The mouth of a father disappears
into the mouth of a son, and that day
my own mouth disappeared into my brother’s.
All those prayers and lambs he bore up
for all of creation, all of his jaw,
unhinged in my palm as my father
found us in the yard. I waited for him
to take my hands, or for halos of bees
to swarm a snake up into a dragon,
a deity to blind me as I blinded him,
something to clinch down on me,
someone righteous to pack my throat
with ire and salt for when I don’t remember
later, for when my brother pretends not to:
me holding a boy that isn’t mine,
me learning to hold a boy
like a man shouldering his kill back
from the field for the cleaning.
Poetry
First Brazil Nut After Several Years Of Avoiding Them Because Of Their High Levels Of Radiation
Let me at them, devil’s batteries
or toxic scarabs though they be, leeching
from strata of Chernobyls and Pompeiis
or seismic forge, the same force
that blasts the tree’s roots, blasted roots
of Madame Curie’s hair; and soon enough
will sear our leering skulls on the calendar.
Once I shunned them, blank on whether
they were pods of homeopathy or
slow explosion of decay. But
these days, I more dread standing on
the wrong corner when Carnaval sambas by.
Perched on three reels of backstory, each
a score of years, our uncut un-hero
(his half-life more, yet less than half)
reaches over the throbbing fence for a charge.
We were talking about guns
we were talking about guns at the luncheon after bill jrs father had diedand
he had discovered his dads gun in the dresser just one bullet and a hole in
the dresser where once and we all laughed about this he had accidentally
discharged the weapon while trying to unload it probably killed all the
socks in the drawer haha and then marji shared about how her dad one time
insisting this things not loaded shot a hole in the kitchen door her mothers
arms crossed i told you so and the holes still there to this day and so i turn to
my dad and say so do we even know where all your guns are and we laugh
haha because we know theyre all under the bed the long guns anyway under
the bed in the master bedroom where nobody sleeps anymore except me when i
visit but what about the pistols i ask how many pistols did we find anyway
when we cleaned out grandpas house unpacking boxes of ledgers and bottles
of that whiskey with his name on it and the things from his bank office and my
dad said quieter several he said dad gave me his pistols sometime after
mother died and he told me here i dont need to have these around i dont
know you said looking at your beer depressed maybe but he didnt want
to have them around and then i remembered how we found that one a long
time later still unpacking boxes it was small maybe what i thought a
derringer was but i dont really know what a derringer is really at the bottom
of a box i pulled it out asked whats this probably a gun I remember you said
then and it was wrapped in dark leather soft as an old womans skin its
grey heft warm as if hed just been holding it
Prayer with Torn Fingernails
Inside the cedar drawer, you
are the mineral
memory. The claw hammer’s
steel scent-stain.
Each moth-wing corner –
a place my fingertips
dissolve you accidentally.
*
I slip inside: an oyster shell. Dad,
I have been rinsed away. Dad, I am
the sulfur and the rancid shoreline.
Dad, I am what’s left. An oil-slick
saucer. Smooth and pearly worry
stone. Dad, I want you to know
I am benthic. Silt
that ribbons over wrist bone,
having lifted a teacup
from the lapping, brown river.
Dad, I wear a mud-drip
chin, my lashes
soak and glimmer blue
with summer’s luminary
plankton.
*
Here – the pinch of ballpoint ink.
Oil of house keys sealed
in a Ziplock. Here – your compass
clouded white with
wandering. Dad,
*
I could rub away in ribbons
and beads, the excess clay
until all that’s left is your forty-pound
head. Belly the width of a garbage
can. Jaw like a spring-trap, ankle
biter. Dad, I could sculpt you
out. Familiar as the story told
over wild rice and beans:
You were building trails
in Sangre Di Christo, sleeping
under narrowing spears of balsam fir.
A black bear traced the smell
of your toothpaste, rifled
through the tent as you lay, stricken
feet ahead. Son of a bitch
sat on my legs. Thought
I was dead for about five
minutes. Then off it went.
Dad, I want you to know. I am
brave, too.
*
I slip inside: a rusted nail. Stem
russet-feathered like slept-in
lipstick. Dad, I am
a turbulent winged seed, grit
in the maelstrom of your hazel eye.
