Poems

Susie Asado

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

    Susie Asado.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

New Year’s

If you want to travel run

around the neighbourhood with an empty

suitcase in hand. At least once, full circle.

Wear yellow underwear

for the 31st, lest fortune oversee your cup

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

On Shakespeare. 1630

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,

The labor of an age in pilèd stones,

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid

I’ll Teach You Cree

with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki         frog

your mouth will be the web

catching apihkêsis words,                        …

Fire Watch

Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.”

Repeat, don’t talk until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand,

God the Tea Master

All the weapons we marshal to confront the day

You ask to be left by the door before entering.

The sword in its sheath must lie on the grass,

the quiver and bow hung off a branch.

A Breakfast for Barbarians

my friends, my sweet barbarians,

there is that hunger which is not for food —

but an eye at the navel turns the appetite

Family History

Only the beginning is true.

There was an island

and an orphanage

and a boy.

There was a train and a country

to cross.

In Jerusalem

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,

I walk from one epoch to another without a memory

to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing

the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven

Blank Sonnet

      The air smells of rhubarb, occasional

Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,

Undulant hurt, so body snaps…

Break of Day

’Tis true, ’tis day, what though it be?

O wilt thou therefore rise from me?

Why should we rise because ’tis light?

The Flea

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,

Bury Me in Arabic

“Morning of goodness to you”

— “Morning of goodnesses”

Or add flowers: “morning of roses”

Always multiply the gift—

“welcome” to “two welcomes”

“a hundred welcomes and kinship and ease”

Finis

Give me a few more hours to pass 

With the mellow flower ofthe elm-bough falling,

And then no more than the lonely grass

And the birds calling.

Give me a few more days to keep

forgiving my father

it is friday. we have come

to the paying of the bills.

all week you have stood in my dreams

like a ghost, asking for more time

but today is payday, payday old man;

my mother’s hand opens in her early grave

What the Queer Community Should Have Told Us

1. you are perfect

& also flawed

2. you are allowed to make mistakes

& you must be accountable for them

3. accountability is not a price you pay in blood

for being human

No Coward Soul Is Mine

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere

I see Heaven’s glories shine

Weed Killer

Our mother gave us a sack of weed killer

the size of a toddler, and told us

to spread it on the front lawn.

My sister and I lugged it there.

A light cloud of white powder

Turtle Island Poem Number Fourteen

once i left turtle island and i

rejoined la and doubleU and see

to savai‘i on a hunting trip

on the fairy from upolu

la picked up a day trick

blew him during lunch

Men in the Gut

Scrape the inside of sleep the belly wall

tasting like yoghurt cooked broccoli

its emptiness leaving something

on the tongue. Escaping the body

that wants to quit from the inside.

Enigma

Who I am

depends on which side of my skin

you stand on.

In here

it’s all neurons firing

synapses telling stories

blood tracing ancestral histories

Echolalia

Once one gets what one wants

one no longer wants it.

One no longer wants what?

Last Visit

Now I set out across a minefield,

space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over

from a point where every pebble may explode

beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up

behind my body as I gasp for air,

Filament

Always that spectral fragment. Filament of line cast back there.

Where open-mouthed fish rise to gulp down shiny lures.

I sang once in an auditorium to almost empty rows.

Eight

The trick to building houses was making sure 

they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste 

was growing more sophisticated and occasionally 

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)

My sister cries the sea

My sister is crying and crying

her tears grow to salt stormy showers

to rain and to rapids and rivers

they run to the sea to the sea.

My sister sobs softly she knows

It was in a boardroom

It was in a boardroom

that I witnessed the latest killing

A room filled with knowledgeable

white people

trying to understand

what we offer

shaking their heads

Badlands

Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home. 

He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books 

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

Say the Names

— say the names say the names

and listen to yourself

an echo in the mountains

Tulameen     Tulameen

say them like your soul

was listening and overhearing

and you dreamed you dreamed

The Ringing Bell

I used to liken a poem to praying. Is that right? 

Not the woo and gratitude praying served by queer witches.

Childhood praying. As a girl I genuflected to the tabernacle

The New School

Do you remember, Nancy,

when we sat in the Creole restaurant

and glanced up at the television to see students running

with their hands in the air and photographs

of two young men?

Equinox Ritual with Ravens & Pines

— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —

     & the shadow kept arriving in segments, 

    cold currents pushed minerals

Paying Attention

He is not doing well. She is not

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Let Us Be Fireflies

Let Us Be Fireflies

                          All day we

     practice morse code signals

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,