Poems

Kay in Summer

Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid

the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf

might see it all as too hesitant for truth

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

How to Tell If a Poem Is Trans or Not

Look directly at the crotch

Gently wave away all

thoughts about how

you never cared about crotches of poems

before this poet

Consider the subject

Introduction to the Songs of Innocence

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;

First Time Smudge

It takes eight matches, a burnt thumb, and a quick Google search

to light the sweetgrass braid Mom scored for me from an elder

at work. Always use matches, she said. Spirit likes matches. 

At the Centre

Today doves flew from my head

and my hair grew

the longing is gone from my body

To Helen

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,

In Exile I Draw the Tower Card

           Spruce, inadequate, and alien

            I stood at the side of the road

i am graffiti

i am writing to tell you

that yes, indeed,

we have noticed

Trust Fund Witches

Adam Posed

Could our first father, at his toilsome plow,

Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow,

Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin,

The Powwow at the End of the World

I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall   

after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam   

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

Letters

I threw away your letters.

Years ago, just like that.

The tight black swirls,

circles and strokes

filling fine sheets —

I would not see them again.

The last items I had left.

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo...

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —

Lean on a garden urn —

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you —

Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

Ocean, don’t be afraid.

The end of the road is so far ahead

it is already behind us.

Don’t worry. Your father is only your father

until one of you forgets. Like how the spine

won’t remember its wings

You’d Have to Pay Me Could You Pay Me Enough

You’d have to pay us

Could you pay us enough

To live for a stretch

April 30, 2014

Weeds are flattened beneath last year’s tire tracks

others lay burden by the winter’s heavy snow.

The crocuses labor through this thick blanket.

I am sun drained from the bleakness

let us suppose

We climb up the rusting ladder, 

Mexican beer forced into waistbands, 

and lie on the cooling roof

count our personal galaxies 

far high LEDs, billboards, dreams. 

Père Lalement

I lift the Lord on high,

Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see

The small birds of the forest lingering by

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

dont worry yr hair

              dont worry yr eyes

         dont worry yr brain man th snow is

With the Dying of the Light

I recited to him,

                      Now as I was young and easy,

and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,

Adam Father

He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear

on sun-fermented garbage.

Hungover and queasy and riled up by

bees.

Nothing going well today, he moans,

life being short and the craft, ah, long.

Flaxman

We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,

Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,

And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and…

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,

From: Incantation: Memory of Water

Tonight, a strand of my great-grandmother’s hair

sashes an amber beer bottle discarded by a tourist.

A white thread of my grandmother’s baptismal robe

is a bangle on a wrist of kelp

If —

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 

From World of Made and Unmade

In my dream my mother comes with me.

We are in the meadows we call

The Flats, walking the dogs.

Walk straight past the water trough,

she says, do not engage the moss.

Visit from Mother

You sleep on the floor in my room

in the modelling apartment

I share with eight other girls

You open the fridge

to see what we’re eating

Butter Spray, Diet Coke, Jell-O

Do you think we’re clichés

The Listeners

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

America (I’m Putting My Queer Shoulder to the Wheel)

The night America took off her mask

we slept together poorly. I'd woken up early

that Tuesday, dragged myself to a gymnasium

in Jersey City to cast my vote into the void.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

Packing for the Future: Instructions

Take the thickest socks.

Wherever you're going

you'll have to walk.

There may be water.

There may be stones.

There may be high places

you cannot go without

On Antiphon Island

— “mu” twenty-eighth part —

    On Antiphon Island they lowered

the bar and we bent back. It

 wasn't limbo we were in albeit

En Route

The train has stopped for no apparent reason

In the wilds;

A frozen lake is level and fretted over

Sonnet XXIX: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,