My body is perfectly
ugly, Dad. Have you noticed,
we are all sort of old
and moly?
*
Here – your brass trumpet
glowing like the moon
in a velvet cloth.
Here – your voice like a purpling
fist. Voice to shake a mountain
down. Dad, I know
the map is wrong.
I want to press my thumbs against the twin
ridges that erupt between your brows.
Erase this.
*
I slip inside: a green-husked
walnut. Remember the photo
of me swinging buck-toothed
from the lowest limb? Mother
crouching over her eggplant, knuckles
rapping on your ground-level window.
Her voice like bright, packed
snow. A thistly speck
of pollen tunneled deep
into the temple bells. Their pious,
pink bonnets, ringing one
after one – come see
your daughter, she’s
as strong as you are.
The Inquisitor’s Parrots
When Columbus returned to Spain,
he gifted two parrots to Queen Isabella.
History cannot tell us how long it took
until the birds had forgotten the language
of the Taíno they mimicked on the island
and if the Spaniards ever registered those
sounds as distinct words or assumed
they were meaningless squawks.
We do not know if the sailors, tired of hearing
the parrots screech for home, stowed them deep
in the brig, where they slept a four month night
or if they bonded with their captors, perched on
their shoulders, and learned the Spanish tongue.
The are no records of their lives in Spain
or what they witnessed in the royal councils.
We do not know if they were bribed with olives
to teach them to shriek auto da fe, auto da fe,
as the condemned was mortified before the crowd
or if the parrots themselves ended their lives
on the braziers, having revealed too much.
The County Judge
The Russian poet S Frug took it as the subject of an epic: Or else your God
appears
to have abandoned you. He found it in the 13th century commentary Or
Zarua by R Isaac,
who attributes the writing to R Ephraim, who claims it was R Amnon,
who is unknown apart from this one story about his friendship
with the otherwise unnamed county judge.
They met daily. The judge didn’t use force.
He harbored the hope that a Rabbi would succumb
but he as much wanted the company of an educated person.
An inspecting officer looks at every one of his troops, Rabbi.
He requested. And listen, back then every county judge considered it a
challenge to cause a Jew to abandon faith. It’s clear then
what interest the county judge had in making relations with R Amnon.
Note the words of the county judge, Fulfill my will.
Yet what interest did R Amnon have? R Yannai found a handwritten letter
by R Ephraim. “Because of his resistance to their daily pleading.”
Translation: Yet I’ll determine my own sentence.
The county judge sent around. R Amnon refused to go.
“He refused to eat or to drink because he had already resolved to end his
life.”
Amnon was brought in before the county judge,
his friend, and requested three days to consider the offer.
He regretted giving even the pretense. On the fourth day,
when he was rebuked for his failure to appear, R Amnon pled
to have his tongue removed. R Amnon suggested such a punishment even
though it would have meant the composition were unspoken.
Instead the county judge ordered his arms and legs amputated.
After each amputation R Amnon refused the opportunity.
“Being dead once already.”
The knife was raised twenty times just because of that which he left in his
mouth.
Then he was sent home as a field snake.
Alternatively, after completing the amputation
the judge sent Amnon and his limbs to the county dump. That’s why he’s
known as R Amnon.
You see the name Amnon wasn’t popular in Ashkenaz
because it was the name of David’s son who raped his half-sister Tamar.
R Ephraim says, The striking R Amnon
but R Isaac says, the infected R Amnon as he lay on his death.
The holidays arrived.
In other words what had happened to R Amnon was inscribed one year
before.
He made the composition on Rosh Hashanah.
The story contains an ambiguous phrase: “And his body immediately
disappeared” “with reference to his own history.”
Others say his brother-in-law gathered the bones and buried them in a cave
next to the muddy creek.
The town heard the cry overcome the cave and reported the noise.
The judge announced, The court knows the reason and is satisfied.
In another version the judge responded, Even if what I do causes the world
to be destroyed.
Three decades later R Amnon appeared to R Kalonymos in a dream and
taught him the composition.
In fact, the above story concerning the county judge
shares three elements with the eventual story of R Kalonymos:
1 The request for time to consult,
2 A statement about the beauty of the victim and 3 The detailed torture.
You see, because R Amnon visited R Kalonymos
things were there and no one knew their presence behind the closed gate
except Kalonymos.
