Poetry

“From the Unsent Midnight Letters: Remission” —for L   dearly beloved—   you need rest but can’t seem to escape another quiet or not-so-quiet litany   of reasons to spit the bullet of sleep          what if I perish? your worry bells   over & over—: although it rings out work? family? desire?          with time on my breath…

I don’t know why I joined the white sorority. We whispered Latin passwords to each other. They wore white robes and sang to us.     I don’t know where I belong. And the parties, like “Pimps and Hoes” inside a rented Laundromat with fake hickies   and scars on our skin and pimp juice…

After he died, the mirrors reflected everything.               The half-face of his friend           walking toward the door,     his wife’s back, his sister’s hands. I was there too,               suspended somewhere           in glass, briefly, indirectly—     What part of me witnessed myself newly without               my father? I tried not…

I keep a few loose threads from each membrane and loop them through a needle to sew an X on the sleeve of your favorite black sweater.   Later, we make love and you complain my fingers burn your body. I rub my eyes with one hand and reach for your inner ear   to…

1.   A marriage is a contract to be stranded on an island with one other person   who retains the option to sometimes not even talk to you. And when sometimes   is all the times, it feels like you are the last two Indians, or Browns, left on the planet,   and it’s…

Logic—my father’s logic died June 24, 2009, in bright daylight. Murdered in the afternoon. I hung up Missing Person posters of myself and listened for the sound of a tree falling. The sound of the wind through trees is called psithurism. There’s no word for the translator of wind. If the wind is words, the…

For the band of panicked street cats           lapping spoiled soup I’d discarded                               at the base of what I only knew           to call a Mexican rose, and for you, of course,                     dawdling on the lawn, bent over                               a Walmart telescope, in search of stars that are remotest—Andromeda’s                                cities, the vaporous                               shimmering that was the first…

Civility—died on June 24, 2009, at the age of 68. Murdered by a stroke whose paintings were recently featured in a museum, two white square canvases, black scissors in the middle of each, open, pointing at each other. After my father’s stroke, my mother no longer spoke in full sentences. Fragments of codfish, the language…

I have been living           despite myself my territory hemmed by mud and threat of mud          If there is a land without its own subliminal violences          this night offers no defense of what has died in it          Some things are only nourished in a stutter of kudzu and the inconsistencies of silver the moon shucks off           Casual machines honey…