(unfinished)
below below a work in trust
death still looks like it hurts some
sometimes a rise rising a rise
because that's too what the sun does
wrong about much including form
including metaphor stardust
stuff mundane af devotion
balm or no accumulates eyes
grows tentacles scales pearls tendrils
ongo ongoes in stillness squirm
IT GIRL
Do we have to get dressed today
Can we wrap rice noodles around words
around chopsticks until we have the whole bowl in a nest
We did not ask for Belle and Sebastian
Why are you stopping we didn’t say stop reading
We don’t want to go anywhere
A purple blanket please
ice purple not happy purple
None of that goo goo slipping off tracks
Get me some more water
How come you never found us
How did you knew we forgot to hide
We always tell the truth
every truth
She’s coming for you she can’t run fast
They are all spilling except for her
Don’t open the letter
Crack the egg, and there is nothing in it
to live in the world and leave only a name
to be pluperfect, doing the best you can
only gossip or not even, just gossip about gossip
overheard there might be overhearing
the rumors are true so please tell me the rumors
what happened will probably happen
the O could be a spiral seen from overhead
or a cone that meets you on your eyelash
everything was once what it could be
cast in the role of dice as they roll
bringing the beginning of the beginning
do you remember?
roll credits, tides, jellies and drums
the blinding noise, the deafening sight
I thought the kaleidoscope
and the microscope were yours
but now I think they’re mine
singular but multipurpose
irrelevant elephants
unnecessary magnets
illegible stars
All Way Street
“Spirits hover (vignette style) over my right shoulder. Coldness in that shoulder.” Thus, this is a rose. Jaunita, Ivel, or the ones before, proud rose, sad rose, ecstatic rose, who was the first. A behemoth dandelion. Get outta here to mean come closer. I was thinking actually of Sister Rosetta Tharpe–that footage of her playing at the train station in England. The force of her, her elegant lady coat and her electric guitar. Her right shoulder must’ve been cold too. I will get to the vignette later. It begins: The tax was a tax on your time but not on your sovereignty. Give to Caesar what Caesar is due but take more time to listen to air? In nothing, so much. All that it holds and all that it has seen. The days were accumulating in their rhymes. Rumor had it you were already writing. At some point today I should get paid. The unpaid hours accumulate like air upon air. Spirit upon spirit. Didn’t it rain.
Terror Sleep
I image being filthy in the deceit of debt, sometimes I too want to die but there’s a daughter who will awaken & say dad & if that space goes blank then the emptiness fills in & the terror starts to taunt a torture worse than my sadness
a finite torture worse than my depression I imagine myself at a lake pulling jagged rocks from tattered denim pockets & although they won’t skip I wrist the motion, the aggressive thrust + belief in magic—a half-ass attempt
the aggressive thrust + belief in magic—a half-ass attempt to meet time in the eye un-idle hands until another day is done & daughter draws the shape of a tired sun so that means I must arise again & attend to the difficult work of staying alive
I can, I cannot
Abide in a contact zone, we all do, are. I can. I cannot. What I take
to be mine makes me. Lost objects packed. Grow alone, I grew
with family, and where did your family grow, your parents and their
parents? The way you eat a hot dog without mustard. The mostly happy
gravity of immediate kinship and its calamities: my children are not yet
a category of Spanish-speaker but will be. You’re from D.C.; you went
to one of those bilingual schools. America is just another place, and I
cannot despair, the dear pure nothing is pure bullshit. The modernist obsession
with alienation and othering. I mean I spent years and hours in Chinese class
and in China learning Mandarin but have never translated anything except
the news. The origins of my feelings are opaque to me, but fundamentally
unmysterious. Phaethon was fundamentally transparent. The splendid pedigrees
of seven generations of dubious documentation. Heaven is a cafe, anywhere.
The deafening sound of traffic is not an object lesson, but understanding
seventy percent of anything is. If othering is a form of extension
(Sarah Ahmed), that extends reach through incorporation, long standing
acquisitive feelings. Oh shit this is empire, again. I have been it’s
mediocre agent since I was a babe, tending towards the exotic but
unable to be something other. I cannot. I am not the sunburned American
in the Ecuadorian jungle, the habit of being at home, the habit of
high-impact camping. The new hybrid as the new idealized mix of the pure.