They began to hang skeletons again in Mainz. The world was at odds.
One night, under the smell of lambgrease even the bailiffs
who had promised to protect Kalonymos fled.
The judge, fearing that the people would turn on him,
fled, because he had initially tried to protect R Kalonymos.
The hold R Kalonymos had on his neighbors weakened.
Now is not the time to ponder thinking.
Some tried to leave through the basement of the courthouse.
When they reached the window, the opening was too small
to pass through and they were caught.
Before the judge returned R Kalonymos took his kid,
kissed and slaughtered them. Word got back to the judge,
who said, Now I won’t provide any assistance to those people.
The people heard what the judge said.
R Kalonymos learned what the judge said
and took the knife with him to the courthouse.
They hit R Kalonymos with a slab of chestnut wood until he died.
They cut his appendage and brought it to the judge.
Others say R Kalonymos never returned to the judge
after taking his kid’s life, but died first.
A third opinion suggested that the Crusaders found him
on the road and killed him there.
John Henry’s 8 Feet Tall, 3 Ton Statue Has Been Moved for Its Own Safety
I believe in the myth of Napoleon
shooting cannons at the Sphinx
because I believe every story
about a white man shooting at a black face.
In Talcott, they never stop killing John Henry because
he won’t fall down. His skin a template for the terror
every cop or concerned citizen will claim
claimed them when they had to shoot. Night
of the Living Dead over and over. Another black body dying
to be shot, dragged or painted
white when America’s legitimate sons whistle
his song. The statue is real,
realer than the man, realer than me.
That metal body is a body America will see
and admit to beating and burning
and turning against itself.
The repairs won’t replace the need
to scar. A patched chest won’t cover
the howl of all the triggers,
the pop of every bullet bursting through
boys not made of bronze.
If there was one thing I could say I knew, and felt, and could get subcutaneous with
it would be the distance between me
and the small insects who do errands
coming through the loblollies,
the tough blue bird
on the telephone pole
and how he makes the mountain
behind him seem glued-on fake,
maybe just myself in the mirror, it would be
that one shoulder slopes a little down,
that I always forget which one
(because it’s in a mirror; because
I forget things that require direction,
like which way to turn the window cranks
or put the toilet paper)
or that one of my sad things
is to be accustomed to fear,
to birth it and room with it,
like when I read about Great Diseases
in YA at the library and
convinced myself, for years, and so silently,
and with great passion,
that I was dying of Lyme disease,
mostly that the only way I can escape the air
is by enumerating the vegetation,
pulling each up by a floss of name,
bright shocked aisles of trees
mountains birds flowers roads,
assailed with my names,
lacquered, punch-and-judied
and that the landscape out this window
leads to really nothing, in me,
is all objects I can categorize,
in the most basic of ways, not
in new striations,
new vibey colored folders in the room of someone
who’s happy about it
Eclipse from Clayton, GA 2017
The Mediterranean orange fruit bowl I’d hear your ring kiss
has hovered over our dinners since you died, even though it doesn’t hold
enough orzo pasta or clam chowder to feed the family.
–
I’ve always imagined babies this sharp, curled up around organs, perfectly
round, save a bladder. I couldn’t have kept you because I have a history
of good fingernails, so you’d be able to scratch me from the inside out.
–
I picture the glinting, gold necklace circling
my mother’s neck or the way she cradled her arms
for months after she lost it in the ocean when I was twelve.
–
The white-feathered halo settled into my sister’s hair like a nest,
perched as if she were born to molt until she was punished
in Sunday school for saying she didn’t believe angels existed.
–
Toenail clippings used to line our nightstand; after you left
I’d chew on them as if they were a collection of voodoo dolls.
I was grinding bones. You could be hurt by the smallest part of me.
–
The handle of the mug you threw for me was still
wrapped in my palm as the yonic body shattered
on our hardwood floor and covered it with coffee.
–
An antique oscillating fan blade sliced off the tip of one of your fingers
when you were 6. Rusted, it rests like a shrine in my living room
I worship on off days. What could you have done with all ten of them?
