National Poetry Month: April 2023

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

     

   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

    (after the murder,
    after the burial)

Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing;
    the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
    drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
    And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
    through a red prairie.

*original work from CU Boulder's English Department

I consent to release the necessary information to determine my eligibility for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program. I understand that providing false information or making false statements may be grounds for the denial of my application. I also understand that such action may result in criminal penalties.

     we use gut        (to keep living)        to mean taking        (in my home)        something out
         what we are            (i fill)            taking out            (out the paper)            are guts
guts separate  (to prove i don’t)  what our bodies need   (have money) from what we cannot use
 when gutted   (sign a waver)   guts separate   (for the damage)   from the body that needs them
name this    (i may incur)    a thing    (from their official fingers)    after what it does not have

(rooting through my guts) Applicant hereby (hunting for unclaimed
pennies)       authorizes management        (to cut my children with)   
to verify above information   (dumping unlabeled organs)   and make
independent investigations in person, by mail, phone, fax, or otherwise  
(in the shredder)  to determine Applicant’s rental, credit, financial,
and character standing  (tell me it is necessary) Applicant releases
management (is fraud prevention) from any liability whatsoever       
(to catch me)  concerning the release or use of said information  (in a
deficit) and will defend and hold them all harmless (of deserving)
from any suit                        (name this body)             or reprisal

                        (this body’s human services)

                                                           guts is a way

                                                 (a thing)

                                                           of saying the courage

                                           (after what)

                                                            it takes to keep living 

                                   (it does not have)

cartographing  the  noise  ¹  between  a  barcoded

banana ²  and the kiosk ^{3              4}               beeping⁵

your eyes             sauter⁶ to the ceiling⁷  avoiding⁸

contact⁹      the clerk's¹⁰ dull¹¹ eyes¹²   translate¹³

packaged good¹⁴ after packaged             gaze as 

your own gaze            meets¹⁵                 the clerk's

in this ^{16 17 18 19 20} information                 ocean,

yet the see through you,²¹ you ²² packaged good

tumbling along                       the conveyer ²³ belt

unloading²⁵             a blank²⁶          expression²⁷

 

 

¹two neon white wireless headphones cork your red wine brain, muffiing chatter from the other shoppers, workers, and wheeled carts squeezing between the aisles
²fruit's tie dye yellow does not mitigate the fluorescent magazine covers, glossy and vibrantly saturating chis checkstand with People^TM and Time^TM, staring blankly across each little highway carrying our consumption 
³killing rays of dancing red lasers peel your fruit, oily adhesion from the barcode dries and falls back under infrared radiation, as though mimicking the peel 
⁴colloquialisms of kiosk afford scanner, price checker, pricer, clerk, hands, and minimum wage, red eye under metal eyelids calculating your remaining paycheck
⁵clerk's hands dictating the speed between each registered barcode, muscles automating automation 
⁶eyelids one quarter of the way open, like the coin machine filtering her jar of extra quarters fills the aisles
⁷a number 3 illuminated above, signifies an opening to ready shoppers, and above the deflated balloons judge our acts of reconciliation, like the fake filling of oreos
⁸the non-asbestos tiles litter the ceiling in grids that ask to be multiplied by water stains or missing sections 
⁹your contact lens saunters down from pupil, the next bottle of solution in your cart, the repetition of filling, a constant need for fulfillment and sight and solution
¹⁰in the next aisle he bought 3 more packets than you, though he has 12 children and 5 parents to feed 
¹¹that name tag claiming I love my job and Ask about our membership in red cursive under their Arial name
¹²especially branding of location on their clothing, red
¹³crossword puzzle book strains, sags against thin metal
¹⁴twix candy bar between hersheys above reese's peanut butter cups beside crunch below three musketeers 
¹⁵his frozen meat selections clogging the line, ninety three percent lean USDA prime omaha steak and pork
¹⁶Philadelphia Original Cream Cheese Spread Gevalia House Blend Medium Roast Ground Coffee
¹⁷Progresso™ Keto*-Friendly Creamy Tomato Canned Soup Simple Truth™ Butter Pecan Keto
¹⁸Halo Top Chocolate Caramel Lava Cake Keto Frozen Dessert Country Crock® Dairy Free Plant 
¹⁹Butter With Olive Oil Amy's® Vegan Gluten Free Vegetable Lasagna Frozen Meal Dreamfields Vegan 
²⁰Rotini Pasta Ben &Jerry's Dairy Free Mint Chocolate Cookie Almond Milk Espresso Pod 
²¹your phone mockingbirds the noise, relays media and your thumb mimes all other thumbs, scrolling like the shopping cart wheel pushed in the same place 
²²exit sign gawks the sliding door open perpetually 
²³triangle plastic partition separating shopping, this unpurchased agreement, ownership between strangers
²⁴all these words collapse unprompted, you had no imperative to read them yet feasted on their lettering
²⁵cash back 5 10 20 50 other none donation to children's hospital none debit credit input pin 
²⁶ and avoiding the plastic bags in favor of your own 
²⁷ avoiding the static chatter and noise, your eyes gorge themselves, you read without moving your lips

