Poetry

Bees in the Eyes

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

“…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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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.

30 November 2022

Categories: 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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

“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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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

30 November 2022

Categories: Poetry

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

1 December 2021

Categories: Poetry

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

1 December 2021

1 Comment

Categories: Poetry

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

1 December 2021

Categories: Poetry

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

1 December 2021

Categories: Poetry

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

20 November 2020

Categories: Poetry

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.

Generational Trauma

19 November 2020

1 Comment

Categories: Poetry

After carrying the weight of all this damage

for over thirty years, I wanted to be rid of it.

And not just the smell of it—all of it.


To remove it from my body like a malignant

growth or parasite. To deposit it in into

something: a jar, a forgotten account,


someone else’s body. To throw the shame

away. Into the trash. Into the ocean. Into a fire.

To archive the pain like slave schedules or


census records that no longer spoke of my

existence. This poem is a scar that reveals the

onceness of a wound, a curated show in which


joy, bitterness, and unknown patrons attend.

It is an elegy to mourn the parts that were

shamefully discarded like scraps and a song


to celebrate the vibrant parts that still remain.

It is unsolicited advice stuffed back into the

throat. It is a how-to book misplaced on the


shelf. It is an old family map passed down

from great-grandmother to grandmother.

My father told me to go this way. I didn’t


listen, thank god. What can one do when it

was her own father who once used the same

map and found only the weight of all his


damage at the end of the road? Too tired to

turn back, he built his house there: a wife in

the kitchen, two children at the end of a


leather belt, a small dog crying in the yard.

I ran away from home and found men who

ate deliciously at the good corners of my


body. I ran away from home where we were

predators and weapons and the wounded.

We became fluent in the small-necked


language of control, our house illuminated

with gaslight. Was it because we were the

daughters of a mother who told us, “At least


he provides for us”? Was it because we grew

up wishing that one day he wouldn’t come

home? Was it because men took us and ruined


us, and our parents—reminded of their own

taking and ruin—turned away in shame?

Rather than chew on the answers, rather than


revisit that house, I will lay it all here, in this

poem, and pretend it never happened: my

body, my parents, the men. I will bury it


under the fruit filling—I am mother now.

Everything must be sweet. Everything must

be perfect, clean. This poem, too. Still,


I hope my children read it. I hope they see

themselves reflected in the fine print. I hope

they know it’s not their fault.

I just had the weirdest dream

19 November 2020

Categories: Poetry

This poem contains lines in Yiddish, with rough translations before and phonetic translations after.

i.
I just had the weirdest dream:
We were strangers in the land of egypt.
Fremde zenen mir geven in land mitsrayim
Hemmed lines in our hands gave way to mime
and we mouthed a thousand languages –
babel’s tatters gestured at our calloused feet.

Each brick was a tongue,
Yeder tsigl iz geven a tsung.
Friends at seder gummed their tile song,
made mortar in their mouths to pave
paths between wayward tribes.

ii.
I just had the weirdest dream.
Our tonsils were the sand of the Sinai
and our lungs were made of dust
un undzere lungen zenen geven fun shtoyb;
we wetted tongues with wine to mend our voices
delirious for want of water.

The blessings that we coughed
Di brokhes vos mir flegn hustn
Dust-ridden and bronchitis-stricken
pleaded with the sky for deliverance
in Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish and Bukhari.

iii.
I just had the weirdest dream.
Strangers were we in Babylon or Speyer or Toledo
I think. The scene kept changing.
Di stsene hot zikh shtendik gebitn.
The tree of life, etz chaim, was a witness
and we struggled to recognize one another
through pillars of smoke.

iv.
I just had the weirdest dream.
Strangers were we while inquisitors asked questions.
Strangers were we in Istanbul, Salonika, and Tangiers.
Fremde zenen mir geven in Lublin un Lemberik.
Huddles lined streets, friends landed like embers
and the air ticked colder
while they hid their clarinets.

v.
I just had the weirdest dream.
We had become a graveyard.
                  Zenen mir gevorn a besoylem.
                                    (Our arms turned into soil like a golem’s.)
                                                      With clasped hands we begged others for asylum.

                  Strangers are we in Herzliya
                  Strangers are we on Long Island
                  Strangers are we in Golders Green
                                    Keyner veyst nisht fun di tsores vos ikh hob gezeyn –
                                                      Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.

I just had the weirdest dream.

Coloured Boys in the Suburbs Are a Novelty

19 November 2020

Categories: Poetry

On a sweltering Tuesday, me and Dylan pack into my beat up minivan and bump our stereo damn near to its limits, pushing out Lupe Fiasco and Nas records on inadvertent caucasian ears. The volume knob spins halfway backwards like our necks do on a double take when we see a cop car cuz police here don’t hide no prejudice. We go back and forth rapping along to Illmatic; Nas told us that the world was ours even if the white boys at school told me to go back to my country for saying I hate the winters here. We breakdance after school and play basketball in our off time. These are coloured boy territories, and here live all our homies; varying shades of rich mocha under Ecko and Fubu adorned battle armor. Every afternoon is a reminder that you gotta let your hair hang down in your face cuz a bandana ain’t gonna do nothin’ good for your image son. Dusk-caked asphalt drinks in the vibrations of our homebound running footsteps as symphonies of coloured mothers fill evening air with the familiar sound of hell no you ain’t gonna sleep over at nobody else’s house tonight. You know you’re close to home when you’re greeted by the bold smell of curry and garlic, filling up the block with a confidence you haven’t yet found for yourself; too many memories of plugged noses, cocktails of laughter and disgust as I open my lunchbox. Listen, I know all too well that people here in this suburb see my skin before they see I’m human, shit I remember that every time I gotta shave my beard before I cross the border or pops warns me about wearing a kufi to school because yes son it’s cool that Muhammad Ali wears one but you’re not Muhammad Ali and we gotta be extra careful ’round these parts. I think about the men who snatched the hijab off of my friends head, how they built up temples to conformity on the land they broke her down on, how god once gathered enough stardust to fill her form and how she is now collapsing into herself like a dying sun. Her coloured boy clan would gather around a lit backwoods like a campfire, telling stories of places where melanin wasn’t as potent a currency as here; countries where you couldn’t use it to buy clutched purses in the elevator like in this one. The coloured boy territories don’t have no border, they lie just beneath the ground of our neighbourhoods like a trench so you gotta stand twice as tall just to see your peers eye-to-eye. Suburban white folks like to say that they don’t see colour as their gaze meets the brown pine-box home of a dead coloured boy while my momma still sees coloured ghosts and you ask her why she can’t smile for you. She puts her head on my shoulder. Her tears run down my arm like a narrow stream and I’m grateful I can tell her that I’m still here.

I’m still here.