Poetry

There is no future.
It’s that simple. New Orleans
humps its sodden past

Discover me, find me,
as my woven ends
unravel in your hands,

Her portable garden escapes the terry gym towel.
Unweeded gladiola shoulders.
Arms with petal trails.

One can buy someone’s bairn,
collect a kidney or chew a cherry.

At nightfall, they melt into a sea of discontent, glide like a procession of fireflies answering the same call.

Why now?
These byways inevitably
find one un-branching road below

Inside the tent with my mother
the women are wailing:

I stole a watermelon from your kitchen. I must have been about 18.
I’m thinking of a black-eyed angel.

One time when my mother was dying
slowly but surely in the nursing home
death creeping like bindweed over a field

I lose my place in the sound
A splendid, fleeting trace in the sound

A dog whose bark mimics a beeper implies nothing
to another dog whose voice moves like a fax machine.

Your sneakered feet shade the limp-petalled lilies, ferns burned brown in their pots. Crouched on the glass roof, you hug your knees, hiding from Father, who enters like an angry god to grant water from a cracked green can. Mottled pansies droop in a row, purple as your mother’s eye, bright as the knife you

i. A ball of wire supplants a body Body of tangled knots of wire The shirt ripped open to show The street inside. The dog that ran those streets Still runs above the salt caverns, Past cupolas and porches, rotundas— And somewhere a river. And somewhere a train, a track, And somewhere tears.  Numbness. Custer’s

They call it kite fever, kite madness, gangs of kite looting children

hoarding bright acid kites, darting through rows of kite kiosks,

My mother(land) wants
to abort me
after I have
learned to walk.

after Solange Knowles   i am steeped in hunger & you are a dinner of bones. above us the moon could get full like a plate, but certain ephemera such as the Galileo telescope has been put away & so, how to name what we feel, is lost on us. epoch of Vulcans. the neighbor’s

Everything, as always, is justified—
All the roads you’ve traveled and even the futile ones,

Translated by Michael M. Naydan   You always approached this with suspicion Mary But here the udder of his heart flows with the milk of pain And you  sitting beside him there all night in the wind and rain feel how your skin becomes burned with the rust of doubt You carefully look at the

Of all the things it could be how come
The entry code to the building I live in the green door at No. 37

One day as I awoke I asked myself
Is this the future

Nothing happening in the man’s head happens
to feel as good as lemon squares taste before
breakfast but after coffee, when the moon,

I knew a cabby whose honest-to-God
Name was Finally, the first word
His mother uttered when he came out

  Like any foreigner, he thinks first of the song, the pudgy rodeo clown, lewd confetti vomited on the mall roof. The Apgujeong store fronts flash diamond teeth, neon kaleidoscope. The Supreme Leader of North Korea is a ferris wheel, drunk with light and rage. What they have let happen. The Supreme Leader buys a

My body is an entire ____________________ wrangled into a jar.
[body of water]

I. In the Grocery Store

We weave the shopping cart down the aisle,

A choking terror detonates the psych ward:
drug-blank faces of fellow patients who mind
their minds, who converse with shadows, won’t eat

Since the Bible never says Adam & Eve ate an apple,
why must we be so specific? I would enjoy a love scene

No thing erases. Myth’s wind cannot blot
out the name in alabaster. Atlantis lives

my forehead. I lean against it, look at the snow
that would not hold me, its agreements
more lax, more wink and nudge.

A bitch senses under her padded
paws, the earth
as it fattens

Inside my catfish body you will find
two additional fish—blue & washed
in wet light through the translucent

With each handful you dead
breathe in, nourished by dirt
by these leaves half stone

In the house of February,
where we hid from the claws of Carnival

La noche es viento solitario y estrellas calladas.
Un perro ladra.

On the Plaza de la Independencia – Bronwyn
warm air has filled our lungs

to be selected among the chosen
that permeated with the odor of hissing sheep

the aggressive man
with the looks of an uncertain skinhead, asked

You’re right, you’re right,
the fertilizer’s good—

Call it sloth; call it sleaze;
call it bummery if you please;
I’ll call it patience;

The music maker is heavy. The music maker is so heavy and you have to carry it.
You have to keep it strapped to yourself forever.

After the storm, in an old hotel, I opened
the closet door only to find it was not a closet,

From the breadbasket passed for years
around your table, your wife asked us each

Run away, or Stolen, one very likely new Virginia-born, imported from Gambia, Mundingo or Ibo country,

The whole neighbourhood aghast—to find the tour

bus of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys

There is a hand at the end of the knife, a small hand. It is my hand.

According to these bones, they say, this
was all water.

