My baby cousins have curly hair, all little Lebs. Some grow out of it. Some are cut down
before they can. The air mows the earth. Sky rake. Cloud gardener. The land lord
is unhappy. This is not Greece, he said. What a shit sea. There is no one here to save
from it. I want the waters to rise higher still, submerge my body. I want to stalk naked
through its soft hands, lone sunflower looking to spread against lengths. To queer this
domestic Eden. A mirage. There are no persuasive snakes in my yard, just one crab
apple tree bristling with overripe cheeks splotched red, rotten cores. They bob on the sea,
fallen fruit, baby heads. The cold is creeping in. There is no one to save here I whisper
as I go over every inch with my mouth and lovingly tender the green.
How to sleep
My cousin the farmer is laden with death
he tells me each morning he checks the chickens
while I sleep. The weaklings need killing,
so he walks among them, dawn-spectre,
and takes their lives. It has to be done,
he tells me. While I sleep, the long sheds
hot as summer’s guts are home to lone
acts of kindness. Among ten thousand
fluffed bodies, his eyes hawk upon
the others, the strange-winged, hobbling,
he tells me: I get a little rope, noose
it round their necks and hang them
from the ceiling. He laughs at my belief.
I’m kidding. I just snap their necks
like this—his huge hands twist the air
so sharp I’m surprised it doesn’t crack.
Ravens haunt the nearby treetops
and foxes stalk the feathered earth
outside the sheds the survivors yet
live, for now. My cousin tells me
Cain and Abel were the first
to farm, to keep and raise animals
as sacrifice. A lamb for God. A brother
for the devil, who taught a man how
a stone could crack a skull, but not
why. When the devil brought news
of her son’s downfall, Eve said, “Woe
to you. What is murder?” “He eats not.
He drinks not. He moves not,” said he
in reply. Many days I have lain
as if felled by a fallen angel
unable to move I tell my cousin
maybe I lose half my days
in penance, maybe I die a little
every night, for this. The absence
of a brother. He walks away
from belief. He will sleep tonight
in the hot house, lying in the reek
of their living. He will be covered
in a cloak of wings, hear the song
of too-many hearts, and his hands
will be stoneless, still, all of them
waiting for the crack of dawn.
Citizen of—
One desultory howl is what I imagine singing
out the throat of the grey wolf separated
from his mate by a wall neither had dreamed of.
There are so few of them left it falls to me
to dream of a muzzle unbothered by country,
summoning the music of the lost. Wolves
understand territory, borders of lifted leg
but not of stone. Maybe the Americans will
walk along the dirt and drench the invisible.
Nobody consulted the wolf, spotted owl, jaguar,
thick-billed parrot, barred tiger salamander,
Mount Graham red squirrel, ocelot, or armadillo
as to which passport they would deign to keep.
Of course they are citizens of everywhere,
at least in part. Some species must move to live,
and that means they must also have enemies.
An angry landlord. A jilted lover. A neighbour
who couldn’t bear to be outshone or out-howled.
So maybe Arizona’s no good anymore or Mexico is
the go. For some love is a destination to be winged
toward or from—it’s never where you originate.
Others just want to eat or stretch warmth
out another season. Scientists haven’t measured
or mapped the devastation a wall would trap
in place, but the lights at night would lure millions
of monarch butterflies to flutter topaz gold
no more and fall to drape the earth like autumn
leaves. Bilingual beauties*, I don’t need to imagine
their howl—everyone will hear it echoing
*I trust you to know this isn’t about butterflies. OK, I don’t trust you.
How to destroy the body slowly (3)
I have wasted so many days on roses
On all sorts of ragged blossoming &
I will waste so many more—
The Exhibition of Autobiography
I put history in a cabinet where it can do the least
damage. I make sure to buff from time to
time. It cannot be less than
glamorous. We keep paying for it, anyway. Maybe
this is why it lives. I am obsessed with
the past the same way a victim
is obsessed with their killer, not their body
but the origin story, the motive where
the end began. In a dream
I explain this to my mother as I throttle
her neck, and she smiles. Finally,
we are a family. I won’t say
when I let go, only that I don’t know how
to look to a future I am certain
doesn’t include me.
Everything is changing now that I am in love.
