perched on a fist
out in the wild
Atlantic where we
shelve caricatures
of ourselves for
the sweet, barren
dunes of art,
freedom and
most indecent
pleasure,
colorful tackle
hung from store
fronts down
Commercial, bait
for our eyes
that dart away
from the other
like minnow
From my front porch, clouds
hang like gray cotton
from a moth-eaten quilt. No rain,
but it’s promised in the silence
of cicadas and the wind
that whistles and whips the weeds
against the house.
Then comes the flash,
a cacophonous shroud of lightning bugs
that, all at once, decide to fall
and form a neon thunderbolt
to split the air in vengeance
for every single mason jar
or fly swatter that is or was
or will be
and crash somewhere beyond the oaks,
then roar, fly up, and fall again
while water whispers to the roof
the way Nana spat her dentures in a cup
of seltzer water. Clear, at first, then bubbles
boiled between the teeth and rose, with clumps
of crackers, to the surface to sizzle
as they burst against the air.
And she’d say Your granddaddy’s hands were
blue-veined marble. If you looked hard enough,
you could see down to the bone. Her sunken
lips pressed against my forehead. If I ever see
you hit a woman,
I’ll bury you.
my mother on the other end of the coiled
phone cord describes her insides
as being of snakes
chewing holes in the lining
of her good winter coat rattling
until she feels them under her fingernails
one of her coat threads is sewn
mother to daughter Florida to Alabama
holding us together in our serpentine sickness
I am cold all the time stretched out on a heating pad
I tell her my temperature is 100 and rising
her fever is 101 she says rattlers are sunning
in the rocks on her property’s edge
they get heavy with rats
that come drunk out of the garden
on yellow squash on parsnips
and old pasta from the compost pile
she turns the pile with her nose pinched
shovel like a spatula in a lasagna of rot
each winter layer I shuck in fever
adds me a new rattle to my growing tail
she scoops old goat shit
from the barn into the wheelbarrow
to fertilize next year’s rising crop
she finds the snakes under the foundation
leaves them be in their cool stupor
lets them live to eat another rat
a would-be garden thief caught in a god’s jaw
a late storm leans the crumbling beams over
pushes the antique wood into the empty lot next door
she says the rattlers find a new place to sun
on the hundred-year August-bleached wood
as if to say we will take your barn
we will love this rot
we will lie here if you won’t
make our bodies warm in our sun
and we will be here when you come
to understand that you cannot
fully shed what tethers you
when your rattles grow in
they’ll hurt like wisdom teeth
my mother texts me a video of a dead rattlesnake
I ask her which one is easier to kill
the rats or the rattlers
she says this one was quick got too brave
and writhes after shovel and neck meet
the snake watches its own severing
shovel cleaving scale cleaving scale
my coat is larger than my mother’s
made of diamonds
sewn together with snakeskin
Crawling in the long grass at sunset
with a spritzer bottle half-full of two percent,
I want to lie down in front of a mower.
A long weekend turned the pumpkin’s leaves
into toddler’s palms caked in wet cement.
I called Dad, and he said to remove the ones
with mildew and spray the rest with milk.
I asked Really, milk? and he said, Milk.
How long before it sours on the leaf? Or is
that the point? This is the problem with living
things: they grow beyond their good, develop
ordinary diseases with absurd cures. The sprinklers
stutter at me—enough, enough, enough—
and rinse the milk from each leaf’s empty bowl.
the pencil hairs that score your chest
like tv snow on the old tube set
my grandmother smacked during storms
soften the knock of your arrhythmia.
still the dull iambs greet my fingers as
I trace the sorrow of your collarbone.
if I could reach into a ventricle
to part your red seas I could be sold
for silver coins and jump for joy as the Romans wept.
what you ask of the body, what you take from it:
your nakedness in the mirror
a thin road of flesh
to separate a prognosis
and the machinery.
My father raged when protestors left signs
out front, condemning him a Bear Killer.
You should be thanking me, he hollered at cars
while hosing red paint off the mailbox.
The bear had toppled garbage cans up
and down the mountain. Neighbors locked
their kids inside and walked their dogs on leashes.
Now the bear was dead and skinned. I howled
when he brought home the rug. I loved to watch
the black bear lumber through our yard, sniff
at mulberries, acorns, beech nuts, then mosey
out of sight behind needles and leaves.
What kind of idiot loves a thing they fear?
My father asked, then dragged me to the yard.
Learn control. Then you’ll understand.
