Poems

After Betty Goodwin’s The Memory of the Body (1993)

As Whitman sang the body electric

Goodwin sings the body forested:

dense stand of dark-trunked saplings

illumined by a blood-streaked sky,

ominous forest where

abandoned children wander

Question:

What do they think about you,

the people who pass you on the street?

What would you like them to see?

They see the druggie, the whore, the junkie.

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

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

Nuisance

Only the thickness of log

and triple-paned glass

between my children and

the open maw

of a bear.

I slip warm chocolate chip

cookies from the pan

Jacknife/2

Each day, I am apprenticed to the boy

I want to be.

He rifles the ball

and I catch it

or I fumble.

His red head ducks and weaves,

Moment One

I remember my birth

like it was tomorrow, the unholy sensation

Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure

“I saw my land in the morning

and O but she was fair”

- M.G. Smith, “Jamaica” (1938)

I

Come see my land

Come see my land

Great Intimacy

It is like an exquisite spider web, this world, but I

don't get trapped.

I have ceased to tie the strings of one shoe to

another in the morning,

Community Garden

There, the bolting black kale,

taller than it has any right to be

and not the twitter troll who asked

if you were on your period.

In the corner, a pile of dead

zucchini leaves, spotted with rot

Comfort

11 am. Time to wake up.

Muscles sore, jaw clenched, warm light

scattering dreams of violence across

the bedroom. I've chosen a self

Catastrophe That Nearly Brought Down a Plane

After late-night Li Bo,

on a plane to Houston, out of sheer intumescence

I begin unravelling a sickness bag—

starting with the wired throat,

then the pleated sides, then bottom.

Closure

On the night we dug up your father’s body

(for reasons I can no longer remember)

we took turns with the shovel

as we passed a bottle of Whyte & Mackay

An Online Friend Dies Somewhere Outside the Internet

Freezes, goes blue screen, shuts down. Dead pixel, dark.

Ghost echoes, lossy in the source code. Time zones away,

people who have actually shaken hands with my online friend

The Cactus

You sit in the forgotten bone-dry hills

surrounded by sand and sagebrush

above Buffalo Pound Lake.

A day and a night, and then

three more days and nights.

School for the Deaf

You gasp, awakened by

a bucket of cold water.

A gauzy autumn morning. A drained sunrise.

You shiver, strain to see the house

parent’s fingers whipping & flicking in

Family Affair

they say we are a family that is good at death / i make a decision to hold

a seminar on how to live / i schedule this party for my uncles on the first

Bilingual/Bilingüe

My father liked them separate, one there,

one here (allá y aquí), as if aware

that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart

(el corazón) and lock the alien part

memories of my youth

as children

we learned to stand on one leg

clasping bundles of hope between our teeth

not because we wanted

to resemble flocks of black flamingos

Duras (Poverty)

“The link with poverty is there is there in the man's hat, too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow,” M.D., The Lover.

Internet Safety

My dad taught me to never give out my real name, age,

address, or photos. This seemed obvious to me. My fake

birthday entry was always my crush's birthday plus a

C Wing 1

Your mother is missing,

the nurse hovers at the door .

Your mother is missing, a bit louder this time.

As if this was natural, a daily game of let's find the Italian,

The Windrush

Dem did sey she pregnance

Cum a sea full a mi

Weighing har down eena har shoe dem

Dresses, coco, mangoes an baggy an arl

Dem did sey de ship nearly sink

Mi mumma nebah sleep a wink

The Problem With Being a Box Too Small for Its Contents

Love, you ask too many questions.

Let’s agree: we are whole

Wrk

this job hates me

             this job wouldn’t make me feel so shitty if it didn’t

i’m nothing but nice to this job

but when this job is done with me it always sneaks out while

Dear Diaspora Child

it's okay if you only learned about your culture from Google

it's okay if you only read your language at the public library

Picking Up a Dandelion

Before dawn,

I pick you up,

then bring you closer.

My fingers slowly roll

over your body,

removing seeds attached to you,

free them into the air.

I hear you sigh

Glass Hands: A Eulogy on the Anniversary of the Pandemic

Hands pressed to glass

The Bow

I only know rivers

Waters elongated to the unrumpled recitatif

of endless land

The Bow knows

Has tongued and grooved the firmament, baby,

of this Last Best

The Bow knows

Planet Earth

It has to be loved the way a laundress loves her linens,

the way she moves her hands caressing the fine muslins

knowing their warp and woof,

like a lover coaxing, or a mother praising.

Holy Ghost

We had no paper

then, or we had

no pen, or no words. How

to say it. We had

no voice. No listeners.

Just deaf night

Women Do This Every Day

Pride

A half-hour.

Thirty minutes.

One thousand eight hundred seconds.

They sat.

urban NDNs in the DTES

had a dozen foster parents

                                   tell me to run from my mother’s truth

Inner Life

Those tweets I sent about Duke Ellington

While my mom was being evicted again

According to what ethics under the sun

Can I possibly have been speaking? A

Kind of private feeling I can’t even place here

Conversion

sam says you can’t name your book good boys without a dog

but sam doesn’t know that i am the dog

i am the ultimate mutt and i am telling him this story

One fish, Two fish, Plastics, Dead fish

recycling Dr. Seuss

Some fish are sold for sashimi,

some are sold to canneries,

and some are caught by hungry slaves

to feed what wealthy tourists crave!

The Ayes Have It

When I think of Trayvon Martin, I think of Emmett Till,

             when I think of Emmett Till, I think of young, black men in the South,

I saw a perfect tree today

I saw a perfect tree today

From my cabin bed on a Via Rail train 

Through the North of Ontario

I saw a perfect tree today

It was tall and thin and scraggly and prim

Then I saw another just as perfect

Color Piece

Visual world not exactly shaped –

Sense of smell, anticipation, senses that

are not exactly shaped —

Dark shadows casted —

Rat colors with faint hairly smells and pale