A sea of foliage girds our garden round,
But not a sea of dull unvaried green,
Sharp contrasts of all colors here are seen;
The light-green graceful tamarinds abound
Amid the mango clumps of green profound,
And palms arise, like pillars gray, between;
And o'er the quiet pools the seemuls lean,
Red—red, and startling like a trumpet's sound.
But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges
Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon
Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes
Into a cup of silver. One might swoon
Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze
On a primeval Eden, in amaze.

If you ask me if I am fluent in Spanish I will tell you
My Spanish is an itchy phantom limb: reaching for a word and only finding air
My Spanish is my third birthday party: half of it is memory, and the other half is a photograph on the fridge is what my family has told me 

If you ask me if I am fluent I I will tell you that
My Spanish is a puzzle left in the rain 
Too soggy to make its parts fit so that it can look just like the picture on the box. 

If you ask me I will tell you 
My Spanish is hungrier than it was before. 
My Spanish reaches for words at the top of a shelf without a stepping stool 
is hit in the head with all of the old words that have been hiding up there
My Spanish wonders how bad is it to eat something that’s expired
My Spanish wonders if it has an expiration date
My Spanish asks you why it is always being compared to food
spicy, hot, sizzle
my Spanish tells you it is not something to be eaten 
but does not really believe it. 

If you ask me if I am fluent in Spanish I will try to tell you the story
of how my parents met in an ESL class
How it was when they trained their mouths to say 
I love you in a different language, I hate you with their mouths shut
I will tell you how my father’s accent makes him sound like Zorro 
how my mother tried to tie her tongue to a post with an English language leash
I will tell you that the tongue always ran stubbornly back to the language it had always been in love with 
Even when she tried to tame it, it always turned loose If you ask me if I am in fluent 
I will tell you 
My Spanish is understanding that there are stories that will always be out of my reach
there are people who will never fit together the way that i want them to 
there are letters that will always stay silent
there are words that will always escape me. 

I don’t even like you.
condoms separate us
Elasticity for honor
Stretching the good parts of ourselves
making up for lost ideas
Of what could have been.
Bare breast, bones.
Stagnant ass
no poetics
attached to it.

you tell me where to be
when I entire your bedroom
a cold hardwood floor
say “harder”
on the bed or
in the bathroom.
choking on my own likeness

My insides are wrapped in gauze
Eagle spread, look into me

see nuclear thoughts
dream images that don’t meet
Expectations.
Sickly and vast.
The way I open up
Like a peony.

We could have been fucking
On the roof of my Prius
Inside bar bathrooms anywhere
you could’ve wanted
me, I burn rosemary
to cleanse my self esteem
My chest bulging.
I mentioned my escapism
I am more
Than what I said I was.

You don’t like to kiss
Before we fuck
I think that’s what
eats up my poetry.
mouths dry

fingers burnt
I will be here
far enough away
Stroking my own tongue
Like a weapon.

