When I was younger, my friends and I would talk about the future.
We would talk about how many kids we wanted and how successful we would be one day
In an almost childish mindset, I would say ‘I want lots of kids maybe three or four’
I would say ‘but I want a son first so he can protect his siblings from harm’
Now as the years go by I have to laugh at myself
The innocent thoughts and joys that consumed my mind have disappeared because the world
does not seem to want the same future as I once did
Now I tell my friends I don’t want any kids
No Sons No Daughters
No child up for an unnecessary slaughter at the hands of those who know nothing about them but
still see them as someone terrifying before someone terrific
someone a mother would give her life for in the same second it takes the heart to beat
I do not want a knock on the door
I do not want a phone call
I do not want to see a video of my child dying
Screaming for me
Praying for their life
Begging that I come save them while people idly stand by and watch them suffer
I do not want to watch my child’s life fade from their body as if I didn’t hold them in my womb and
fight to bring them into a world I promised to hold them in
I don’t want to see my child edited into a cascade of clouds with angel wings and a halo
I don’t want #justicefor—
I don’t want protests just to put a murderer in jail even when there’s video proof of the crime being
committed and everyone gets to watch it again and again and again until it becomes
another dead child lost in time
I want my future child to be able to go to school
To drive
To walk with their hood up or down
To be able to walk alone
To take out their wallet
To buy Skittles
To go to parties To
cash a check To
run
To sleep
To breathe
When I was younger my friends and I would talk about the future
About how many kids we wanted and how successful we would be one day
I would say ‘I want lots of kids maybe three or four’
I would say ‘but I want a son first so he can protect his siblings from harm’
I laugh at myself.
◆
Exegesis
I wrote this poem during the summer of 2020. I was sixteen years old and watching the deaths and protests of Elijah McClain, George Floyd, Breoanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Then, I was seventeen and watching the deaths of Daunte Wright, Brayla Stone, and countless others. I remember always being tired of seeing someone else who looked like me dead and never being able to escape the news because the Black Death became an almost popular topic at the time. Suddenly, it became normalized again, the protests lessened, and life went back to how it was before COVID-19 to a certain extent. It was such a confusing time to be alive and witness so much collective chaos and opinions on who deserves to live or die. I had to get my thoughts outside my head, so I wrote: “When I was Younger.” It encompasses a great deal of the emotions I had at the time and the frustration rattling through my body daily.
Poetry
She Remembers: a zuihitzu
Poetry is the ecology of memory. ~ David St. John
1. Remember when you were a kid on the first Earth Day, how you decided to celebrate it by
walking your neighborhood to pick up roadside trash?
2. It’s gone, the alpine lake where you and your dogs love to swim after a long hike on one of
Alaska’s endless summer days. It’s dried up, a moonscape of cracked mud where once the blue-
winged teal nested and Ptarmigan Peak reflected.
3. And remember in the 80’s during the first oil crisis, when everyone was talking about solar roof
panels, the government was giving tax credits for them, and you worked on that North Carolina
Solar Law Commission, on the legal implications of people shading their neighbor’s solar panels,
and we all thought that was the problem we needed to solve?
4. Now the Milne ice shelf has collapsed into the Arctic ocean, and the Thwaites and Pine Island
glaciers have broken loose in Antarctica.
5. You don’t remember the last time Beaver Lake froze, only when we were kids it did, and now it
would be considered a miracle that not even your entire Catholic grade school could conjure. All
those ice skates rotting in Asheville basements.
6. But do you remember how the frogs sounded in the marsh, the one kind of amphibian that
survives in Alaska, their lilting songs like the rounds at summer camp, and your boy’s hand in
yours as you stood at the edge and tried to count how long they sang?
7. You do remember when you were a kid like him, and the problem was roadside trash, and on
that first Earth Day, you walked your neighborhood, found one tossed can. How it shone in
sunlight, the glimmer like a ray to your heart telling you the Earth needed you, and what joy that
you could be of use.