Jesus fucking Christ I am saying that I am white but my whiteness tends
towards I don’t know. Fat bureaucrats with crummy posts far from the capital.
Disenfranchised soldiers. My great great grandfather didn’t want to
work on the railroad and didn’t want to work on the farm but mostly worked
on the railroad and drank. When does appropriation become the new
capitalist hybrid? This is a question I cannot I cannot get over. Am I
an ally or am I a thief. I am both, the relief of being conflated with something
interesting the way confession never is. You know what I’d confess.
The Purpose of A System is What it Does {14/15} (on 19)
crabs & crabs & crabs & more crabs momentum loves a shell, a pinch a future into which well wait in the suction hush in amongst the muck skitter slip slink patience effuse keeps becoming shore scads waft of life undoing life which undoes until teem seems like spate seems like rush seems like gasp repulsed a place for it abid against againstness still where placid has time to brim granite womb don’t flinch in her face hold & hold abate aversion’s flex let in goog clutch let breathe what breathes in each crevice
Penultimatum
Can you speak louder than you think?
The length of your ear is exactly
The same as the length of your nose
Or a line drawn between the dots of your eyes
I can only look at one part of your face at once
I can look you in the eyes or the mouth
It’s up to you
Replacing worship with wonder everywhere
So then warship, wander?
I feel my way towards an order
I am what my body can do
Rapturous sunbeam interruption
Mauled by quick brown fox
The peace ship sails at dawn
Fear of God
It never occurs to me to address god,
whoever she is. It occurs to me that
that reads like a bumper sticker joke.
It’s true I must ignore or hide from
god because when I was a small girl
he was in every classroom, full of
spite and smite, palms full of nails.
Father son and little bone-carved
replicas of suffering floating over
the threshold. Was I left with a
paucity in the shape of god.
Have I been running and hiding
from god and other angry men
my whole life. I’m trying to imagine
a god I could talk to: jocular, gentle,
rocking a chair on a porch at sundown.
Long white hair and a nightgown.
But instead I see myself ducking down
a stairwell to a garden apartment
during a storm, and the lightning and
thunder is god, not a stranger opening
the door, as I did once for a boy named
Mohammed when we lived on the other
side of town. The rain and wind were
punishing. A knock came at the door.
We’d read the Bible. We knew what to do.
But as a woman alone, I never would
have answered; such is the fear of god.
POSITIVE MINDSET
I never want to interrupt people reading
I’d rather be hired and help myself than ask her to look up from her book
the title of which I was trying to guess based on thickness
To stand and read is to say I am paid to do this
It doesn’t take much to move with confidence
Why did all but one blackbird fly away
Everything changed and was the same at my father’s funeral
I enjoy working everywhere
so I could organize supplies and talk to people
In the downtime I would read books as I always read books
with a pen and notes for poems nearby
with urgent adventure
connective collection
Maybe I could pass out basketballs and mock hunky teenagers while reading
Everything is about class
Class money class power
I want to hug the boss with obelisk disappointment
We don’t have to stop just because it’s time to go
Terror Sleep
& because I could not sleep I forced myself to shut eye & imagine a butterfly but the monarch remained mystery & instead some winged thing smearing gray-white came fluttering & I thought fuck me is that a moth well might as well be Woolf-noise siphon to signal one zombie spirit blaring on speakers
Woolf-static tap to signal zombie spirits deafening sleep slipped out window
while I am left
in mystery of black surrounded by deeper black a car passing drags the ear & then
falling silence
the terror of a singular heartbeat, how many do I have left thump thump goes
something night
thump thump went something seconds ago— an anticipation of another fracture, men desperate to kill each other & war is ever near rocks in pockets stone piercing hrt I did not want die not for you & your senseless horror I imagine burning all my credit cards getting dirty in the deceit of debt
The woulds
A more permanent now is on temporary hiatus
When it returns you may have lost patience
Waiting for a word that rhymes with the unnameable
Even then it refuses to do what it means
You never expected such a conversationalist
To join the conversation
You thought the rhythms would announce themselves
Like a fanfare of gibbons
The fires you lit were more for light than warmth
But these were the dark blue hot ones
Not the bright red tall ones
Blazing in the braziers
That was what they were made of
And if you held out your hands to their foreheads
And peeled the fingernails back
Saying “get along or be late to the world”
You’d see there were no bodies under the armory blankets
And the damp trays from the refectory dishwashers
You’ve given yourself away always with a squeak of a door
That you would break if you tried to repair it
So you carry the story like a bag of air
Not enough, the magicians announce
We can do better even if it’s already good enough
Do you believe them? Does it matter if you do?