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

pretending to forget my glasses
as i am childish and embarrassed.
highway lights blur, my myopia
corrected by corrective lenses
finger-painting tail-lights and
street-lamps in the windshield,
my focus fights this blending
over cornea, contaminating vision.

begin with the image,
metaphor made in the moment
forgotten, nearsighted meaning
slipping out of view. a dark spot
in abstract vision, representation
repressed, blinded my third eye

highway lights blur, my myopia
corrected by corrective lenses: -2.0
pretending to forget my glasses
as i am childish and embarrassed.
finger-painting tail-lights and
desire to construct my image
in your eyes to be unassisted

begin with the image,
as though written on my palm:
a metaphor once well constructed
smudged by sweaty intention
overtaking the word’s outline.
my meaning now cascading
tumbling out of reach.

begin with the image,
i write alone and begin
inches from the blue light
benign or hopefully, yet still
wearing my glasses alone opposite
doctor’s directions

begin with the image,
as though written on my palm:
a metaphor once well constructed
as i am childish and embarrassed
smudged by sweaty intention
overtaking the word’s outline.
my meaning now cascading
pretending to forget my glasses
tumbling out of reach.

pretending to forget my glasses
as i am childish and embarrassed.
highway lights blur, my myopia
like your face, the world’s outline
grows fur: fine hairs erase barriers.
corrected by corrective lenses: -2.0
finger-painting tail-lights and
street-lamps in the windshield,
my focus fights this blending
over cornea, contaminating vision.

pretending to forget my glasses
as i am childish and embarrassed.
highway lights blur, my myopia
as i am embarrassed of the image
finger-painting tail-lights and
my focus fights this blending
over writing, contaminating words.
like my cornea, the word’s outline
grows finite.

pretending to forget my glasses

begin with the image,
as though written on my palm:
a metaphor once well constructed
as i am childish and embarrassed
smudged by sweaty intention
overtaking the word’s outline.
my meaning now cascading
world’s

From the immigration questionnaire given to Chineseentering or re-entering the U.S. during the Chinese Exclusion Act

Have you ridden in a streetcar?
Can you describe the taste of bread?
Where are the joss houses located in the city?
Do Jackson Street and Dupont run
in a circle or a line, what is the fruit
your mother ate before she bore you,
how many letters a yeardo you receive from your father?
Of which material is your ancestral hall
now built? How many water buffalo
does your uncle own?
Do you love him? Do you hate her?
What kind of bird sang
at your parents' wedding? What are the birth dates
for each of your cousins: did your brother die
from starvation, work, or murder?
Do you know the price of tea here?
Have you ever touched a stranger's face
as he slept? Did it snow the year
you first wintered in our desert?
How much weight is
a bucket and a hammer? Which store
is opposite your grandmother's?
Did you sleep with that man
for money? Did you sleep with that man
for love? Name the color and number
of all your mother's dresses. Now
your village's rivers.
What diseases of the heart
do you carry? What country do you see
when you think of your children?
Does your sister ever write?
In which direction does her front door face?
How many steps did you take
when you finally left her?
How far did you walk
before you looked back?

Chinese Dream 6

During the father’s absence—what he know
of soft words to Timothy, the press
and crush of feeling, cannot say—
as during his dark father’s, all the hurts
& hustles of a striving immigrant
back to the quiet boy in island pent,

Taiwan’s romantic child, and Li Po drunk
with bitter insatiable greed, Timothy’s late,
and Doc Sun Yat-sen was a modern man,
all through the nation’s dream of a start,
when Mao was whipping Chiang and would have no heart
for parted lovers, catch them if you can,

while America’s guile to keep the fathers out
was the reason, dear Henry, Chinese doubt
inscrutably was growing, toward what end?
A silent son over a blotted page
written in gall, a eunuch’s unknown rage,
these baubles breaking under your feet, friend.

Chinese Dream 9

Deprived of his slumber, undine of the honor roll,
timorous Timothy, striving. Fan-tan dance
toward them who troll
the high schools: admissions officers, best
in U.S. News ranking: improve his chance
on entrance test

by being, please, inhuman: robot, please,
therefore get the phone call from H–v–d that crow
“You in, you in.”
Therefore he trudge, incurious; degrees
step-stone over seething undertow.
At Downtown Crossing

he trail the shoppers, buying nothing, & rub
his rented nose. He know: myself am hell.
His feet unmoved in the snow.
A crack: just mildly racist. Boston hub
his grating gut, & the clockwork brain
advance one gear, too slow.