8. The marsh is dried up, isn’t it? And your boy now a man who doesn’t want to think about what
used to be here, and why would you want to remind him of what was taken from him before he
could fight for it?
9. And remember, do not forget, that you knew forty years ago, we all knew about global warming
and habitat loss and extinction, we knew what we were doing and how to stop it, remember
Soft Energy Paths and Small is Beautiful and all those books we read in college showing us the
path out of this chaos. And now forty years later, you stand with your hands hanging by your
side, and look back at decades of working hard to help the Earth, and what has come of it, things
are far worse now than that ten-year-old girl who picked up a soda can could ever have
imagined.
10. But do you remember, do you remember, how thick the forests were, how many-layered and
fecund, how melodious the morning chorus, how dark the skies at night, how the Milky Way
arced overhead and fireflies lit the night, and you didn’t think about forgetting, you didn’t think
it could ever leave?
More Like Totes Sick Masculinity
Man so mean
eat carnivorous plant leafy greens.
Break a bottle on his wiener.
Pay for gas with teeth.
Bring a gun on a plane
a gun on a plane so big
bullets full-sized airplanes.
Shit out a whole alligator in a godless land so
now their god is the alligator man. Hail hail the Alligator Man.
Strut through museum
quetzalcoatlus scoff
say pff as if – take a big swig from a pickled piranha specimen jar.
Smash the jar on his wiener.
Say like I give a FUCK to simple requests from girlfriends and mothers.
Finger so beefy.
Original model for “truck nuts”
every time you see those lumpy bumps swinging from a chassis
he get a royalty check for seventeen cents that’s already been spent on cigar
implants for his
backup titties. Ooh finger so beefy. Smell he emissions.
Fume haze warp horizon climb
take the bow from Apollo and shoot it with his GUN.
Only thing he fear: his clone or a NUN.
Only one revere: RUMPLESTILTSKUN
Rhyme so hard it no longer ENJOYABLE.
Breakfast of metal called TITANI-YUMS.
No tears,
eyeball sweat.
All feelings uninstalled, replaced with a single switch
ON – ALL THE FEELINGS AHHHHH
OFF – CATLIKE SLUMBER OF READINESS
winter sunburn chest so damp so smooth
exactly as soft as an almost ripe mango
like that all blue muscle ass dolphin the first minute its beached
the saltwater slip away
nobody knows what happen after sweat dries up.
Nobody nobody knows
Bees in the Eyes
“…the 29-year-old and her doctor were horrified to discover
four bees living under her eyelids, feasting on her tears.”
—The Guardian, 10 April 2019
The salt their nectar.
Your sorrow and ocular muscles
they chew and spit out
as honeycomb,
as wax, as candle-source
and sweetener.
Imagine that,
all your pain transformed
into the sweetest sweetener
one knows,
a spoonful to hide medicine,
a spoonful to make hot tea
a firework on your tongue,
a spoonful to soothe
someone’s suffering.
All you have to do:
let the bee, the light-jacketed
employee of the department
of pain transformation
suck and eat and suck away
your human sight.
First Time
the first time I had sex
I heard voices in the hall
and risked everything to listen
you smiled, smushed your face on my face;
decided what to do with my body
I was limp
I was listening
the girls in the hall seemed so lovely
having normal conversations:
“what classes are you taking?”
feeling trapped in here, with you
I wished that I was water
or to do things that I wanted
Once
I ate a rose-pink bird,
it hums in my mouth.
