I burned in my skin like a stone. How exactly?
Where did it start? There, in the muck
no one saw how we blazed into poppies.
Light raked through our bellies like combs.
We drank & I bled all the way home.
Now, I blister up from bed. My love
is a silver cry in the light. O animal life—
in a city of gardens & muck, you can start
to itch. You jostle & fight, scrambling
for years up the hill of your life. You ask
Where does anything start? In muck. In a garden.
You drink the drinks & bleed. You’re foam.
Nocturne
After Mark Strand
I fill my plate with rain. I fill my belly.
I fill a T-shirt with shells & count them on the floor.
At night, I drink juice from a moon-colored mug.
I feed the lamp & wrap my hair in a scarf.
What good am I doing? The ocean whines from bed.
I take my pills. I bury watermelon seeds.
The pills & the seeds move past each other in the dark.
Who blesses them?
When I slither up from sleep,
my regrets are shreds of pulp in my mouth.
It’s true that I love & that I do not love.
I fill myself with my regrets & begin to speak.
Twenty-One
Journal, mixtape, leather coat.
Silk scarf painted with caducei.
Lunapark, broom flowers, ferryboat.
Ticket stub: Autobus 25.
Birthstone anklet, white Peugeot.
Journal, mixtape, leather coat.
Perseid shower, bear paw charm.
Lunapark, broom flowers, ferryboat.
Thumb ring, tank top, lucky coin.
Birthstone anklet, white Peugeot.
Pastasciutta, freckled arms.
Perseid shower, bear paw charm.
Campfire, windsurf, sudden wine.
Thumb ring, tank top, lucky coin.
Olive orchard, sunflower farm.
Pastasciutta, freckled arms.
Yogurt with apricots. Coca-Lite.
Campfire, sudden wine, windsurf.
Olive orchard, sunflower farm.
Laundry, terrace, Sting concert.
Feather earrings, volcano hike.
Yogurt, apricots, Coca-Lite.
Green-yellow sunset. Fever sleep.
Terrace. Laundry. Sting. Sting.
Study Abroad
No chance you’re pregnant the English doctor asked. No chance you repeated slowly, then added No chance. That was the summer all Tuscan girls wore green cargo pants & orange camisoles. It looked one way, shopping at Esselunga, & another in the piazza with your tumbler full of strawberry liqueur & the first blue stars catapulting over the Arno. The doctor resembled a townhouse, his hair peaked narrowly in the middle. Your fingers, in their closed fists, made a subtle heat exclusive to your experience. You took the green-yellow pills, thinly coated with sweetness & punched into a paper card. Weeks later, you let your companion take you into the woods by the beach. In his family’s summer house, you broke some old chairs to feed the fire, & the stem of your body unspooled in every room. Then you slipped your long feet into the green sandals you hadn’t realized were python leather until the scales had already kinked & dulled. You will never have another pair like that. Not real python.
Europe
Every night, I go back to your house
behind the abandoned caserma, where once
I wept in my clothes on the street.
Your same window with its rolling blinds.
Same diesel smell. Same birds on the roof.
Every night, I go back to your house.
I almost dissolved when you sank
your verbs in white ink: imperfect, subjunctive.
I wept in my clothes on the street
where olive trees turned their foil palms.
It was summer. I stood in my smithereens.
Every night, I go back to your house
climbing your melted marble steps. My age
is a seed-pearl under my tongue. Was I wrong
to weep in my clothes on the street?
Your lamps are still. Your mother is home.
I’ll never be so lonely again, or young enough
to weep in my clothes on the street.
Every night, I go back to your house.
Why Don’t You Wear a Black Crepe Glove Embroidered in Gold, Like the Hand That Bore a Falcon?
You are describing how the transparent oval of my face seems to hang before you in the seconds before sleep. I peel off my gloves to eat from your paper cone of burning chestnuts even though they taste like bugs to me. You buy the chestnuts because you want me to enjoy this trip but then never to come back, not to your bedroom where I left my footprint in lotion on the hardwood, not to sit with you before your mother’s scant bowls of pastina in brodo. We pass the newsstand next to the bakery next to the bus stop by the restaurant that used to be an orphanage. You’re still talking about my phantom face, about the white light which, you say, surges into a beautiful tree-shape on top of my head. The clarity of this light magnetized your soul, or perhaps your soul already contained the exact spinning glob of sweetness that matched my own. It would be wrong to say precisely, it would be wrong to remember in any particular fashion. Our futures float by in their clear bulbs of breath, & I tell you the story again.
