(I love how you love promises because they are lies)
(I love the honesty of cheap rings)
Like a ripened plum or two, pitted—Now a flat middle ground, now
another
interior to hold the ruin
XI.
Your hair grows in eighths on alternate days but you pretend not to
count What rains in it
What grandiose adornment hasn’t happened but will happen Also a
lie—in color
XII.
The grunting you hear on the other side of the wall might be music Or the
disaster of a concrete floor
The western cities, the eastern cities / I chose that inscrutable skin
The high ground of resurrection Discursive—
falling soft / I witness the guilt planted for others
I practice by moving my legs I am a bracket
You are the conquering seawall
Nothing earth about you except what clean is visible Also your hands
ECLOGUE FOR PERSONAE
All the way human, we came to hurt.
We came via unpredictable route
via safer lacuna, via habit of wondering
what desire settles belief in commitment,
in silence & self-observation
We came to shell the day-cold,
bone-filled, language-less
We arrived in winter,
a snow-topped mountain range spilled
adrenaline through the bay window
samaras of white ash
We arrived with varied intensity
As in to make a disturbance
We came when our eyes burned
& consent to what we don’t know
how to heal yet
We allow for devastation
Discomfort is for the machine’s sake
meant to break you or part of you—
We are not asking
It feels strange to smile in a fascist era—grief
dammed up, ancient energy held back
like certain floods
We have flooded ourselves, we have flooded
Nine hazel trees & a mother’s
body as a door of no return
A mother’s body as a place we’ve been
mapped inside of, a galaxy
pointing toward grit,
& who can feel the possible
in their bodies & not break
toward it—
(Any closing action)
THE WORLD SAYS NOT TO EXPECT THE WORLD
But do it anyway— be made, all
out of love— taken, bestowed, lived
through, by means of, without
the beauty we don’t want
to waste & the world says it
wants, but trashes, sees as glut, usable
in a finite manner We like talk
of human forevers as holes in us
unfilled, we’re raggedy apartments
Which thin glamour to blame for such
schism, runaways & orchids
tattooed on wrists or thighs, as dull men scoff—
We still say keep fighting
& love me again—don’t the pines die, too
& exactly with our names
I WATCH EXACT IN DISCONNECT
after Anaximander & McMorris
futile
a cartographer’s dream to
graph
material persistence
of faults
ODE TO THE ACCURACY OF INTUITION
O collagist O montage maker of scenes
ancient & modern & profane, O superimposer of meaninglessness
upon the voiceless
tormented in the gloss
of daily rags, O the figures magnificently
gowned in the explosion
precious untouched, O but not the women whose
children fly
limbless into sky or earth
as men watch or die or kill, O
painter of rainbows in soldiers’ hands, O gluer of Caucasian smiles
against atomic skies, O
Febrezer of Iraq,
O arranger of models lounging legs open
on fire, cloned acrobats in the verdant 1970s
fields, fake-lashed
fine line of the tightest rope,
O if you left them a net, O a sea of ocelots beneath it
PRECIPITATION ERASURE
Rain— blackening
what’s already slick, dark in ice walk
season— slip
free into whose choice
A script you glove up for, in spiral.
That small home
folding screams into lace. Permeable,
evaporating—
ANODYNE
I wish I’d learned to take better care
As if this world tried to love me
A body I used up
on hard ground, flowsy &
sop-studded, misplacing words
I keep to settle for pain
Pitch breaks in—
body leaning into quiet
I couldn’t ask for, what I needed
& thought I couldn’t afford. A shun,
undone, a hush a shudder through
thinned fascicles of flesh &
flimsy bone, walkward
in a lost idiom. Are we on a heartway?
We could pretend. Calculate
how immaculate hardship
covets itself
Acts like it aches for more
IMMINENCE
Bergen County, New Jersey
A pair, young, embrace—heels lift,
arms encircle, not expecting
lifetimes to come next, bodies grown taller
in a blink, imagine they’ve yet to be
pulled by the wrist into supermarkets,
by the hair into adolescence,
by the sorrow-struck heart into graffiti or frantic
streets, dim & touch-starved, can we? If
even our buried objects strike us
as reversal of sky, & we look down
only in the wrong seasons
at what sustains our weight
& containment means existing inside, & when
we contain we are contained in time, in place,
in memory, those immensities
we forbid ourselves, so vast
our resistance as infinite tininess, defiance
an Atlantic problem, hallucination, worse,
cello-soundtracked—a course of recovery
amid strewn bricks, dead acres &
plastic-laden foliage trudging
along the Passaic, past wrought-
iron fences green with corrosion, foresight absent
denial—choices to make for the labyrinth
NJ TRANSIT PASSENGER ODE
On the way home from the MoMA I decide
I want those blue patent leather peep-toe
stilettos & hardback Japanese novel with silver
bookmark scissored dead center
I want vegetarian gumbo
I want snapper & trout blackened on the spit
I want feet that don’t swell &
veins that don’t threaten varicosity
I want that lean man to kiss me
on the back of the neck & smile
when he whispers, so I can feel what he means
between breaths—the truth of all performance
I want that heiress ease
minus the trickle-down
I want to clear the Lincoln Tunnel
Shit I want 24-hour service
to be unnecessary
I want to sleep at night
& when I do I want dreams
like the one last April
My family all lived
in the same place
long enough to grow daffodils & safe babies
I want to kn
ow
who’s walking toward them on the street
I want a real salve, a cool
wet cloth & jasmine tea
I want to bow down with
my arms breaking earth
until it grows more delicious
than shaved dimes between
my grandmother’s teeth
I want the city’s lights to stop
telling me that bedtime story—the song
I can’t get enough of—the swagger
keeping me hooked
ANCIENT MOTHER I KEEP TEACHING US NEW WAYS TO FIND JOY
I draw no propriety My island is recursive So I have a son
whose brilliance : :
isn’t understood yet I know how to make a frail body
look perfect but not a sad mind or a world
that can’t catch up Since I cannot run
I stretch my thoughts fight my voice
low like water in air extinction
: what continuum : I return
fallen My illnesses in secular lifetimes—no matter
Sound makes space in the throat in a glint euphonic
small lights free affection I face
those prepared for open force those who favor weapons
My caution limited
to what might exhaust this brittle form, easily spent
muscles, bones ready to snap How to weasel a monsoon
I have instead
50 ways to plummet if I slip twice
will it rain again before : the Trance : How is joy
a ruptured curse if I get more tattoos as a crone
will my withering get more or less respect from whom
I didn’t perceive where imaginary lives cacophonized
into the real How my skin handles certain atrophy is akin to
what I devote to trust How does one outstretch the practical
in hiding from husbandry A violin can whistle
if you want it to The sun a warm tint on a bad photograph Who am I
without this danger & with this naiveté, protected still
I’m sitting too long
Of what would I be afraid
AFTERLIGHT ERASURE
The pain is willing &
I suffer—
A good mother does what it takes.
