Poetry

Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist

11 November 2018
Categories: Poetry

                  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.

Second

11 November 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.

A Few More Thoughts on Tubers

11 November 2018
Categories: Poetry

                  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.

Green Hand

11 November 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.

My Father the Shark

11 November 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.

Birthdays

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.

When Winter

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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 who never came

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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

The Secret History of Versification

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.

burial: taftótita

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

identity, sameness from taútós,
he, she, that + -ótita, -ity, -ness

                                                                                                                                                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

La Madrugada

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.

Cosset

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.

I Suppose This Bout of Mania Is Over

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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

Self-Elegy as Abel’s Brother

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.

First Brazil Nut After Several Years Of Avoiding Them Because Of Their High Levels Of Radiation

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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

9 April 2018
1 Comment
Categories: Poetry

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

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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

9 April 2018
Categories: Poetry

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.