If I have been raped violently at knifepoint.
If I have had premarital sex with those
who never deserved me, betrayed me, used
me as an object. If I have kissed a woman & liked it & licked her pussy & liked
it. If I have gazed, made covenant with my
eyes. If my body has not been blessed, please tell
me. If I was not warmed by the fleece of sheep,
if I have not warmed those in need. If I was
slaughtered like a lamb. If I ever was lamb.
Baby, if I did not repay my debts. If
I let him call me kid & I called him daddy even though he was not daddy. If I
shrank along the front range, a fraud in my state.
If I filled tins with lilacs for myself, not
sharing their scent with those dirty as me. If
I smoked pot, smoked cigarettes, freebased cocaine,
opiates. If I swarmed with fury & fought.

Let my shoulder blade fall from my sinner’s skin
& let my arm be broken from its socket.
For I was in terror of calamity
from God, & I could not have faced his glory,
majesty. For I would have been false to God
above. Bind me with a crown of ashes &
dust. I would give an account of all my missteps. Like a prince I would approach God at last.
Let thorns grow in my garden, & foul weeds too.

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

I don’t call it sleep anymore.
             I’ll risk losing something new instead—

like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing—
a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined
             fruit to unfasten from,

despite my trembling.

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.
Let me call it, a garden.

Maybe this is what Lorca meant
             when he said, verde que te quiero verde—

because when the shade of night comes,
I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest.

My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,
             hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion

beneath the hip and plow of my lover,
then I am another night wandering the desire field—

bewildered in its low green glow,

belling the meadow between midnight and morning.
Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising
             and many petaled,

the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow.

I am struck in the witched hours of want—

I want her green life. Her inside me
in a green hour I can’t stop.
             Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth

green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending.
Green moving green, moving.

Fast as that, this is how it happens—
             soy una sonámbula.

And even though you said today you felt better,
and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear,
             to say, I don’t feel good,

to ask you to tell me a story
about the sweet grass you planted—and tell it again
             or again—

until I can smell its sweet smoke,
             leave this thrashed field, and be smooth.

Give me a church
made entirely of salt.
Let the walls hiss
and smoke when
I return to shore.

I ask for the grace
of a new freckle
on my cheek, the lift
of blue and my mother’s
soapy skin to greet me.

Hide me in a room
with no windows.
Never let me see
the dolphins leaping
into commas

for this water-prayer
rising like a host
of sky lanterns into
the inky evening.
Let them hang

in the sky until
they vanish at the edge
of the constellations —
the heroes and animals
too busy and bright to notice.

Listen, Sister: I lied to learn this slays the soul. I was married to the wicked (a gap between his
teeth) on the solstice. I dipped in & out of fame showing the world photographs of me fucking
the devil. Stopped right before I forked my tongue. Let an anarcho-atheist-sadist cane me for
laughs. Listen, Sister: In my ear he whispered, nasty, bitch, disgusting, slut, dirty, whore.
I believed in this like love & confused him for my Higher Power, but this lie I lived carried
me to a ridge where I stepped off a cliff into God’s hands.

Righteousness is immortal in us, Sister. We live among the Saints: Mystics, Little Sparrows,
Sissies. Caring for the sick, protecting cobwebs, uprighting silver Christmas trees. Holiness
is our invincible shield. We keep Holiness Holily & are judged Holy. Our moles are the same,
mapping constellations across our backs, the whole universe in us. Remember, Sister: We coped
with crack, smoke trailing from nostrils under bedsheets, loaned gold jewelry to pawn shops for
more. God’s collies shepherded us to safety—

Sister, I still hear them barking when I rise with you as we desire words & are instructed.
The multitude of our wisdom is the welfare of the world. We are wise Kings who began Kings
at birth through cries & milk. Our mothers are sisters. We are deathless in our wisdom. By which
I mean: We desired more by any means, linked pinkies to make deals with each other.
You are my God & I am yours. Never forget, Sister: Wisdom in you makes you righteous,
deathless. Eternal in your love, caring.

I.

