecticut winter slow to relinquish cold. As a girl
she herded slow turkeys on her aunt Nettie’s farm, fifty acres
in a Maryland county that didn’t plumb until midcentury,
plucking chickens and pheasants from pre-dawn
into the late night, scratching dough
for neighbors, relatives stopping by for biscuits, and the view
from my window changes. It’s Mother’s Day
and I’d always disbelieved permanence—newness a habit,
change an addiction—but the difficulty of staying put
lies not in the discipline of upkeep, as when my uncle chainsaws
hurricane-felled birches blocking the down-sloped driveway,
not in the inconvenience of well water
slowing showers and night flushes, not in yellowjackets
colonizing the basement, nuzzling into a hole
so small only a faint buzz announces their invasion
when violin solos on vinyl end, but in the opulence of acres
surrounding a tough house, twice repaired from fires, a kitchen
drawer that hasn’t opened properly in thirty years marked Danger,
nothing more permanent than the cracked flagstone
path to the door, that uneven earth, shifting.
ANTEDILUVIAN
Where were you when the truth disappeared or
when the truth battered us & we pretended fear
fell from the ripped pillow of our sky instead of
rising up from the one clear place of us Where
were you when strongmen told us to die &
blasted us into nothing Were you downtown
to witness the smooth mirage stagnate in sky-
scraper shade & neon glower Did you hop a bus
& clutch a cold center rail, the sweat of your palm
making you slip as if at sea Were you at sea
in memory, gathered into lyric, your body
pretending any era was a safe one Six persimmons
ripen unconsumed, mayfly wings flash
their iridescence in the dark Nothing works
By swallowing alarm you scrapped what you knew
near plaza fountains, ultra-anonymous
Now an arrowhead sharpens
the blood under our flesh Low to the ground,
a sea of tamarisks You claim millennia
led to the false obelisks led to what severs
the head of connection in the time of least But we
only ask that you not kill us
SESTINA FOR PERSONAE
We choose to call our scatter
Expansion—openness, inexact song,
Imaginative loop
We came to what wants to surface—
The rest revealed in undercurrents, our bodies
Insistent
Insistent
No one in charge but energy We arrived to scatter
With half the clamor of bodies,
Screaming or singing
For the throat’s own sake, its corrugated surface—
We arrived luxuriating in the loop
(light moves downstage right in a frantic loop
Improvisational movement or complete stillness, insistent)
We came to (improvisational movement or complete stillness) surface
We came to be anywhere—to scatter
Paint but not trash, to turn holographic, singing
It’s not true that we miss what we can’t give our bodies
We came to say there’s another, plusher approach—bodies
(Bromeliads appearing in the staged darkness, in silver, variegated, yellow loops)
(Improvisational movement or low volume singing)
When we say we want, the love in it—absent the scatter
We came to deny the surface
We came to be impossible and surfaced
Inside Emily Dickinson’s perfect attitude, our bodies
Longing—for what? A defect as power, scattering
Ruthless integrity in a joyful time loop
We came to consider anything alive respectable, insistent
Anyone in need of radical devotion can or not sing
We came to choose (indiscernible mumbling or opera singing
& unrestrained laughter) chocolate cosmos, floriphages, all summer surfaces
Maintained in drought, anything we can count on—(folds into self) insistent
We came through the Taghkanic in autumn, our bodies
Arrived in red deer abiding a clear path, a loop
Arriving nowhere, but scatter—
Who are we? Orion songs, missed evergreens, bodies
Looped into every surface, looped
Insistent into struggle—like heirloom seeds, rising in scatter
SKY ERASURE
sans bright star equivalent, hoist
autumn slate
& dive up, cloud borne
hooked for purchase, flail
lark limbed at song ,
at light bridge, try rocket—
every angular distance boxed under
constellations three fists apart
SYNESTHESIA
I. Theory
First, I was twenty-five with no sleep ( )
& my body said feel this And I didn’t
want to ( ) then It turned into a constant & ( )
burned to be felt I couldn’t harden
away from it couldn’t ease ( )
or sleep or not-feel my way away because ( )
it was myself &
what my child could see ( ) & what I was
watching ( )
Semiotics—
a feeling as dagger ( ) as gestural shard
sheathed expensively ( ) dividing itself from its origins
from evidence of uncertain shifts ( )
Dreams for three nights: I sang hush to a wounded man
( )
( )
gunshots, my brother ( ) and he lived. I said a
prayer &
a ghost running crowded ( ) woke up calm.
Streets and shady hallways. I severed
the angriest part of me ( )
only to have double the raging
( )
weapons grow in its place
II. Signification + Gesture Drawing
A mechanism crumbling its history, I used to
( ) build up my own hard feelings ( ) with
those of
others Can you believe
I (signifier) would take them like they were mine
or take them
like I could take them away ( )
like I could
learn the texture of a heart as if touching it ( )
in the dark like in Grey’s Anatomy
when the power went out ( )
Dr. Yang has to put her hand inside a man to feel
where the hole is, feel how to save his life
& now I ( ) sketch a tender gesture:
smell of antiseptic as the squeezing of a lover’s hand versus
grinding against a stranger’s crotch ondulato
ODE TO 180 PAIRS OF WHITE GLOVES
smacking that ass
making a phat beat
(the thinking man’s Beyoncé
endlessly sketching
Isaach de Bankolé)
O hair as urgent bulletin
cosmic drifts of hair
emitting important information
O untapped talents and salted bravado
a syntactic turn-on
a paragraphic chasm
stirring up hallucinogenic
invader magic
resembling a hoarded apocalypse
of fetishized resistance
against a corridor of wounds
O honeypot hand in a real
busy honeycomb
watching the bees
suck on brown girls’ legs—sharp
like hustlers or suicidal stargazers
O pink lips first pulling on a Kool
I DREAMT YOU AT THE TATE
Leaned forward on a long bench, long legs
taking up the whole sleek area
Drawing your own sneakers & eating a tuna melt
cut in half
After you offered me that 50%
I took out my own giant sketchpad & we switched—
Size 14 men’s & size 7.5 women’s, archival
Who cares about matching
The dream occurred on a plane
traveling north from Phoenix to Denver & now
carouseling slow is my neutral hardside
& Sade, through Bluetooth, intends to leave like a lion
RETREAT
If I had the bones for this, I could cheat
the finish. Melodramatically, die
trembling as I peel tangerines
in a state, catering to doubt.