He put a rifle in my hands and pointed
at a target (a paper cut-out man, with rings
across the chest). The gun was heavy, long,
awkward. Make sure the safety’s on, he said,
taking a bullet, lifting the silver bolt.
See into the breech, where a hammer strikes
the shell. Now snap the bolt back forward.
Listen for the click. He raised the gun
up to my shoulder. I found the crosshairs
in the scope, the target loomed downrange.
My father stood, a perfect statue, holding
my arms straight. I tried to stand my ground.
His finger pressed my finger on the trigger.
— After DaVinci
It barbs into the dead
doug fir
at the end of the field.
Sunders soft
rot
long
as a child’s finger
pointing towards
the bird’s red crown
now flashing now
gone.
Not metaphor
but instrument,
more saw than
flute.
It curls inside my skull
as I sleep,
the old painter leaning
so close to my body—
absorbed in coarseness
the tongue’s
blue dusk
— that I can almost taste
the wine
on his breath.
A fist full of angry thistle that you’ve pulled
by a ditch along blacktop
cutting and carving through cornfields in the
dumb, dark name of progress near
Elkhart, Indiana. Whose name itself is elegy
for some four-legged beast, or maybe a day long
gone when beauty once grew from blood to
hang like a yoke so heavy round the neck of an
Indiana boy. His head now inked and
jarred by the size of this elk’s junked heart. And who
knows what killed that elk, if it wondered
lost and lame, limping through
miles of meadow until it could walk
no more. Finally nuzzling the shade
of an old-growth oak or elm to be
pecked and pulled by buzzards so this boy would no longer
question the girth of an elk’s stilled heart. Its quick
rhythm finished, as he reached to touch
some seed with roots through squalid rooms
that no longer walled racket and clatter. For today, they’d
up-sprung flowers. The umber of muscle and
vibrant white petals which shone in the vast
wide light of a sun winding round in a sky. Its
axis always steady—and shining, perhaps, in excess—as that boy ran
yelling of yarrow, how it grew so wild from a heart. Or to gather a
zinnia for seed that he might zip it tight in that thick rich soil.
You are my second husband. We parse this sentence. A second is short, a sixtieth of a minute. A second comes after the first. Second constitutes the number two in a sequence. I already broke my word once. Oh my dear, you are not secondary, lower, subordinate, subsidiary, lesser, inferior. I brought the children with me, most of the furniture in our new house. Second in command? No. I like seconding your motions. To formally support or endorse. Backup, encourage. More promising. Second base? Not far enough. Leap second. Second future. Second future tense, obsolete. I will have finished by tomorrow, we read, I shall have gone by then. A grammar to mark the future. Second language. Second nature, as if natural or instinctive. You like second self, n. a friend who agrees absolutely with one’s tastes and opinions, or for whose welfare one cares as much as for one’s own. After Latin alter idem. We linger over second helpings. Second breakfast. Second honeymoon. You say, it looks more French, the further we scroll. Even second mortgage sounds good now. The word begins to blur. Francis Bacon, 1597. It is a good precept generally in seconding another: yet to adde somewhat of ones owne. A grammar of prediction. We suppose. We second.
Which sounds, I admit, like tumors
and must, on some long scroll
of words, have shared a common
root, some thick and prickly thread
that cinched to bind them tight
like the lips of a sack’s wide mouth.
And most often, I think it’s burlap.
Heavy and bursting with Carolina Reds,
maybe dark Georgia Jets, dug from sandy
soil where they’ve grown and spread
unseen. Which is also what tumors do.
And perhaps why I dreamed last night
of my father home from the doctor.
We sat at an orange table by my weed-
wild backyard garden where I killed
my rows of potatoes with too much compost
and lime. But here was this feast of home-
grown tubers. Peruvian purple hash with dill
scrambled eggs. Roasted yams, pecans,
and almonds tossed in maple syrup. And with every
plate we filled, we ate till there was no more.
The hand was hungry,
could eat none of small
creek animals, could not
catch the slippery catfish.
The fiddler crabs knew it
human no more, scuttled
over the stinking veined
back. The hand would twist
to shake them loose, thrash
against boat ramp’s raked
cement like a pale maimed
fish, caught and beheaded
but somehow still breathing.
The hand does not recall
how it became the hand.
Shrimp boat or sawmill,
construction or highway,
some hard laborer’s luck,
no matter now, whatever
dark accident dismembered
it left it to steal away
unnoticed, the rot soon
hiding whichever poverty
it crawled from, black
or white skinned no more,
rough knuckled in this life
and the last. Now the hand
knows only how sawgrass
cuts sting, how to hide days
under the dock, how to drag
itself up the stairs night
after night searching out
tender meat, how hunger
survives even death.