I’m still here, still sworn to sorrow’s geas
but the exit has inched closer.
Kennel Light
She was a rescue. A master trembler
she fears the door as much as
the wall. I let her out of the cage.
She bolts toward the light, the new. I wish
I could charge from this world into another
instead of crawling. I’ve done it at least once
before surely. Men make her anxious.
I watch from the couch. Movement excites fear.
She bounds toward my feet, backs down
bounds again. Fighting herself. Nameless
in the way of stray animals. Language
urges a response: call me a dog
or donkey or boy with the right tone
and I’ll come running. My mother proved that.
She made me a mongrel often
enough. The dog presses her neck on
my foot. She twists against my shoe, moving
around as if any touch is better than
no touch. Who called you a rescue?
I croon, as the cur rams her throat
on my sole, tail wagging, desperate.
I curl up into a ball so she can’t use me
as an instrument of cruel memory.
I hear the lock click shut. I whine, turn.
The world has always been this small.
The dog and I disagree on the ethics
of touch. I only want to be seen,
and on my greedier days, heard.
Our desires collide into nothing,
proof we’re both dumb bitches
in the end, jumping at the past,
running in our d
reams, barking at
all our animal instances, the hidden
collar nestled against skin.
No Goldblum, No Matter
I want you to know I have seen a thousand dinosaurs
on a barn floor, most of them an outrageous yellow,
while some were black and all of course newborn,
shifting from thick talon to thick talon chittering
in anticipation of a stranger world than they knew.
You will say, they are not dinosaurs anymore.
You will say, look at their bodies. The body knows.
And it’s true, they were small and fluffy
and Jeff Goldblum was nowhere to be seen
and the place swam in waves of oily heat
and I could walk the dimensions of their universe
and the walls would be so easy to knock down—
walls always are—but bodies do not know
anything. They remember, they imagine.
The day I saw a thousand dinosaurs, I knelt
in the soft mulch and whispered their history
and saw a raptor light come into their being,
which is to say, emerge from forgetting
as I once did. I know from whence I came.
I tore the stuffing out of a bus seat with my teeth
when the memories first transformed me,
and laughed at their crude lines thinking
they knew the limits of my flesh.
Only carnage can come from such certainty.
I am never what I expect myself to be,
one day a man, the next a strange reverie.
If this is true of the cosmos, we must worry
what ours recalls, what it might still invent,
what was lost. It could be legendary,
a vicious animal or something small
enough to survive whatever is coming.
How to endure the final hours
It is so strange to witness an animal / dying. More than living,
that is, breath remains / our working assumption even
in new/found species. We look for life, always. Here &
beyond the stars. Cut a ram’s throat if you disagree. It is harder
than the line suggests / its sinew is tough to cut. See the blood
spurt from the part / a viscous flood. Feel the wool / scratch against
your bunched palm. The frantic whites of its eyes / look to find / God
or meaning, it kicks at clumps of mud, mussing / worms, crushing
ants, making a mess / of the earth, snorting mist / into the early
light / its nostrils wide & wet, bleating at the air / as it folds, gently
at first, then in a rush. // Every death is violent to the life around it,
seeks to take as much as it can. / As it ends you / will strain to see
mortality disproven, a twitch in its flank, a spar of grass bending
to breeze or last / huff as hot red deepens into black around your boots.
Do not worry / if you find nothing. This is what I tell myself.
Do not / worry. The search / alone is beautiful.
How to destroy the body slowly (4)
When I am bleeding out sure
As a body cratered by a blast
I often think of God as explosive
& that having faith tears holes
In your chest to make room
For itself. It will kill
Whatever it finds there, even
Kindness. Faith is an old bear
In the chamber of your heart. It is
Best left sleeping, a warm pile of
Itself, a furry back to rest on
In winter. Awake, it is hungry
& needs something to die
That it might live.
Self-Portrait of What Graces the Night
The moon does not identify
as moon. Nobody has tried
to crush it. Who would define
their body as less than another?
As orbiting shine, as hole?
Earth hollered at it and yeah,
it knows when it gets called,
naming is a bitch like that—
so it pulls back, makes refusal
a circle, a virtue, a kindness.
Not-Moon said, I own your sky
sometimes with only a fingernail.