Although Tía Miriam boasted she discovered
at least half a dozen uses for peanut butter—
topping for guava shells in syrup,
butter substitute for Cuban toast,
hair conditioner and relaxer—
Mamá never knew what to make
of the monthly five-pound jars
handed out by the immigration department
until my friend, Jeff, mentioned jelly. 

II.

There was always pork though,
for every birthday and wedding,
whole ones on Christmas and New Year’s Eve,
even on Thanksgiving day—pork,
fried, broiled, or crispy skin roasted—
as well as cauldrons of black beans,
fried plantain chips, and yuca con mojito.
These items required a special visit
to Antonio’s Mercado on the corner of Eighth Street
where men in guayaberas stood in senate
blaming Kennedy for everything—“Ese hijo de puta!”
the bile of Cuban coffee and cigar residue
filling the creases of their wrinkled lips;
clinging to one another’s lies of lost wealth,
ashamed and empty as hollow trees.

III.

By seven I had grown suspicious—we were still here.
Overheard conversations about returning
had grown wistful and less frequent.
I spoke English; my parents didn’t.
We didn’t live in a two-story house
with a maid or a wood-panel station wagon
nor vacation camping in Colorado.
None of the girls had hair of gold;
none of my brothers or cousins
were named Greg, Peter, or Marcia;
we were not the Brady Bunch.
None of the black and white characters
on Donna Reed or on the Dick Van Dyke Show
were named Guadalupe, Lázaro, or Mercedes.
Patty Duke’s family wasn’t like us either—
they didn’t have pork on Thanksgiving,
they ate turkey with cranberry sauce;
they didn’t have yuca, they had yams
like the dittos of Pilgrims I colored in class. 

IV.

  A week before Thanksgiving
I explained to my abuelita
about the Indians and the Mayflower,
how Lincoln set the slaves free;
I explained to my parents about
the purple mountain’s majesty,
“one if by land, two if by sea,”
the cherry tree, the tea party,
the amber waves of grain,
the “masses yearning to be free,”
liberty and justice for all, until
finally they agreed:
this Thanksgiving we would have turkey,
as well as pork.  

V.

Abuelita prepared the poor fowl
as if committing an act of treason,
faking her enthusiasm for my sake.
Mamá set a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven
and prepared candied yams following instructions
I translated from the marshmallow bag.
The table was arrayed with gladiolas,
the plattered turkey loomed at the center
on plastic silver from Woolworth’s.
Everyone sat in green velvet chairs
we had upholstered with clear vinyl,
except Tío Carlos and Toti, seated
in the folding chairs from the Salvation Army.
I uttered a bilingual blessing
and the turkey was passed around
like a game of Russian Roulette.
“DRY,” Tío Berto complained, and proceeded
to drown the lean slices with pork fat drippings
and cranberry jelly—“esa mierda roja,” he called it.
Faces fell when Mamá presented her ochre pie—
pumpkin was a home remedy for ulcers, not a dessert.
Tía María made three rounds of Cuban coffee
then Abuelo and Pepe cleared the living room furniture,
put on a Celia Cruz LP and the entire family
began to merengue over the linoleum of our apartment,
sweating rum and coffee until they remembered—
it was 1970 and 46 degrees—
in América.
After repositioning the furniture,
an appropriate darkness filled the room.
Tío Berto was the last to leave.

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

        at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

his forehead white with illumination —

 

a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,

        darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

 

By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,

        he was already linked to an affair

with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue

 

and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems

        to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out

across the centuries, his lips fixed as if

 

he's just uttered some final word.

        The first time I saw the painting, I listened

as my father explained the contradictions:

 

how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out

        of necessity, my father said — had to own

slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

 

he could not have fathered those children:

        would have been impossible, my father said.

For years we debated the distance between

 

word and deed. I'd follow my father from book

        to book, gathering citations, listening

as he named — like a field guide to Virginia —

 

each flower and tree and bird as if to prove

        a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater

than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

 

I did not know then the subtext

        of our story, that my father could imagine

Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh —

 

the improvement of the blacks in body

        and mind, in the first instance of their mixture

with the whites — or that my father could believe

 

he'd made me better. When I think of this now,

        I see how the past holds us captive,

its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye:

 

my young father, a rough outline of the old man

        he's become, needing to show me

the better measure of his heart, an equation

 

writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.