When I cry, a sweet
flutter forms emerald
tears singing of moss
and movement, a boy
who loves shadowed
light freely falling
from a branch I climb,
green as ponderosa pine
till heart-ache takes hold
(soft sheath) impaling
my tongue, a courtship
tasting of gorget, of thyme.
i’m hungover and jesus is kind of hot
my head throbs in tune to the organ’s wailing and my back aches against the pew polished by thousands of asses and sweating palms before me, praying lord i am not worthy and i can’t help but think, as my gaze follows the incense smoke, rising from the censer to the pristine white marble of the altar, and lands on jesus, hanging bare from a crudely cut cross, that he’s kind of hot, and i clench my teeth so tight i can hear the rumble in my ears, but i still don’t take my eye off of his slender, silky fingers and his creamy blood dripping from his palms like the sweat dripping down my back and can’t stop this yearning pang of loneliness not in my chest or my heart but my stomach, sitting among the acid and single piece of white bread, and the priest whispers hypnotically may the body of christ keep me safe for eternal life and i am still gazing at the body of christ, but it’s not because the taut marble skin of his ribcage but because he’s so sublime, hanging over the priest’s glossy head, willing to sacrifice anything for you – for me – and i know if we were in love that he would never leave me, except maybe he would get tired of me because he is exalted and i am nothing and he would ask too many questions about why i do the things i do and i don’t want to have to explain myself to anyone else ever again, not even to the alabaster lips and recessed eyes of christ, and his forgiveness would make me sick, but maybe it’s just the lingering whiskey, and the blood of christ, amen, that’s making me want to vomit on the immaculately dressed family in front of me
i don’t get up to take communion today.
Poetry
My husband storms angrily into the kitchen and tells me
he’s had another nightmare that I’ve been writing poetry,
that I was sending off stacks and stacks of envelopes,
spending excessive amounts on postage and mailing supplies
to pursue my worthless ambitions. “You seem to think
you’re going to live forever,” he tells me at the end of his story,
“that you can keep taking these little steps towards nothing
while people out there are working themselves to death.
It seems like a smart person would have figured things out,
given up by now.” But I’m still stuck on this nightmare he’s had
of me writing poetry—and not of me
stabbing him in his sleep, or running away with another man,
or forgetting to feed or even completely abandoning our children,
all things my subconscious has terrified me with,
all the things that send me running to my desk in the middle of the night
to exorcise with poetry, this terrible thing I do.
Ode to the Model T
“Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the stars”
-Cannery Row
All-steel body,
nickeled radiator,
& deeply cushioned seats –
You had a streamline effect.
The way your rotary lifted us
necessitated double ventilation,
artificial lungs pushing
the toxic away.
Your Windsor Maroon & Channel Green
reached for a planetary system
as if gears could ever be cosmic.
We hopped in for the touring
& behind your silk curtains
we proved rims are
mountable –
This was the push of your throttle,
a gear shift supplying an alternat-
ing current to our spark plugs,
whether you noticed, or not, whether
your grill ever found any lips
or not.
We wanted to pretend, tin
Lizzie, you weren’t mass
produced. That you weren’t
some assembly line runabout
with interchangeable parts,
we wanted to pretend
we wouldn’t be fiber
glass to your steel,
pretend the ride would propel
us both forward on the same high
way, but you slammed
on the brakes, left us
in your rearview
& picked up a new passenger.
Was I a placeholder?
Standard equipment you wanted to upgrade?
Time isn’t factored into the total
cost & fuck, we weren’t
transactional. We saw the glow
of your headlights, a singular
universal joint.
When you ignite the dash light
the space we occupied is bare –
If only you felt
our aftermarket value,
the way you stare
up into the black tarp
of night & know
the stars aren’t welded together
on a belt by men
but are collisions
of particles untouchable,
irreplicable, white-hot
moments always already
burned.
Origin Story
I rose from marsh mud
I oozed from tabernacle brack
amid caterwaultails
gushthrushes deltalillies
sluiced with lack swaddled
in slack I rose from the low
scar of my momma’s belly
son of a fracker
a quiet motherfucker
tucked into sins original
baptized babe in a callous chalice
in viscous liquid
dry as puss and snot
and the blood of a vicious bent nose
I leaked shame
from cracks and crevices
was slain by the sleeze
of blame embossed by blithe writhing
of scarcity my million tries
to shake loose
the chaff of a name
sift and reduce to thick truth
left with two vexing advices
your body is a gift you have to live through
Note from the author: The first italicized line is Lorine Niedecker’s. The second is Shane McCrae’s.
