collect them, pin their glossy backs
to the board like the rows of stolen
beauties, dead, displayed at Isla Negra,
where the waves broke over us
and I still loved the country, wanted
to suck the bones of the buried.
Now, I’m outside a normal house
while friends cook and please
and pour secrets into each other.
A crow pierces the sky, ominous,
clanging like an alarm, but there
is no ocean here, just tap water
rising in the sink, a sadness clean
of history only because it’s new,
a few weeks old, our national wound.
I don’t know how to hold this truth,
so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down
in case, later, no one believes me.
FULL GALLOP
The night after, I dream I chop
all the penises off, the ones that
keep coming through the walls.
Tied in sweat-wet sheets, I wake
aching, how I’ve longed for touch
for so much of my bodied time.
In the shower later, I notice new
layers I’ve grown, softness love tosses
you after years of streetlights alone.
I will never harm you, your brilliant
skin I rub against in the night,
still, part of me is haunted—
a shadow baying inside me
who wants to snap her hind leg
back, buck the rider, follow
that fugitive call into oblivion.
DREAM OF THE MEN
At the beach that was so gray it seemed stone—
gray water, gray sky, gray blanket, and the wind
some sort of gray perpetual motion machine—
we gathered like a blustery coven on the blanket
from Mexico woven with white and gray threads
into a pattern of owls and great seabirds. Then,
they came: the men. Blankets full of them, talking,
talking, talking, talking, and our mouths were sewn
shut with patient smiles while they talked about
the country where they were from; their hands
like slick seaweed were everywhere, unwelcome,
multicellular, touching us.
A NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps
the truth is every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?
CARGO
I wish I could write to you from underwater,
the warm bath covering my ears—
one of which has three marks in the exact
shape of a triangle, my own atmosphere’s asterism.
Last night, the fire engine sirens were so loud
they drowned out even the constant bluster
of the inbound freight trains. Did I tell you,
the R. J. Corman Railroad runs 500 feet from us?
Before everything shifted and I aged into this body,
my grandparents lived above San Timoteo Canyon
where the Southern Pacific Railroad roared each scorching
California summer day. I’d watch for the trains,
howling as they came.
Manuel is in Chicago today, and we’ve both admitted
that we’re traveling with our passports now.
Reports of ICE raids and both of our bloods
are requiring new medication.
I wish we could go back to the windy dock,
drinking pink wine and talking smack.
Now, it’s gray and pitchfork.
The supermarket here is full of grass seed like spring
might actually come, but I don’t know. And you?
I heard from a friend that you’re still working on saving
words. All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe
being kinder to others, to myself.
Just this morning, I saw seven cardinals brash and bold
as sin in a leafless tree. I let them be for a long while before
I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive too.
Am I braver than those birds?
Do you ever wonder what the trains carry? Aluminum ingots,
plastic, brick, corn syrup, limestone, fury, alcohol, joy.
All the world is moving, even sand from one shore to another
is being shuttled. I live my life half afraid, and half shouting
at the trains when they thunder by. This letter to you is both.
THE CONTRACT SAYS: WE’D LIKE THE CONVERSATION TO BE BILINGUAL
When you come, bring your brownness
so we can be sure to please
the funders. Will you check this
box; we’re applying for a grant.
Do you have any poems that speak
to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.
Would you like to come to dinner
with the patrons and sip Patrón?
Will you tell us the stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?
Don’t read us the one where you
are just like us. Born to a green house,
garden, don’t tell us how you picked
tomatoes and ate them in the dirt
watching vultures pick apart another
bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one
about your father stealing hubcaps
after a colleague said that’s what his
kind did. Tell us how he came
to the meeting wearing a poncho
and tried to sell the man his hubcaps
back. Don’t mention your father
was a teacher, spoke English, loved
making beer, loved baseball, tell us
again about the poncho, the hubcaps,
how he stole them, how he did the thing
he was trying to prove he didn’t do.
IT’S HARDER
the slight gestur
e over the coffee table, a raised
eyebrow at the passing minuscule skirt, a wick
snuffed out at the evening’s end, a sympathetic
nod, a black garbage can rolled out so slowly
he hovers there, outside, alone, a little longer,
the child’s thieving fingers, the face that’s serene
as cornfields, the mouth screwed into a plum,
the way I can’t remember which blue lake
has the whole train underneath its surface,
so now, every blue lake has a whole train
underneath its surface.
3
AGAINST BELONGING
It’s been six years since we moved here, green
of the tall grasses outstretched like fingers waving.