A lifetime thinking I know who I
am here—I avoided erasure, I fought—
Can I collect my fragments,
fragile now in the gentleness
your questions taught?
No such marginalia. In every burst
of agreement, no turbulence to try
& estrange us, no opposition to
map onto the joke. Observe
the rough architecture a whole person
bases key decisions on,
its faulty edges hazed against
clarity, uncut nails
catching on unfortunate silk—
RECLUSIONARY
Stranger, the stone forest
alive with limestone
says come on over to my place
à la Pendergrass & watch the LCD TV
but only ’til I die & not after
None of that Poe shit
Let’s watch animal gods meanwhile
probe the floodplains—
red in beak & claw
How else can I live alone
having read ol’ Herm through 1857
Knowing what’s corroded its way
into the heart itself—the entrance
full of swifts, Archimedes counting
principles of loss & we can get joy
clocking subterranean
pursuits of cave-evolved fish on Nat Geo
IN THE QUIET
I ended things & need to migrate soon
I’ve had a rocky epoch
Not boring & non-hairsplitting so
resort to heating leftovers in the oven
Or in a blue skillet on a hot eye
Watch a wasp behind blinds escape
Laconic ease in the new absence,
so beigy safe & later, fiddleheaded
Souped-up in a fast sleep
I furl at the least pain
For fun & distraction—American Horror Story
Violence I can turn off
DECLINATION
The truth is I am lionhearted. Dreaming
no match for the waking flame. We fell asleep smelling smoke,
placed damp towels on all the sills. Now the ground is frozen
and in the dream, distance evaporates. I say every word
held back, bold in touch too, lengthening in spirit. The mountains
shadow the rust of the cold day breaking and we hum with energy. Winter
keeps us lucky, rested, like suns.
Are you an eagle yet?
Serpents, they say, can’t keep
lies from breaking their tongues. In the dream I resist
your silence protects me
from my own. One touch to eradicate all sense except, electric,
what you know you control.
On a day like this, mottled grey-blue with threats of yellow,
I watercolor until hunger overtakes. I might write but words don’t feel
brave enough.
Do you draw upon waking? Do you first spike a coffee or
rinse dreams from your skin with wet heat? I dare not ask. I make. I make
messes I delight in. I draw, too,
darken my small hands with charcoal, blow its dust
off the paper, use up chamois after chamois
deepening shadows, black as lust. Or ink. Sleek
lines improvised across the cotton rag. Why can’t this work
make me not want you drawn
over me, a dream in rowdy fragments, impossible. Midwinter
the day thrilled frozen, denatured minute by minute
into a graveyard for night and dreams.
I could want you or hate that want. I heat
last night’s plate just as light snakes in. I add lemon to the cool
water in a faceted glass. Set it down heavy, ringing the wood.
My sister would tell me
I need to stay focused. I do.
I am writing this in the creeping dawnstrokes, having made my list
and folded the white paper into crude fourths. I have to manage.
Foolish, I know, to try so many times
after spectacular failure. But I refuse to fight the urge to
rise from my low camouflage, letting hunger quicken the hunter in me,
shattering pretense. I make a show, don’t I, blushed
and modest even as I etch your departing silhouette in gold.
IF GOLD, YOUR FIGURE AS MIRROR ON THE GROUND IS
after Pizarnik, after Pessoa
I.
Comic screen to change what came to notice Even though sky
at first was the same blank slate So literal. The value of it
You make your own lion’s teeth sink in, slowly
II.
So green the insects claim you don’t belong here
then bite & bite
Virtue the undulant yards as penance
III.
The capuchin stays silent in the void
You feel the sun of unknown experiments
IV.
Hordes of animals without teeth crash the window in a
dream & it means you are not hungry enough
V.
Once a choice comes to full & the act carries the joy
of struggle The winter mother severs only a chance at
restarting. Could you sorrow the one unchosen thing
infinitely so it feels occasional, the act is itself
VI.
Where the jewelry case in your closet holds
Not expensive things but purchased—
Acquired in a place that no longer exists
If I write a texture I could make it stucco like childhood
Aloe or cactus spines / to cut is to heal the rough of a cut
All dark blue against good skin like leather
VII.
Aloud your voice heightens its wrongness
You speak anyway because you are learning / I think this might be the
end of insecurity
VIII.
Imagine the root of oppositional archetypes Next to m
e
chrysanthemums the rust of blood when it dries but in front of me So
much blue & a broken white
I can’t see myself on purpose
IX.
What rocks itself out of time on a wing beat Is not a
name or a silence
As in sanity’s meager gestures. Downriver, the unruly
sound turned
C-shaped / Real secrets as fragrant & familiar as
what’s under the smoke
I stand next to the rocks
Where you choose to return without choosing / Some black,
some silver
The lines of ash & passage A neon swig of enlightenment
X.
Don’t be exceptional in this false.
All fluent in nothing, hiding where your debt grows
Be aggressive or do not mind, you say
I feel like a chicken after boiling
Or like you do now—smooth from the pain