–
If I didn’t say I saw a honeyed peach my grandmother may call
my poetry morbid again, and she’s been disappearing into the dent
of her bed so I’m afraid all of that darkness might kill her.
Harram
my mother was 100 miles south of Death Valley when
Amba Karras grazed her belly
you’re going to give us Antony
the monastery was modest still
a couple coptic churches peppered
across a few dozen acres of the California desert
You are the treasure
Of Goodness and
Giver of Life
life is not safe in Masr
martyrdom is mundane
America is a place where we can pray away from persecution
away from static poverty in service of the Lord
Your peace, our Savior;
Save us
And spare our souls
my father was proud of my skin when I was born
my mother says he showed me to everyone in the hospital
a brown man with a son white as an ostrich egg
the American dream
Merciful eyes
At my weakness
At my disgrace
And my humility
Amba Karras traced a cross with oil on our wrists and foreheads the last time my father visited the dayr
He tried to kiss Amba Karras’s hand
but the bishop pulled away before his lips warmed meek flesh
we pushed home in hush
the sun sunk into my skin by the time i was five
my father felt betrayed
he hated the tint of his own flesh
how it was resurfacing in his kin like a bloated corpse
Amen
Transit
Fourth grade frightened I carried a stick to the bus stop
and swung it like a mace,
stabbed the empty stomach
of an Asian chestnut
and topped that haft with spines.
Three towns over another backpacked child
had the ham-soft tip of his thumb snipped off
by a rabid raccoon.
They only come out in the day
if they’re sick. Weeks of gut-punch needle-pricks
or for one bright morning before the choke and the spit
and the frantic body strung to the air
with elastic bands, I could
walk brazen through sunlight
to piece apart the world in clever little hands.
AFAKASI | HALF-CASTE
What can I tell you about this body but that it is mine?
Not my mother’s though she tried harder than any to mold
its soft form. Not my father’s though I carry his color.
Often I wish I were an already discovered fact.
My body and its histories known like the mapped,
the chronicled, the clichéd phrase at home in every mouth.
I wish to give you my shovel, my miner’s helmet, lamp affixed.
Will you take these words – every word – until all I have
are ten fingers to trace my lines at this exact moment?
So that for once I will have a whole being beneath my hands—
all that will ever be and never be again.
HOW CAPITALISM ENDS
It kills others before it turns on itself.
In faraway lands, a bomb scatters
debris like a flock of startled birds.
A drone creeps on its civilian target like a stealthy cat.
Bats, from their hanging cocooned slumber, emerge
from the damp mouths of caves, infest
its homes.
At its border, mass, unmarked graves
where children tried to mount a train
they call a beast. It flings them off
its steel, well oiled back:
before it ends, apathy will be mechanized
just like everything else.
In refugee children, their eyeballs
have been replaced by miniature worlds.
Here, some people wear flags
as blindfolds, beat the piñata world
in its gut.
When it ends here, it will be like an ax,
hacking slowly at an ancient tree, its roots,
claws tunneling under every landscape,
still taking whatever it can take for nourishment.
Ruination, sowed by man.
Gripping his gold handled ax,
wood chips will pool at his feet for centuries,
until the final creak squeals like a newborn
as it slumps over, a defeated bull.
HOW CAPITALISM FUCKS
It depends on if you’re its type or not.
If you’re not, it’ll tease you like you’re an unripened
plantain dangling on a branch, wishing for its calloused
palm’s pluck and buffer. It’ll leave you bathed
in your own night sweats dreaming of teeth.
Bruises will appear where you swear no one has ever touched you.
You’ll wish you could be flayed, peeled
layer by layer back to a girl, the way she gulped
air with such ravenous swooning.
For others, it’ll turn you addict,
pinned permanently under its thrusting gut,
thrashing under its traffic of fingers
and tongues and limbs and cocks.
The mirror will begin to lie to you, unable to reflect
the wreckage its made of your home or your
needled nest of bones—you’ll spit on your thumbs
and wipe trails of shame from under your eyes.
You’ll fall in love, staring yourself to death.
Orphic
At least once every generation
the hewn but living head of Orpheus
pauses mid-song to spare a thought
to his body, still winding its way
among Europe’s ganglion of rivers.