I remember the first drive in; the American beech,
sassafras, chestnut oak, yellow birch were just
plain trees back then. I didn’t know we’d stay long.
I missed the Sonoma coast line, the winding
roads that opened onto places called Goat Rock,
Furlong Gulch, Salmon Creek. Once, when I was
young, we camped out at Russian Gulch and learned
the names of all the grasses, the tide pool animals,
the creatures of the redwoods, properly identifying
seemed more important than science, more like
creation. With each new name, the world expanded.
I give names to everything now because it makes
me feel useful. Currently, three snakes surround our
house. One in front, one near the fire pit, and one
near the raised beds of beets and carrots. Harmless
Eastern garter snakes, small, but ever expanding.
I check on them each day, watch their round eyes
blink in the sun that fuels them. I’ve named them
so no one is tempted to kill them (a way of offering
reprieve, tenderness). But sometimes I feel them
moving around inside me, the three snakes hissing—
what cannot be tamed, what shakes off citizenship,
what draws her own signature with her body
in whatever dirt she wants.
INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy–colored blossoms to the slate
sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist, I’ll take it all.
WOULD YOU RATHER
Remember that car ride to Sea-Tac, how your sister’s kids
played a frenzied game of Would You Rather, where each choice
ticktocked between superpowers or towering piles of a food
too often denied, Would You Rather
have fiery lasers that shoot out of your eyes,
or eat sundaes with whip cream for every meal?
We dealt it out quick,
without stopping to check ourselves for the truth.
We played so hard that I got good at the questions, learned
there had to be an equality
to each weighted ask. Now I’m an expert at comparing things
that give the illusion they equal each other.
You said our Plan B was just to live our lives:
more time, more sleep, travel—
and still I’m making a list of all the places
I found out I wasn’t carrying a child.
At the outdoor market in San Telmo, Isla Negra’s wide iris of sea,
the Muhammad Ali museum, but always
the last time tops the list, in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge,
looking over toward Alcatraz, a place they should burn and redeliver
to the gulls and cormorants, common daisies and seagrass.
Down below the girder that’s still not screened against jumpers,
so that it seems almost like a dare, an invitation,
we watched a seal make a sinuous shimmy in the bay.
Would you rather? Would I rather?
The game is endless and without a winner.
Do you remember how the seal was so far under
the deafening sound of traffic, the whir of wind mixed
with car horns and gasoline, such a small
speck of black movement alone in the churning waves
between rock and shore?
Didn’t she seem happy?
MAYBE I’LL BE ANOTHER KIND OF MOTHER
Snow today, a layer outlining the maple like a halo,
or rather, a fungus. So many sharp edges in the month.
I’m thinking I’ll never sit down at the table
at the restaurant, you know that one, by the window?
Women gathered in paisley scarves with rusty iced tea,
talking about their kids, their little time-suckers,
how their mouths want so much, a gesture of exhaustion,
a roll of the eyes, But I wouldn’t have it any other way,
their bags full of crayons and nut-free snacks, the light
coming in the window, a small tear of joy melting like ice.
No, I’ll be elsewhere, having spent all day writing words
and then at the movies, where my man bought me a drink,
because our bodies are our own, and what will it be?
A blockbuster? A man somewhere saving the world, alone,
with only the thought of his family to get him through.
The film will be forgettable, a thin star in a blurred sea of stars,
I’ll come home and rub my whole face against my dog’s
belly; she’ll be warm and want to sleep some more.
I’ll stare at the tree and the ice will have melted, so
it’s only the original tree again, green branches giving way
to other green branches, everything coming back to life.
CARRYING
The sky’s white with November’s teeth,
and the air is ash and woodsmoke.
A flush of color from the dying tree,
a cargo train speeding through, and there,
that’s me, standing in the wintering
grass watching the dog suffer the cold
leaves. I’m not large from this distance,
just a fence post, a hedge of holly.
Wider still, beyond the rumble of overpass,
mares look for what’s left of green
in the pasture, a few weanlings kick
out, and theirs is the same sky, white
like a calm flag of surrender pulled taut.
A few farms over, there’s our mare,
her belly barrel-round with foal, or idea
of foal. It’s Kentucky, late fall, and any
mare worth her salt is carrying the next
potential stakes winner. Ours, her coat
thicker with the season’s muck, leans against
the black fence and this image is heavy
within me. How my own body, empty,
clean of secrets, knows how to carry her,
knows we were all meant for something.
WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE
was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of
liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two