It starts out dream-like, setting up the card tables
as the sun burns the sidewalks dry, as summer comes

He was really her favorite
student, dark and just
back from the army with…

Alexander VI kept hemp fires burning
to remind himself that everything is ephemeral

My gym, all gussied up
with streamers, balloons

Huge and unembarrassed, my friendfloated like a Buddha in the small pool.I drank iced tea, gradedchlorine-splashed paperson The Mayor of Casterbridge. When she had her babyon a bed covered with a shower curtain,I did what I was told, sealedthe placenta in a plastic bag,stashed it in the freezer. Life was breathless in its daringor boring

A charcoal shadow accompanies my husband down the stairs.
He is to steady the ladder so I can change the bulb that’s set

Shuffling and cutting the deck, he fumbles,his fingers laggards, each follow-througha synaptic aberration, his hit you? morelike hoodoo, his I raise like whoosh,his call like auk, consonants not beingnegotiable, vowels as soft as snowflakes.Despite the drool worming its waydown the right side of his chinand the upper lip tugging his mouth upto a crooked smile,

1972–2012 Irony the enemy unto death of truth,history his unflinching gaze, the lyricalfrontal assault his arsenal: not the bird,not the song of the bird, but the beak,talons, feathers and wings of the bird.And wouldn’t you know, today I heardof his passing, today with my headburied in the slender body of his poems,those little fickle songbirds

When my friend calls from the West Coast,
he tells me about his blurred sexuality,

It begins with something small:a virus hitches a rideon a copter or a few germsfling themselves into the eyesof the nurse tending the princewho drank too deeplyfrom the fouled water of the pond;or a flea bites a ratwho scurries into the holdwhere his brothers and sisterscram into the spaces between casksof wine and the barrels

The second thing is this: to have.
We arrive and close our fists on

Mrs. Caro Hu says Hello,I know I have never met you,but my mind instincts me todo this. I believe everythinghappens for a reason. Peoplechange so you can learn to let go.Things go wrong so you canappreciate them when they’re right. I am a dying womanwho has decided to donatewhat I have to you.For charitable goals.

They called me Maggot-the-unborn-fly
and Lanny Millman shot me with a BB gun—

Records topple,

the Midwest melts, rippling through a scrim of heat

as though it were an illusion

and not reality.

sus huesos yacen caidos en el povo —Eugenio Montejo At 5, I picked up French with ease attending a parochial school my parents couldn’t really afford— le morceau de gateau! I knew a table from a window, the book on the desk from the stars in the sky—le livre sur le bureau de l’école a

We know so little but the little we know
we place beside a neighboring bit or byte
of information, thereby shaping knowledge
as fields of knowledge, finding correspondence

To those transfixed in the tunnel of colored lights,
to those frozen on the escalators
below constellations of candles
wreathed in the cascade of didgeridoo vibrations
and the wet clicking of tree frogs.

Shook foil—that’s what a river is. Catfish hauled like bars
of iron

from a mid-town bridge,
the wire that holds them

I spent my childhood in a world of imaginary
swings, the rope lines frayed, the base a heavy board. I’d do magic
higher than tree tops, high enough for the burn

Here in Pittsburgh, March,
rain, days-long, relentless as sin.
Ash Wednesday
but I only have beard stubble

One-by-one the trees undress in carcasses
of seed, scatter in cascade, in flimsy under-orange,
a negligee of red. The colors lost, caught with vine between
the tines of rile and wind. What dread in bleeding?

Praise you for that blanket.

Praise you for the stranger

who draped it over my mother,

Never seen you in the flesh. I’ve seen
a cousin, martes martes, stuffed, in a shop window
in Bavaria, where they chew wiring in cars,
and martes zibellina turned

The trees unravel,
plowed by a bright prow.
What’s light enough

New snow’s made our yard a white slate,

a Winter tale written out in shorthand.

When the new kitten chooses my lap for her nest,
when miraculously I’ve earned her trust,
I feel the way the sky might feel
to learn we see it as vastly blue.

“Try talking yourself out of it.” Richard Ford

But, of course, you can’t, or won’t.

And at night the poem persists

inserting itself into what you write

Do not wax sentimental on the first “good night”.

Never mind confessing how you feel.

Fight, fight the urge and keep it light.

The message came by the carriers of doom
with books, pamphlets, primers.

They said he was seated on his throne. The wounded got up from the ground. He made them whole and it happened before our eyes. We had not seen this before though the missionaries said he would. He is a God who robs his people of what they are and want to be and makes

I’ll never forget the wind the corner whispered,
nor the windowed darkness that was more
a frame for the world’s high-rise loneliness.

I found a turtle in the road,
happily sunning beside the median strip.