No animal would touch such offal—
a heart flanged in concertina wire,
lungs pumped with mustard gas
from the Somme, kidneys fattened
with lead. There is a hole in the gut
where the Ciconian women scooped
his entrails as if hollowing a pumpkin.
A ring of teeth have grown in this gash,
& where there are teeth, appetite surely
follows. This living maw is always open,
waiting for something to swim inside, or
for a hand, offered freely, to reach in,
& then the maw will snap shut.
& wherever Orpheus’s head is, he will
pause mid-song, to smile & lick his lips
with their sweet residue of antifreeze,
& then on with the next verse.
no city left behind
Walking across 14th street, rumor
of August is a factory facing
Union Square station and
Broadway collapses before us
stripped of desire, immense in
its beat, like a giant’s eye.
The furious paragraphs of postpunk
the speed of summer in this
Friday that began in the inner part
of your thighs, your back lined up
with all the southern buildings.
To long suddenly for a family business;
everything we yet ignore is home.
Teacup Bloom
I’ve seen a tree swim
the shallow pond
tentacle and suctioned
to the murk. If you peer
into it all, you won’t see
the reach and ribbon
of her slimed tail, the smooth pebble
shoreline spitting up
bullfrogs to balloon
gullets for her.
A Curse for Pressure
You say there is nothing as beautiful as the dry cracking,
the callus of a hard day’s work. My hands speak back through
creases, the folds you bury your face in. Every sound
pressuring flesh like a magnet, breaking skin, snapping
a rib that no longer carries current. I dive to
beat myself at the bottom. I comb
my hair strands with useful fingers. Anguilliform means
resembling an eel— nothing beautiful—
this slimy new ocean, this dark fertile magic, the scaleless serpent
air is all wrong here.
Ubuntu
there is a phrasing in Oshiwambo that states:
Owuhenda nandjila iha tandilwa amu lalo—
a traveller can’t be denied a home
I am five hundred thousand miles away from home,
once in a village I am given water to mix with my blood
once in another, three children are cooking imaginary stew
to be eaten with sand
I once arrive at a city of 21st century diplomacy
where my evening is full of halves
where Amichai told me, half people in the world hate
the other half love
and that Gaza is now debris because her bricks were made of sputum and hate
that Berlin wall was an erection of vex and arrogation
that in 1886, the word hate came into the African dictionary
the word Ubuntu is the nuanced capital of human heart
when we come to it, we must hesitate
whether by water or wind we must define it with kindness
before we waste into worms
so when mother wants to define it,
she starts with a plate of primroses
by the seaside sharing their bodies and water
I imagine mother now on the bamboo bench
baying and belching about sociology of being
her words, breaking with the wind
To Extricate the Feeling from the Thing, Think of 50 Ways to Spell the Word “Hurt”
from the kitchen table you hear
a familiar last name comma
first name and see white light
see a face you’ll only ever know
from marching band high
school blue and white
uniform silver threads feathered
hat braces brass instruments;
“another identified victim of
the Orlando Pulse shooting”—
see a face you only knew in
two measures: music and absence.
late Sunday walk down Milton
Street you shake the sting
through the phone of your mom’s
“everyone called but you.”
lupus is a lithe thief so you tell
her about the time you saw
a mouse scuttle in through the
bathroom locked the door
washed your hair in the kitchen
sink the next day and her
understanding feels like a fingernail
clawed into clementine meat.
when you find the pigeon in
the boiler room your landlord
brings a case to the feather fight
and bags you: “toughen up.”
on the train you look for torn
shoulders on blue raincoats, check
bodega oranges for foreign labels,
see a fight in the ferryman’s
fists when he steers the boat towards
Governor’s Island; see everything as
fucked and somehow perfect because
of course it’s fucked—
for six months you watch two bodies
love each other like slot machines
and withdraw at the comedown
of a jackpot; for a year you watch a
woman build an 80-ft platform of feathers
and wax and still pummel because
gravity always misses you most
at your highest. when your father
asks what’s wrong you think
of yet another way to spell the word.
over the phone you imagine the cat
squirm when he grabs it by its scruff
but when you own them they
let you do it. when winter comes
you learn to love that merino itch
because though this coat’s patchwork
was never made for you,
you live in it.