Sonnet after the Storm
A big branch with white blossoms broke
and fell to the ground. I snapped off a piece,
came home and set it in a small glass globe.
I wandered away from my notebook to send
a teddy bear holding a balloon to the hospital.
The bookmark, I saw, was a receipt from the
record cabinet I bought on the way out of town.
The sky sent us to the basement and the sirens
kept us there. The pages of the magazine were
wrinkly and damp from sitting in the mailbox.
We rushed through the room to the other side.
The return to normal life? Then I see something
on the internet and remember. Wasted summers!
Filling boxes, not wandering the streets at sunset.
In Cahoots at the Crossroads
Who wants love?
Does the state wants love?
Does Diet Coke? Does the state “wants love” speak
in triangles . . . ellipses? Lemon trees? Tentacles?
Does it have a shield? Does “wants love” speak
freely? In tongues? Does it have fathomless eyes? Its own self-
fulfilling alphabet? Do all of the letters reflect
themselves? Like capital B? Like emu feathers double-
plumed? What does that sound like? Should all languages
sound? B describes a balloon a holiday a house a womb
a dwelling making room for primal feelings
the bulb at the hinge of my jaw taut with poison.
D like doom or dare. J an arm extended with open hand
to take, to give. After “That was
‘Who Wants Love?’” the DJ said
“Maybe you wants love” then
“Nothing can be done”
Draft Strategic Plan
Most immediate tasks have no recompense. This social media schedule,
for example, as if I walk my roof at dawn, leaning onto the parapets,
leaning into sunrise. Kickoff, am, pm and post-event posts. I lack the emprise
for a complete schedule. So, the half-made schedule. The draft poem was this:
I want to buy so much stuff, and I want to buy it on credit then never pay it back.
I wanted to name Desmond Beckett before he was born, imagined building
a small dovecote in the backyard, but instead dug garden beds and built low,
slightly tilting brick divides. I am agnostic about schedules but faithful to strategy:
I made this special schedule for you, without strategy. Gallant, I send it early,
knowing it will remain unreviewed, imagine printing it on pearl-colored paper, revel
in the bureaucratic beauty of a schedule with no design except itself, the beauty
of charts and graphs and slides, of timetables. The parapets prevent accidentally
falling into the sunrise, but I’d prefer that to this damnable marketing brief.
On behalf of the team I note that although this is a roundtable discussion
there will be no roundtables in the room and no repercussions for their lack.
I go to a shared workspace, sometimes, with a new, difficult-to-open window.
Imagine the courtyard is a canal and below the window a basic boat que c’est
bateau. But it’s enough to float away from work and capitalism and drift on
a lazy wave to somewhere reasonable, where everyone understands that being
overwhelmed and rageful is the only feasible response to knowing how much
our taxes go to war and the contractors of war. Somehow I’m a poet paying
taxes and making social media schedules, interviewing for other jobs via
text messages with robots. There are no detractors of poetry, just disparaging
non-listeners or former and secret poets. I would buy so many different serums,
so many button-down shirts in various bright prints like my dad used to wear. Batik
shirts. Guayaberas. Shirts with ornate prints like 18th-century British wallpaper,
and then I would buy out of print art books and ugly crocs, cut my hair every four
months instead of once a year. Die it pink-magenta ombre. Amazon orders as
an archive of distraction from everything, everything, from knowing that children
might sleep through a bomb blast then wake up in dust, or never wake, that I
make social media schedules while my country sends bombs everywhere,
everywhere, while empire carries on but somehow, something bursts through,
though prior power remains and I feel dumb saying things like “burn the castle,”
because what is a castle? This campaign has no strategy except to please
my supervisor, I promise. Once again, I abstain from strategy, from belaboring the point.