        Now, we take in how much has changed:

talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,

 

How white was she? — parsing the fractions

        as if to name what made her worthy 

of Jefferson's attentions: a near-white,

 

quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.

        Imagine stepping back into the past, 

our guide tells us then — and I can't resist

 

whispering to my father: This is where

        we split up. I'll head around to the back. 

When he laughs, I know he's grateful

 

I've made a joke of it, this history

        that links us — white father, black daughter —

even as it renders us other to each other.

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me. 

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed 

for children walking to school?
Those same children

 also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing 

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs 

as they eat at McDonalds.
They shouldn’t have to stop 

to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might 

reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit, 

I had one student
who opened a door and died.

It was the front
door of his house, but

it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written 

any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old

and was aiming
at someone else. But 

a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn’t 

distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent, 

and how was the bullet
supposed to know this 

child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment 

because his friend
was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who 

opened a door and died?
That’s wrong. 

There were many.

The classroom of grief

had far more seats
than the classroom for math 

though every student
in the classroom for math 

could count the names
of the dead.

A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,

 nor could the gun, because
“guns don’t kill people,” they don’t

have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose

or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t 

have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how

 we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be, 

and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside

each of them. Today,
there’s another 

shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school, 

a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world 

is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save, 

you may open a door
and enter 

a meadow or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be 

mourned, then buried
in rhetoric. 

There will be
monuments of legislation, 

little flowers made
from red tape.

What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close

like a door above you.
What should we do? 

And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,

 the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.

I think about sending you my insides.

Hiked skirt, flash jaw,
teeth ready to warp around

raised waistband, a starving
mouth series, lipped growl.
Slink around my stomach, pelvis,
that slight bump above

gnash exposed inner pink drip.
Try feeding them.
Haven’t eaten in ages.
Sink into esophagus, swallow.

Teasing snap, peeled shirt collar,
warn nipped finger light bleeding.
Clavicle to umbilical ghost,

a feasting, a three A.M. is all I need,
wait for you to ask what I’m wearing.

We used to say,
That’s my heart right there.

As if to say,
Don’t mess with her right there.

As if, don’t even play,
That’s a part of me right there.

In other words, okay okay,
That’s the start of me right there.

As if, come that day,
That’s the end of me right there.

As if, push come to shove,
I would fend for her right there.

As if, come what may,
I would lie for her right there.

As if, come love to pay,
I would die for that right there.

The time of birds died sometime between When Robert Kennedy, Jr. disappeared and the Berlin Wall came down. Hope was pro forma then. We’d begun to talk about shelf-life. Parents Thought they’d gotten somewhere. I can’t tell you What to make of this now without also saying that when I was 19 and read in a poem that the pure products of America go crazy I felt betrayed. My father told me not to whistle because I Was a girl. He gave me my first knife and said to keep it in my right Hand and to keep my right hand in my right pocket when I walked at night. He showed me the proper kind of fist and the sweet spot on the jaw To leverage my shorter height and upper-cut someone down. There were probably birds on the long walk home but I don’t Remember them because pastoral is not meant for someone With a fist in each pocket waiting for a reason.

^{a variant of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII}

I don’t love you as if you were penicillin, 
insulin, or chemotherapy drugs that treat cancer,
I love you as one loves the sickest patient:
terminally, between the diagnosis and the death. 

I love you as one loves new vaccines frozen 
within the lab, poised to stimulate our antibodies,
and thanks to your love, the immunity that protects 
me from disease will respond strongly in my cells.

I love you without knowing how or when this pandemic 
will end. I love you carefully, with double masking. 
I love you like this because we can’t quarantine 

forever in the shelter of social distancing, 
so close that your viral load is mine,
so close that your curve rises with my cough.