Break-Up-A-Thalamion
You don’t share
your scones with me anymore
even though you said
I’d have all your buon
sostegno per sempre.
I don’t care
for your bakery smug.
I’m crying you out.
My tears are cold cubes
springing off my face
like cartoons.
Hey.
You’re a punch
in the head. Nobody
will tell you so
but me.
Let Me Tell You People Something
The women in my country, they are going into the yard with pots & spoons to bang at crows. Always, this. Because crows will eat every fruit from the trees, & then? Nothing left. So the women bang, they yell in a big voice every morning. But crow is not afraid of woman, it will come back tomorrow. Crow is like, you bring pot & spoon? I do not care. You know, do not care? Tomorrow, maybe, you leave this city. You take just one small box or one small case, fly to another house, put your box on the floor & ask: this box, who is it? Who lives in my house? You are forgetting all the time. I have seen you, wearing the name of your city on the T-shirts. Every name more huge, lying across the chest like a creature. Always, you complain in your small clothes. You complain when the rain is not stopping, but also: no rain. This complaining you do? Is just the ghost of the house you leave for another house. You don’t remember. But. In my country, we take the young asparagus in March when it walks on the hills. Asparagus is like the persons we have loved, standing in the house of our parents. I am living here for many years now, but I do not forget my mother in the yard. My sister with her spoon. I do not weep in your way of ghosts. That’s all.
Political Poem
The country is not what it was. I miss the arc of
green fireworks in spring & the moral
bellies of lake trout rolled in flour. This universe is
so dry, star-sharp. Each day, my arms grow long but
never reach the freedom shore. The line of it bends
like a fern in rain. Birds chatter towards justice
towards justice towards justice towards justice—
Their beaks click together like dolls. I study the arc of
my own slithering chin as it bends
along the waterway of my phone. The moral
is a glass canoe lodged in a long but
finite block of news. I say: This universe is
; not worth my heard-earned glitter. This universe is
not what I dreamed. Wings careen in the blue, towards justice
but I watch from the dirt, my feet burning. I long, but
I can’t measure my longing, can’t trace the arc of
my tears as they depart from my head. Now the moral
autobus kneels like a camel at the curb. It bends
& I climb into the sinking dark. I climb. It bends.
This forced union is not what I’ve loved. What’s a universe?
A tingle up my leg. The stars. Once, I dreamed a moral
constellation of strawberry seeds, arranged towards justice.
But I don’t know how to read stars, the arc of
federal dust that governs me. My body is long, but
not quite free. I go along, I get along, but
I’m not quite free. My sweet, harmless body, it bends
so you can’t identify my color, just the arc of
my spine, which could be anyone’s, in the cool universes
of love. So let my body move towards justice
& away from countries. Let it curl up like the moral
fortune still inside the cookie, the moral
border dissolving in cold milk. Won’t be long.
Will everything we know collapse towards justice?
Bodies, berries, beaks, barns—will all of it bend
& wash under the moon? It feels like this universe is
someone else’s calculus, the arc of
a moonbeam in the moral firmament. It bends
& the light is long, but dimming. Such universes.
Here, I draw the arc of two words: just is.
Afterlife
My exes shall rise up from their Mazdas
& adorn themselves in denim.
I’ll take their hands & we’ll wander
among the silver asparagus.
Though all are present, it seems to each
that I’m walking with him only.
One brings me five white roses again
petals curling in soft paper.
Another comes with a mixtape & drawings:
heart, suitcase, shape of his country.
We’ll sit at the stone table & eat
from the same jar of strawberries & mint.
Each will tell about his wife. The golden hikes
they take after lunch with their dogs.
I’ll show them my books & the healed mark
over my ribcage.
We’ll enter the cottage where our babies sleep
forever in their small beds.
I’ll hum to them in many voices until just
one brightness occurs.
Then I’ll go alone to the curve of the lake
to see what will jump for me.
Estival
When the arms of the larkspur dial open
it’s only natural to want to dissolve. In the glinting haze
you have nothing to do but keep moving
inward. Here’s your realm of green sepals, tall
as knights. Your calyx sharpens over a dominion of seeds.
When the arms of the larkspur dial open
draw your wedding ring in mulch. Don’t stand
around too long. Since all parts of the larkspur are toxic
you have nothing to do. Keep moving
with patience over the hooks & buttons of sun.
July is an alkaloid tongue, sunk in botanical Latin.
But when the arms of the larkspur dial open
you can learn to climb. All the way up
to the silent blue beak at the top of your thought.
