Poems

the ghosts of women once girls

somewhere a little girl is reading aloud

in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles

at the sound of her own voice escaping

the spine of a book. she feeds on her hunger

I As In

    i as in sow a muskrat tooth back into jaw
i as in dented pumpkin memory
i as in deflated basketball consciousness
i as in anaphoric internet parrot projection loop
i as in holding uterine lining above a toilet bowl

Full Moon

My bands of silk and miniver

Momently grew heavier;

The black gauze was beggarly thin;

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

We can never be with loss too long.

Behind the warped door that sticks,

the wood thrush calls to the monks,

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

Common Magic

Your best friend falls in love

and her brain turns to water.

You can watch her lips move,

epistrophe and epistrophy

some ekphrastic evening, this will be both criticism and poetry and 

failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between. this both/

and and/ or neither/ nor machine comes in having been touched

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things —

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple…

71. Song for a Silent Treatment.

I told her, in plain language, how I felt. 

And by that I mean I mumbled a poorly 

paraphrased and…

Blow, blow, thou winter wind

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man’s ingratitude;

Give All to Love

Give all to love;

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,

That feeling of my soul getting yanked

That feeling of my soul getting yanked

I wonder where my soul hides when I’m sick

My heart feels as if it’s getting beat up

Is it because the restless ocean is clumping up?

An Innocent Little Girl

The little girl is innocent

they’ve put henna on her hands

they’ve plaited her hair beautifully

they’ve put kohl round her eyes

they’ve dyed her eyebrows

Icicle Glasses

Day thirty-nine

The thing that death gave you —

your face leaks

your face overflows

Your face is the grave of your nose

your face is the grave of your ears

Pale Blue Cover

In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.

Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a…

Fear of Snakes

The snake can separate itself

from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,

taste the air, the morning and the evening,

Revenge

Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair,

And gaze upon her smile;

Seem as you drank the very air

400: Coming Home

You are still on the highway and the great light of

noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled

shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of

Poem for My Body

No one else rescued me. Not my father

or my brother or, years later, the gentle man

who became my husband. Not my mother

or my best friend or any of the women

who listened to me tell my story

Coffee

big ghosts

big ghosts contra

band my diction war

korea's north sees red as

america flags china's chopped limb

british crowns hong kong

cut for duplicity more capitalist than capitalist

A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales

I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.

I have discovered something, an entirely new species

with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy

with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided

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

Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

The limpness of a bird’s legs in flight.

The place, the question, the question. 

The place, the interest, the question.

There is the place.

There is what you do in the place.

There is your belief.

from Citizen

The rain this morning pours from the gutters and 

everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your 

glasses to single out what you know is there because 

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.

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

I’ve Dreamt of You So Often

I've dreamt of you so often that you become unreal.

Is there still time to reach this living body and to kiss on its mouth the birth of

the voice so dear to me?

I Have Something to Tell You

I’ve come to talk to you about shaving cuts

I was waiting across the road

right over there

for the light to turn

and you were on the other side

fumbling with change at the newspaper box

breakup

a girl between two dialects

still a screen and still a searching, learns

the season of breakup

another word for spring

can come before or after

depending on where you grew up

online, back and forth

Introduction to the Songs of Innocence

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

from Quit Dying to Die

   When the doctors burrowed into my body, they unearthed a slew of tumours. Growths speckled across lungs and kidneys.

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

Thoughtless Cruelty

There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly — ,

And should you thousand ages try

The life you’ve taken to supply,

From Silvija

If you can’t speak / write in a fissured / alter-language

Of nerve-matter / dura mater / orbit of the central axis

By a crevice / scattered / venous lacunae / lamina code

Black Sheroes

My Black heroes don’t drop names like Fendi Gucci Prada

My Black sheroes rock afros like Angela Davis and Assata

But my sheroes are more than a trend and they’re bigger than a hairstyle

Mrs. Kessler

Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,

And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,

And stood on the corner talking politics,

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.