packrat
from memories to broken toys —
i keep everything — hoping to recycle
them into a poem. or story. or an
ashtray for things that lack the will
to protest against flames
i still carry a piece of my favorite
glass cup in my pocket, and a thorn
from the sweetest rose i ever got,
is under my pillow. i try to save
a little bit of all the things i love
‘cos time takes without warning
and a packrat hates such surprises
so, when you find that tiny note
written in smearing blue ink in my diary,
keep it safe – it’s an echo i saved from
the lips of the man who called me
a goddess before a woodcarver
chiseled a deity in my likeness
and a priest built a shrine in my name
Another Name for Each of Us
Our son’s called Le Tian
in his Mandarin school, a name
his grandmother—his Po—
gave him. But when I called down
from upstairs just now
he said, “No, that’s my Chinese
name. You call me Preston.”
He says he’ll call me Baba
because Dad is another name
for Grandpa. It is?
“Well,” he said, “that’s what
you call Grandpa.” So
when an awful dream shakes
him awake, makes him
cry, Preston calls out
Baba! and reaches for
my hand. So sure it’s there—
as I fumble for my glasses,
scramble out of bed—he keeps
his eyes squinched shut.
I’ll unstitch myself
for you, watch myself weave
through spindle and spine, I’ll wrap
around your mannequin form. I’ll speak
to you through the fabrics’ gentle
movements, I’ll whisper my way across
your skin—I’m moving in or through you
and wouldn’t you like to know which? The song
will unwind us further, so slow it starts to feel
silent, your shaky breath attempting
to keep rhythm. Sound can be slowed
in so many gentle fashions. Let me show you the first—
Holy Roller
was the nickname we gave to an aunt on my mother’s side, she
never missed a day of church and when I was shipped off to
that Hell of a catholic school I wondered would some
magician cut me off from the waist down and
stuff me into the confessional until I bled out for a cause I
never wanted to believe in? Staring at stained-glass
through violet smoke and stronger wine than they serve
at mass, someone commands the head tipped back and
the host received; someone touches your neck and tells you to
kneel with your hands tied behind your back, someone says
Angel, you’ve been so. very. Bad. Now’s the time to repent
with daily devotion. Now’s the time for penance. expiation.
atonement. self-abasement. redress. Come back until
you’ve learned your lesson, dressed all in black, breath
hitching up a skirt, and dripping holy
water the way witches learn to use candle wax. Trans
ubstantiation, we take our time trying to escape
Divinity before realizing, a bit disappointed, that it only
lasts an hour, anyways. Once fearful of
being blinded by false idols, commencement day
left me, silk in steadied hands, Saint
Irony; the one who now ties your blindfold.
Skewered
I tell my Tinder date
I was four when dad fed me
stewed dog meat or 보신탕
in a straw hut.
Another time, while I cuddle her dog
on an Ikea futon, I tell her dogs taste
like chicken nuggies. Is it fair
if she accuses me of looking at her dog funny?
When I send my dad a video about factory farming
he responds with a lmao emoji, types
in korean—slaughter makes them taste better son—
My dad the country boy, sling-shot snakes
and sparrows for a bag of matdongsan, a b-b-big.
Wikipedia says 27 million dogs are eaten every year.
Is this why, when I say what’s up dawg, my friend
replies, no dog, cause you ate it.
Tbh Sally, I’m not even sure
if my dad fed me dog. I only ever
mean to make fun of myself.
Sometimes, I wish I could be more like my dad
who could shrug off the world
like a long tongue, ready to be snatched
back into darkness.
Aubade in the Apiary
In the gabled room of your uncle’s house,
I left you sleeping, left you
before your alarm could sound, before
the white gravy could thicken in the pot
and went side-stepping through the linens
hanging like a history of honeysuckle.
Beyond the screen-porch, beyond
the indifference of dirt, I returned
to the rows of white boxes—a mini mill
town of clapboard houses thrumming.