from skate-rink pink to ballroom blue to
post-revolution ashen heft : I survive to see

such things to press my heel to wood girl, girl
today’s list of broken things lengthens: lamp, switch, door,

knee, nipple, neighborhood. Today’s silty
store of what refuses to dissolve : love, lying shit

of a president, child-spring. Clouds now
fictional in the back of mind’s memory

I’m losing it, like my mother did,
cause the first time I say the thing

will never be the last. Today’s list of forgotten words,
talus and crypt      and a word for what binds

so tirelessly the five of us
to our mouth-sounds sliding upward

through stairwell’s gloom
Pure foam, pure air, pure caw

pure gaze : gray gaze, or green, or that
sweet brown & that blue

they bloom and also shine and see across the room
wet with the body’s terminable

water

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

I opened up my shirt to show this man
the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up
like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.
I who should have been kneeling
was knelt to by one whose face
should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:

no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses
with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.
He'd sailed past the clay gods
and the singing girls who might have made of him

a swine. That the world could arrive at me
with him in it, after so much longing—
impossible. He enters me and joy
sprouts from us as from a split seed.

 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

the day my step-daughter moved out
i imagined a wolf growing inside
my belly—absurd—copper
IUD semen stopper lodged deep—
inserted by gloved hands 3 weeks postpartum—penny-corded bodice bent
t-shaped—invader to my oil soft
cervix—
if i have another girl
i will not call her sorrow—maybe
sparrow—ursula—lucia—anne—
patron saints of opiate addict
teens like me with my bird bone body
poisoned up until 4 months pregnant—
my first daughter—savior—another
story—a greek myth—a miracle—
but this is the psalm of lolita—
privately i feel the phantom pulse
under my seatbelt—panicked i grieve
the 10-year-old i raised from age 3
& picture myself holding a lamb—

One father was driving a gold Mercedes-Benz.

One father was listening to the Beach Boys.

One father was having an affair with every woman in California.

One father asked me if I preferred Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

He had never heard of Djuna Barnes or Jessie Fauset or Laura (Riding) Jackson.

One father mowed the lawn every Sunday of every summer.

One father wanted another grandson. And another. And another.

One father had a mouth that flattened whether grimacing or smiling.

One father had never before sat on a beach.

Never before had he let the tide rise up and turn the sand liquid under his skin.

Never before had his swim trunks filled with salt and shells, his whole body toppling over by the force of the Atlantic.

One father sat quietly in his cell reading books he once found dull.

This father could make friends even in prison.

One father would dog-ear the last page of the book he’d just finished reading.

One father had been attacked by a cocker spaniel as a child and couldn’t stand to be in the same room as the neighbor’s beagle.

One father sliced the cantaloupe, the honeydew, a dozen golden delicious.

He sliced the Bartlett pears, the mangos, the papayas, the watermelon, the pineapple we only had at Christmas.

One father washed and ironed his dollars, and for a long time, I thought this is what money laundering is.

One father kept a closet full of suitcases, inside every suitcase another smaller suitcase.

One father thought there was nothing better than having another, another, another ...

One father was afraid to enter the woods behind his house.

One father shelled the peanuts before handing the bowl to his wife.

One father watched his wife eat the shelled peanuts.

One father changed his mind and ate the peanuts himself.

One father had no patience for teaching his daughter how to ride a bike.

How to drive a car, how to tell the truth.

How are driving and lying not the same motion forward, faster and forward, keep going, keep going ...

One father called Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, Busan, Tokyo in the last hours of dawn.

One father had frequent flyer miles he distributed to his family like the dole.

One father ran five miles every morning in whatever weather the weather happened to be.

One father could say hello in almost every language you’d find in Queens.

In Mandarin, in Cantonese, in Urdu, in Spanish, in Portuguese, in Korean, in Polish, in Russian, in Tagalog, in Chechen, in Fujianese, in Arabic, in Hindi, in Assamese, in Italian, in Hebrew, in Greek, and once he said good-bye in Galician.

One father, for seventeen months, rode the elevator up and down a Park Avenue mid-rise.

One father said he was American.

One father said one day he’d go home again.

One father forgot all his children’s birthdays but remembered to pay off his credit card bills.

One father thought freedom was lying or that lying would free him or he lied again and I forgave him again, and now we are free and still lying.

One father said good night, good night, I miss you, I miss you.

One father did not say anything, or maybe I never listened to his voicemails.

One father was not the only father I had.

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,

Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.

I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat

Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.

I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold

While your better selves watch from the bleachers.

I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow

You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night

In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-

Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars

Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.

I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.

Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough

To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.