Cold Food Festival/寒食
Translation of a poem by Yen Ai-lin.
*
Cold Food Festival
*
WW I WW II
guns atomic bombs
poverty desolation
pain sorrow
global summits
armament talks
*
Laid out on the diningroom table
(A cloud of buzzing
flies hover nearby.)
*
Wine poured
Splatters on a diner’s snow-white scarf,
Suddenly it’s……
blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood..
blood blood blood . blood blood blood. blood
blood blood blood.
blood blood blood blood blood . blood
blood blood . blood blood
. blood blood
blood blood blood . blood
blood blood blood
. blood blood blood
. blood
blood . blood
. blood
a flood…………..
*
**
*
寒食
戰爭I 戰爭II
槍砲 原子彈
貧窮 蕭條
傷痛 悲涼
高峰會議
限武談判
*
餐桌上的羅列
（一群蒼蠅的翅膀
響在不遠處。）
*
倒了的酒
濺到用餐者雪白的圍巾上，
居然是……
血血血血血血 血血血‧‧
血血血‧血 血血‧血
血血 血‧
血 血血血血‧ 血
血 血‧ 血 血
‧血 血
血 血 血‧ 血
血 血 血
‧ 血血 血
‧ 血
血‧ 血
‧ 血
的氾濫……………
Elegy at the Cinema for Deaths Real & Imagined
Horror I am
falling for it
like I always fall
for it this time
of year when pumpkins
are carved fangs
& bat sonar set
to feast brisk
breeze while
sun slips air
slowly turns color
of smoke threading
through last blue
& it calls to me
as it has called
to you twisted
desire to watch
madmen running
through woods
with revving chainsaw
or its Friday so let’s
let Jason play here’s
a hockey mask
& blunt wood seduce me
with urban hymns written
for final girl while
pretty skulls makeup
morning face button
up expensive shirts pull
up pressed trousers
white knuckles pulling tight
an argyle tie silent sound
obnoxious accumulation
offshore privilege oxides
belabored crystal chandeliers
stiff backs robotic legs move
in rhythm to dance
track loose light while
it filters through
abandon house climb
a hill to greet
haunting hereafter noose in
an antique amulet fading bronze
barn in a forgotten
town hunt moves
through too-tall corn
“He Who Walks
Behind the Rows”
thrash guitars mugging
sky cult kiddos
with bloodied choppers
flower crowns wilting
in hair slacker
slashers file into streets
top-secret hackers reeking
in airtight doom rooms
80s malls forever
our screens the screams
of teens every parents’
fear & perverse dream
ah there’s familiar Freddy
newly manicured
so settle in this is going
to be classic
male violence
& she sits with witching
eyes warming
waters & bears
with nowhere to
go radioactive ribs
alien feelings under
ominous moon cliché
full shadows of
fools ignore the
feeling of fear
tremble if you
must banal waking
hours horror almost
invisible comes to
play—
The Purpose of A System is What it Does {14} (on 17)
(unfinished)
crabs & crabs & crabs & more crabs
momentum loves a shell, a pinch
a future into which well wait
in the suction hush in amongst
a muck skitter skip slink patience
Pigeon
The mist arrives, fogs the windshield, crashes the car.
All the long necks of geese measure the same height.
I want to meditate on one thing — the mist, the snow, the will
to change, but bad people call my friends groomers
for existing in their bodies, I who learned to people-please
from men who learned what to do about pretty girls
from great literature. I listen all night to a bleeding highway.
Tires splash around the killed mist, indifference like wind
snagged in an engine. If I could grasp one thing, a pigeon
comes to me. The lilac chest, a pearl beat within, the red eyes
of a reformed demon. Once, I came across a hawk in the snow
kneading its talons into wet earth. It flew as I neared and out
popped a pigeon from beneath, dizzy with life, dizzy with death.
It walked once, twice, then was earth again, purple blooded snow.
the vibe was
feeding two dollars
into the jukebox &
accidentally playing
all of Mingus
while the poet-
on-poet pool
game clicks &
stabs nearby
after tornado
sirens, sheets
of rain & a four-
hour power
outage
the tulips
blown out
like umbrellas