I made a fist and shoved it in my mouth
to shape a scream. I made a fist
and shoved it in my stomach to shape.
The night before, you laid me down
in the wheated ryegrass, in the heavy heat
of Carolina. I think you wanted to show me
something undeniable, that slow expansion,
the humble roar of instancy.
And between the boxes,
each for different reasons, we added
to the whipping of a thousand wings.
Cannoli
After forgiving my sister for punching me
at our father’s second wedding, we make cannoli.
She says she feels damaged by our parents’ divorce,
and I smooth clumps of ricotta in a bowl,
disguising white with vanilla and chocolate to tell her
I don’t unearth what I’ve buried.
We’re sisters, which is to say we carry the same
sour inheritance in our bodies and only one of us
speaks of it. Kneading the dough, she trains
her hands to keep pain, hold her tongue
in a clenched fist––still, it pulses in her palm.
This is good dough; it obeys fingertips
and catches its breath after every hard press.
She says I must not feel suffocated by the split
because I’ve never spoken about it, and she hates that.
I shrug to show her the way grief sieves me into silence.
I have retraced my tongue, tried to taste moments before–
before the wedding, when a relative said she was amazed
I turned out just fine, before the days divided, the new house,
the twin bed, the court-ordered schedule, the conversation,
the moving out. Before my parents needed my adaptability
and before I was unwilling to break people with words
used to break me.
Boiling the shells, she admires how I’ve clasped their folds.
Even in water, they stay intact.
They Named Us All John/Juan
Like a good bird flying, he would
say when I asked how his day went.
Fingering the holes in his belt with his right,
he’d smooth his left hand over
his baldness. Wars and craftsmanship
had marked his hands—little stains and lines
crocheted across the creases time had slowly
grown. I wonder where in his eyes he kept
the bodies he had seen. Was it somewhere
different than the gold he’d honed? Somehow,
when we talked at length, the light was always leaving.
Someone was calling dinner or for us to come
in for the night and he would say, Jota A, it seems
we are wanted elsewhere. That always sounded
nice, like some distant longing could find
purchase around our waists and reel us in. But on the face
of it, these interruptions leave me the holes I show
you now. I do not know the stories whole. I do not
know where exactly the scars came from. I do not know
what good bird carried that news and where. I run
my hand over my own baldness. I am talking to no
one here but the shadow of myself. It wonders nothing.
Permanence
If the sand
migrates south
to some other
coastal town,
dredgers haul up
the ocean floor,
pumping the slurry
onto the diminished shore
and bulldozing it
into acceptable
postcard flatness.
Natural islands
change shape.
The interplay between
wind and surf
makes dunes march,
freshens the bays,
clears the detritus,
but we build walls,
raise sidewalks,
and manage the place
like a chain store.
Despite our nostalgia
for the transient,
we’ve invested
too much in creating
this stage setting
to let it slip away.
The beachfront
will be “reclaimed.”
Hired hawks
will chase away
the noisome gulls.
We never allow
those things
we think we own
to change. We drive
pilings to fix
the migrating grains
in place. The whole
we’ve created
is our comfort.
Bigger storms?
All we need are bigger nails.
Self Portrait: Crumpled
After Donika Kelly
All the dictionary is erased— palimpset
pulpy remembering
You are not a title page
not the index of your skin you are the falling autumn
already buried by the snow.
You are given creases, given ears— dogs ears your
ears —ungiven
there is no rustling to hear
you are the dead shedding of a sunburn.
become
blank un-
annotated.
what turning what soft lamplight
what cashmere fingers taking the lashes from your eyes.
There is a you at the cover of this
a you tearing the corners with hands sappy from making love to the forest.
a binding down your spine the tying up the glue sap again the juniper taste of
rope. Neither today
nor tomorrow one day a long day from now you are
on a shelf and there are many moths
chewing holes
in the untouched or retouched paper of
your
stomach.