Not-Moon said, your waters are
mine. Who you calling moon?
I am the one looking down,
the first to see you and say
dirt. Trust a child to disrespect
its parent. I lie beneath the night
an astronaut in an alternate life,
thinking what I would have said
had I been the first man
to step on it. Maybe: a’ salaam
wu alaikum. Peace be upon
you, bright light, sweet spirit.
Or maybe just: ahlan, shu ismek?
Blues
Listen: countless days I’ve looked at heaven
and imagined the cupped hand of it closed.
I have made braille of the stars and divined
a message there for the reviled, a whispered
no, not for you. I have seen the moon
as scalpel, as wet white blade, as glaring,
as waiting hole to be plunged into, as drop
pearling on the tip, as well of wonder, as coin
to pay for my eventual passage into after.
I have made it my enemy, over and over.
I don’t know how often I helled blue heaven,
made of it a furnace. Such hate I’ve sketched
all on my own into the willing curve of world
and still, every night, the loving dark sweeps
in, and still, every morning delights again or
weeps in woollen bunches, giving life
to life. This should not surprise you.
Everywhere, the earth wallows beneath
the weight of all that men imagine of it,
all that we graffiti the bright mirror with,
and everywhere the wind laughs
at how easy it is to wipe our cruelties
away. Now I just want you to know
my loves I opened my mouth
and swallowed the sky not
because a man scrawled rejection on it
as men have done since forever began
but because it was beautiful and I wanted
to taste every flavour of blue, every cloud.
Nature Poem
I keep pitting people against flowers. It’s an unfair contest.
I keep pitting myself
against myself. You see where I’m going with this.
The notion of the land is never
as compelling as the land. What you say about my body is
nothing next to my fat nipple,
its hairy crown. The degree of love people have for dogs,
cats, birds, roses, and other
demonstrably inhuman bodies is astounding. It is so easy to
love what isn’t you,
what is removed, what is alien, what speaks another
language, aloof or affectionate,
what brandishes another colour. This goes against what we
learned. That love is
difficult. That we must steal to know each other better,
to empathise. That we are knowable.
That cohabitating requires cages. I look again at
this love and lack,
wonder if this is why I leash my bod
y, why I still try to
root an un-rootable history, why
I worship mortal colour, why I sing & tremble in the after.
All of Us (Who?)
Sometimes I think about the phrase Arab-Israeli. A tainted beauty, a false unity
when the word conflict is absent. A promise, perhaps, a threat. I think of Saud,
that godless kingdom, that mad(e) house of money. Maybe I mean to say gaudy.
What I know for certain is twofold: Muslims pray in one direction and Mecca
exists on no map. No compass works there. This is to say that it is perfectly
possible to be lost without moving a foot, without leaving the house. I reserve
so much contempt for the murderous militarism of the West, but stay quiet about
the cannibal Arabs who aid them in devouring the blood and bodies of our
people, who grow glutton on the profit of our destruction, who open their skies
to Israeli jets while some Israeli Jews choose prison in protest instead of
joining their monstrous brethren, & who keep one foot on the mouths of every
Palestinian and every poet. I say nothing as I haven’t yet found a language
for that kind of hatred, that emptiness, and I’m not sure if I should.
Sometimes even a ventriloquist must fall silent
with dread for what a mouth can do.
O my lost kin, who I dream of yet have never seen, were you ever real?
Galaxies of Road
My foot is trying to communicate with the stars.
The rigid architecture of it buzzes.
I rub the hard arch, feel the harsh static heat
of distant burning. My grandmother
used to terrify my siblings and me with feet
made of bark, bigger than our bodies.
She never thought herself lost.
Her language made a country of her mouth,
it scorched the air, a whiplash snagging
ungrateful kids to work to ease her
work. I tried to knead the factory out
of her muscle, small fingers bending into
ache while she whispered och, och, och
Ya Allah, building into a chorus of praise to pain.
She was still alive, then. In the ground
she is buzzing, talking to the stars who know
what it is to have to walk so far
to be with family, to travel beyond themselves
in order to live a paler life some mistake
for fire. I don’t know if I have anything to say
to those galaxies of road, the blessed realm
reserved for she who knows herself
without shame, who does not worship
suffering but accepts its burden