When you draw the Atlantic over your red shoulders
like a comforter and submerge ten yards away,
I don’t know where I’ll see you next. I’ve checked
the sides of your neck for gills but grazed only stubble—
your lungs are strong as aquifers even after enough
Marlboros to buy the red bike dusting in our shed.
I pull in my knees, suspended in a cheerleader tuck jump
to hide snack legs from the sharks in my glossy books:
black-tip and nurse, ragged jaw sand and low-headed bull,
tigers, even, and whites from deep water cruising
sleepless for schools of dolphin and tuna, their teeth
winking on the pages I flipped in the museum shop
under the school-bus skeleton of megalodon hanging,
the one that breathed after I stared at the wheel
of black and white spirals on the second floor and I
can feel that thick-bone fish below me as you open
your eyes to the sting, to search the shape of my thighs
from a haze of silt. You stay covered for sixty breaths
while I watch the wind-hustled surface, waiting
for the taps of your hands like the brushes
of minnows rolled in current and now that ancient beast
clamps my waist, first jerks me down with a snort
of seawater and holds me there kicking and sightless, my ribs
beating out and in like pectoral fins the moment
before crunch and swallow and as I flutter with this panic
of prey, you lift me whole, curled as a hermit shell
plucked from bed and writhing as though wakened
from a sleep fast and dark as primordial undertow.
Without a calendar,
I will know I’m 86
when stickiness of
my left lung matches
density of cicada air.
My right lung will
fuddle some hair
salon with a meat
market—the one
buzzing with fruit
flies forging their
way as house flies
—and I will fall
for the trap, nurse
larvae in my living
room and reap eggs
for food. It’s what
my doctor suggests.
I won’t need a
calendar because
cacophony from
construction will
remind me to call
my grandchildren
—and remind me
again they do not
pick up ’til August,
so I will rise from
my wheelchair and
watch cranes build
87-story skyscrapers,
fourth floors skipped.
This city will ban
cicadas and both
types of flies, coat
meat markets in
cigarette smoke
until I do not
recognize the hair
salon. This will be
a place people call
dandelions weeds:
yellow buds atop
emerald lawns.
I will resist and eat
dandelions with
the eggs, boil stem-
leaf-petal, drink
the soup. Eat 88
dandelions to fuel
a plane across the
Pacific, gaze at gold
gardens from skies
until I cannot see
the pistils 7337
miles away. Grab
a phone to hear
dandelions over
calls, but they will
not sound the same
saran-wrapped and
stale. Instead, I’ll
look forward to the
two feet and four
wheels pushed by
a family visiting
on my birthday.
December settles like skin over the trees’
skeleton: bones bowed under a broken
sky: my mother is the body of winter—
her mind near the frozen falls
in Ithaca, 1979. Father’s farmed hands
at her throat, over her mouth. How he tried to beat
her mind back into her body. Like a lost child
who somehow finds her way home. But,
there is no returning from this country
of white gowns, crushed pills. There is a woman
who wears the face of someone I once knew
as my mother— but she lives in the silence
of snow. And now, someone calls me mother.
Small hands I hold each night,
as the dark passes through me. Am I not
the walls for my mother’s silhouette?
Every day my name is a ration
on the tongue. Every day
winter presses itself against my window
panes. Every day, wraps its hands around
my throat and threatens to call me home.
you were not the only child
i didn’t have but the only one
i named
not Near Miss or Scare
but a good and proper name
a name i can talk to sometimes
reach for like whisky
guilty comfort that you aren’t here
to answer or mewl for affection
(which i manage even for living
daughters only in beats)
to you i ramble and pray
not-son
in whose perfection
i trust always
you who surely knows
which of my apologies
to believe
you who never came
and so
can never leave
An owl with a broken beak,
and a bone-mourned silence. It
would have been a mistake
to know the names
of the turbulence here – the certitude
with which a soldier fires
towards a crowd, the inevitability
with which a glass bird
is installed
in the middle of the city square,
the raindrops spilling
from its wingspan
illuminating the darkest corners
of a yet unborn child’s mouth –
not to be mistaken as instances of temporary acquittal.
A dawn: flavored
with burnt coal smell
of the roadside clay-oven,
the tealeaves brewing in milk.
The tang of an almost-kitchen.