privilege made peace with
trust.
Sometimes force
means react right—
Right of escape until
that body has fled. Until that scene
eludes
jubilance—
what’s left
COMMON MIRACLES
Across the definition of blue A dozen
Rave in disappearing patterns—
Quarrel of sparrows
Branches beam full green
Bebel sings A falling star is here & with us
cavaquinho, fado, mandolin
Invisibly A cracked bone stitches itself a whitened scar
over and over—caixa wires
Breath culled under cuica, timbal
A wasp on the stone poolside for a monument
I WATCH THE ENDLESS BREAKAGE OF WINGS
after Mothlight & McMorris
the light beauty
death sped up
blue-black
the sepia
the white behind
translucence
the rage
the whirl of it
like falling like
a false flight
ROUTE
Unlit, we left
at break, rode south
Turned hard
left up canyon, up
rockslide-paved wind-sown
center of buttes
Lungs opened
to river down into
cut cliffs
White-topped
energy shift
over plain hills Played over
steep rock vein
Cut body
coming to memory as arid
An astonishing
Sea of sagebrush, sand,
low forest of scrub pine
Tough piñon
Failing as cow shade
A rural rust
Cloud shadows’ chatoyancy
veneers mid-range peaks
Radiant as green rise
Laneside
Acres, acres of which
We cannot
divine from dust
Terrain blue from
sky influence
A true mesa
Crow on the median
Perfect light-leveling rock
jut & lone antelope
facing fallen gates
Trailers left beside
a homeless staircase
Music changes
at the boundary imagined
between horses &
housing debris
Who can live
Next to what’s falling apart
DOUBLE LIFE
Last night I split a bottle
plus a glass of white, a clear
Cali sauv that first woke me then
put me to sleep. In between
bites of poblano soup & spicy
slaw on bootleg street tacos we ran
off each random white man who thought
he could eat in our silence
with our crass laughter & endless
sentences about oppression in work
life & bloodstreams, ours & others’
& who did they think could escape now,
collision of fear & brazenness
clapping together in historical play
across the moving planet. Erika says
a woman named Chocoletta
saved her from boss-led persecution
& I say or think something like
Her mother had vision
& the power in a Black woman’s name
saves us all. Hungover & overworked
this morning I get my tax bill. Doubled
my income last year, so owe double too.
I wish I could pull a Thoreau but
I’m only 41.8% white. If only I could just be
chased off a bar stool at The Hornet
on Broadway after eating a plate of fake nachos
& drinking a warm pilsner. Instead I fear
the end of a chase ending in blood,
mine or someone I love & I love us all
& so many of my white friends know
how to help ease my way out of wreck. I show up
at the university in bold new professor
leather & tweed, elbow-patched & afraid I’ll learn to
pontificate too much by default, or tell
too much truth, or be much too
Black to be trusted. I notice
one of my white male students leaves the room
every time we talk about race. My therapist tells me
I should put things like that in the container
I made up for what I can’t control & I do. This job
isn’t writing at all & I’m burning
too fast, afraid to combust &
afraid I won’t. For dessert we split
peach cobbler topped with vanilla ice cream.
I don’t eat dairy so she spooned it up & I basked
in the warm sugar & fruit & surprise of
caramel crisscrossed on the just-right crust,
remembering my grandmother & the smell of
nutmeg & cinnamon in her kitchen, fresh peaches
simmering in syrup in an old pot on the gas stove,
her fingers pinching quick dough, remembering
her permanent frown as a pair of mirrored crescents
between her eyes, the map of lines on her forehead,
& as we speak I am inheriting the furrows
earned rightfully by crones. If you do it quickly,
Grandma said, you can heal burns without leaving a scar.
Smooth your injured skin then
peel
& cut a potato in two
& hold each rinsed half to the heated flay
until the potato turns black. Repeat
until it looks like nothing ever happened.
Uncle Sugarpie raised her
& her sisters in Michigan because white men
lynched her father in Alabama & threatened