There’s nothing to do but keep moving
hand over hand. Time widens, just like your body
sealed shut in the light. An inner world hums
as the arms of the larkspur dial open.
There’s nothing for you here. Move on.
Doubloon Oath
By dead gal or stove bones
by rainbow or red bird
red bird or cracked spine
by silk wrap or jaw jaw
by cold bodice, blush wing
tick tick or sunk ship
by tipped arrow, glass bite
by weird catch or take that
by chopped mountain, slick house
boatneck or gloss hog
striped awning, gold lawn
by what’s that or so much
without me or full prof
full prof or nunchucks
blood orange, brain gob
time kill or toy star
by black doll or briar thorn
beg beg or gewgaw
by sweetmeat, or gunlock
or old maid or dreadnought
by weakness or whitecap
or grief-bacon, worksong
by fieldwork or field mix
slagged field or steel kilt
by bone-bruise or kneesock
I get my gift.
Three
I Married a Horseman
for his straight jaw & dark jackets.
For he gave me his ring to wear as a cinch.
My markings, he called faint star, white boot
& drew a line of rain
down the side of my cheek. I married him
for the silence in his speech, for
his black kerchief. All the time
he drew & in this drawing, we married.
Now I live in the timber scent & tall
smoke of his shadow. Evenings, he returns
to me from his work, with his fine coat
haltered in frost. This house
has no doors. We pass each other
crossing our necks in Hello.
Ghosts
After Anne Sexton
Some ghosts are my mothers
neither angry nor kind
their hair blooming from silk kerchiefs.
Not queens, but ghosts
who hum down the hall on their curved fins
sad as seahorses.
Not all ghosts are mothers.
I’ve counted them as I walk the beach.
Some are herons wearing the moonrise like lace.
Not lonely, but ghostly.
their brassy beaks, their eyes.
But that isn’t all.
Some of my ghosts are planets.
Not bright. Not young.
Spiraling deep in the dusk of my body
as saucers or moons
pleased with their belts of colored dust
& hailing no others.
Witch Wife
I’ll conjure the perfect Easter
& we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard—
my pink gloves & your green gloves
like parrots from an opera over the earth—
We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths.
I’ll conjure the perfect Easter
dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon
long cords of fusilli to remind you of my hair
& my pink gloves. Your gloves are green
& transparent like the skin of Christ
when He returned, filmed over with moss roses—
I’ll conjure as perfect an Easter:
provolone cut from the whole ball
woody herbs burning our tongues—it’s a holiday
I conjure with my pink-and-green gloves
wrangling life from the dirt. It all turns out
as I’d hoped. The warlocks of winter are dead
& it’s Easter. I dig up body after body after body
with my pink gloves, my green gloves.
Lament
I’ve lost something, an argument.
Even our rickshaw-wallah knows
& the women in jeweled sandals palming clear
lumps of jaggery. They do not squint
as we pass, but they can hear my buzz & bicker
pressed tight with you on th
is bench seat where dozens
of hot vinyl hearts brand the backs of my legs.
I think of the NyQuil I should’ve packed for us—
rainbow lake of sleep we could’ve sipped—
if I’d been a clever wife
if I’d heeded the cough & achoo of that guy
on the flight over from Newark.
I tell you We got punished, this is punishment
& I mean it with steam, as that father & son
rake yards of soaked cotton from their dye vats
sweat rolling down their noses, exact.
If I were sweeter, didn’t boil with panic
I could’ve charmed the doctor into charging us less
for your X-rays & your ultrasound
for your glucose sticks & liver panels.
The second day of your fever, he complimented my arms
black with new henna & promised
you’d improve before they faded. He called
me Madame & I think I could’ve haggled.
Today there’s no doubt about the itch
trailing its thin flag across my throat
or the translucent goo I honked into the sink
this morning. I’ve got what you’ve got, husband:
your white shirt, sweated through to the skin
your watery eyes & snow-cold hands. I do.
Vigil
You ask what I’m not a liar about. It’s dark.
From bed, we watch some passing headlights rake
the windows back. I tell you how I see myself: alone
with my guitar, strappy heels, a bit of sweet pea
twisted through my hair. But my fingers slide right off
the strings I say, pulling up the covers. They just
won’t move at all. By now, you’ve spun deep into the quilt.
Your arms are gone. I’m telling you the truth I say
about the guitar. I’m sitting up now. Almost, I can feel
the lacquered wood against my chest, a resonance
of thrumming spruce. You stir, then clock
the space between my hands. There’s nothing there
you sigh. Why make things up? So I look again.
Left arm, right arm: crescented. There’s something here