A famine always smells
like a memory : the recollection
of the fragrance of a pot
of boiling rice. White,
as autumn clouds. How
the odor of a body
stuck in a chair
can flatten a meter’s edges,
how the irrelevance
of a poem can reek.
A thousand fragments and more,
and we both know: there
is nothing that will shackle
my index finger to yours.
A broken genealogy between
us – sans blood-maps,
sans marriages. A rickshaw-puller
crushed to pulp by a squeaky new
car, and the young woman
driving the vehicle, fiddles
with her phone. In another
instance, she will write
in rhymes
the private history
of drapery, as touch –
knowing,
her father’s hands had tied
the stone-pelter
in front of a military-jeep.
the mortician asked if we wanted
to make sure the body was her
the paiján of northern, coastal peru
believed that cutting a person in half
neck-to-navel was the final act a tribe
owed the recently dead; butterflied,
the body split open in the middle of town:
one kidney plumper than the other,
left leg longer than right
inside the slight wicker basket
she might’ve wanted to decompose in
if she knew biodegradable caskets
existed: her flesh would fall from bone
the paiján believed the dead’s
disproportion proved body
ready to enter soil
over the next fifty years & nothing
would stop her body’s release
when sun swung
down as low as sky
to keep the grass from burning,
the people that loved
the dead buried the bodies
to become soil & live as land
Leave the machete in the manchineel.
break the ox’s neck. it’s approaching.
body of water turned thunder
farmland twisted into graves
our parents are not returning
the horse’s corpse was found.
we write upon a moth’s wing
after the manchineel collapses
leaving its marks through all
and the sap bleeds like rivers
flooding into schools, shops,
the gardens, the churchyards:
you can’t stand under the air
where your memories stood
you can’t stand in that body
and wear it only during rain
what do you know of death
if you’ve never tasted iron
bars twisted into your soil
while your limbs are gone
reaping the harvests of a skull
trying to find our lost parents
the horse’s corpse has poison
the machete was unsharpened
and abuela warned us, told us
not to go anywhere near them
never look during a hurricane
because water will betray you.
do you believe that it owes us?
written upon what constitution?
who told you to leave with me?
does this storm taste like time?
my throat is filling with shards
that are migrating to my lips:
what language will save me?
what time is it in Purgatory?
our streets are now orphans
we’re the parents of silence
I wear a necklace of bones
and pray to the fallen trees
may our loved parents rest
if they do not return today
may all our memories rest
together within this storm
—bring me the machete.
I regret having come outside.
nothing was waiting for us.
The horse is no longer alone.
you’re formless, curled but limb-bound
in fluid and minerals, enzymes and code
as we place our hands on your crib
and ache to feel your toes.
We toast to your deliverance
from persecution and evil,
but then you’ll be pink and pale
– born to the right stable.
Good for you, good for us,
we’ll dream and count the blessings
one by one, as many as the beats
in your heart to come.
I stare at the monitor, grey shapes
the weight of a coconut. I watch Zeus,
sucking her thumb in the muffled warm;
suspended at this other-me you induce.
because a bird chirrups & I wonder if animals know / what they cry
for or if they simply have noises assigned to button discomforts //
instead I like to know / what I need & say something else // button: I love
you / output: leave me // you can’t see my moods’ translations / the way
you see nothing in the air & still a bird grasps it better than gravity //
mania gardens my skin into taste buds / I cup your face & sense
pepper // I keep so many of you at once because when I’m flying I have
such a little mouthhole & all this need for food // with the desperation
of a froglet drying its new lungs / I kissed every beast in the pond //
I don’t like to be a textbook case / but my right wing flaps fuck & my left
die // mania: every rock might be a geode // someone leaves me:
I break myself open looking for crystals / dry my organs in the sun //
I have so many insides study as I will / if I tried to list them
I’d forget a few / though there they all are fissuring in the heat //
depression: birds sing precisely because they are unfulfilled / & I could not
stop waking up in anyone else’s nest & starting the day / with a cry //
once I tried to find a local oak strung with animal bones / a broken
electrical line on the path hummed & misted / this watery dread ran me
back // I ran through the rain to your bed / for the human body is an electrical
desire strung with bones / I laid my head on your insides / & heard them hiss //
once I refused to admit the sky was blue / sometimes it’s black or
ripens itself like an orchid // really the earth’s crust is a dish / barely holding
these colors where they can’t fall & crush us // or I turned my being into
a void / barely freckled with light // it’s dark enough now to rest awhile