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I’d a snip cut in his tongue. Blood scissored down his chin. At every squall I’d been unsnibbing myself and starving him. He knocked me so my nose coughed blood, punched a finger through my cornea. Blood blubbed on my nipple where his gums met. On the radio somebody was saying something about Syria. My son jerked knots of hair from my head, tears dashed off his fontanelle. He’d fixed my hips so my clothes didn’t fit. I blundered him once against the doorjamb: blood. I’d bit his father when we were younger, drinking harder, made blood come then. Twice I tried to leave him screaming, twenty minutes at a time, but couldn’t keep schtum. One breakfast I broke the mug that insisted “Don’t Mess With Texas.” Smashed it. And all the time I smiled so much my teeth dried. He made everything heavy. Like they say the bomb did for a while, so that Americans swam through their homes, eyes peeled, picking up everyday things and dropping them as though they were violated with light and pain. As though blood hadn’t always been there, waiting.

and who are you now in this different blue space without pain remarking on chemtrails and snowmelt,   misreading the “sea” whose letters cease to arrive remain transfixed in midflight       turbulent coasts aloft as a principle of life-- count invisible clams under nameless sands cut apostrophes into the air     announcements send far-flung greetings to strangers for days keep the magma enigma at bay        daily joys effaced vaporous pale generous smoke rising so cling to the dark hand inside you its basalt fingers, rounded

As a kid the only black woman in my life was my fourth-grade teacher— I remember her not because she was black but mostly because of her copper-colored bob that never changed, as if a piece of bronze had been chiseled onto her head and neither I nor my classmates could prove it was a wig, but we knew it was too perfect to be real. Then you came in- to my home—but not the way someone came in one afternoon while we were away grocery shopping, leaving the side door wide open releasing my white-winged parakeet, my mother’s jewelry and our television, gone. And for years I watched you go from analog into digital; you were the modicum of motherhood I encountered daily while my mother stood on a production line mouthing prayers for prosperity and health in a room of air compressors. You’re a super galactic hologram—scattered light reconstructed through the dark matter, ever-shrinking pixels—shifting the cosmology of the world with gigs of Gayle, and revolutionary road trips. And now will you quietly fade out into the space- time continuum where not even my imagination will find you? Your last broadcast like the final song of our beloved parakeet as it flew past the leafless trees toward the vast dome of heaven.

for Shelley Oh you, the sprightliest & most puggish, the brightest star Of all my lively loves, all Ladies, & to whom once I gave up My heart entire, thenceforth yours to keep forever Locked up in your own heart’s tiniest room, my best hope, or To throw away, carelessly, at your leisure, should that prove Your best pleasure, Who is that dumpy matron, decked out in worn & faded Shabby army fatigues which pooch out both before & behind, now screeching Scoring me painfully in philistine Commedia dell’arte farce, low summer fare Across a pedestrian Ferry’s stretch of water in some meshugganah Snug Harbor And once more, even, fiercely pecking at me in the cold drab Parish Hall of Manhattan’s Landmark Episcopal Church, where a once Avant-garde now Grade School Poetry Project continues to dwell, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bouwerie, whose Stones hold in tight grip one wooden leg & all of Peter Stuyvesant’s bones? Who is that midget-witch who preens & prances as she flaunts her lost wares, Otherwise hidden beneath some ancient boy’s flannel-shirt, its tail out & flapping, & who Is shrieking even now these mean words: “Hey     Ted!”     “Hey, you Fat God!” & called me, “Fickle!”         “Fickle!” & she points a long boney finger at me, & croons, gleefully. “Limbo!”     “That's where you really live!” & She is claiming to be you as she whispers, viciously, “Alone, & In Pain, In Limbo, is where you live     in your little cloud-9 home     Ted! Pitiful!” She has a small purse, & removing it from one of her shopping bags She brings out from inside that small purse, my withered heart; & lifting it high into the air over her head with her two hands, she turns it upside down unzips its fasteners, & shakes it out over the plywood floor, happily. “Empty,” she cries loudly, “just like I always knew it would be!” “Empty!” “Empty” “Empty” I watch her, and think, That’s not really you, up there, is it, Rose?     Rochelle?     Shelley? O, don’t be sad, little Rose! It’s still Your ribbon I wear, your favor tied to the grip of my lance, when I ride out to give battle, these golden days.

How hard it is to sleep in the middle of a life. — Audre Lorde We wake in the middle of a life,                    hungry. We smear durian            along our mouths, sing soft death a lullaby. Carcass breath, eros of  licked fingers and the finest perfume. What is love if  not         rot? We wear the fruit’s hull as a spiked crown, grinning in green armor.   Death to the grub, fat in his milky shuffle! Death to the lawlessness       of dirt! Death to mud and its false chocolate!   To the bloated sun we want to slice open and yolk                      all over the village. We want a sun-drenched           slug feast, an omelet loosening its folds like hot Jell-O. We want the marbled fat of steak and all        its swirling pink galaxies. We want the drool, the gnash, the pluck of each corn kernel, raw and summer                   swell. Tears welling up                     oil. Order up! Pickled cucumbers piled like logs for a fire, like fat limbs we pepper and succulent                in. Order up: shrimp chips curling in a porcelain bowl like subway seats. Grapes peeled from bitter bark — almost translucent, like eyes we would rather see. Little girl, what do you leave, leaven              in your sight? Death to the open eyes of  the dying. Here,           there are so many open eyes we can’t close each one.          No, we did not say the steamed eye of a fish. No eyelids fluttering like no butterfly wings. No purple yam lips. We said eyes. Still and resolute as a heartbreaker.         Does this break your heart?                                      Look, we don’t want to be rude, but seconds, please. Want: globes of oranges swallowed whole like a basketball or Mars or whatever planet is the most delicious.                   Slather Saturn! Ferment Mercury! Lap up its film of dust, yuk sung! Seconds, thirds, fourths! Meat wool! A bouquet of chicken feet! A garden of                   melons, monstrous in their bulge!               Prune back nothing. We purr in this garden. We comb through berries and come out so blue. Little girl,                            lasso tofu, the rope slicing its belly clean. Deep fry a cloud so it tastes like bitter gourd or your father leaving — the exhaust of his car, charred. Serenade a snake and slither its tongue into yours and                           bite. Love! What is love if  not knotted in garlic? Child, we move through graves like eels, delicious         with our heads first, our mouths agape. Our teeth:         little needles to stitch a factory of everything made in China.      You ask: Are you hungry? Hunger eats through the air like ozone. You ask: What does it mean to be rootless? Roots are good to use as toothpicks. You: How can you wake in the middle of a life? We shut and open our eyes like the sun shining on tossed pennies in a forgotten well. Bald copper, blood. Yu choy bolts                  into roses down here. While you were sleeping, we woke to the old leaves of  your backyard shed and ate that and one of your lost flip-flops too. In a future life, we saw rats overtake a supermarket with so much milk, we turned opaque. We wake to something boiling. We wake to wash dirt from lettuce, to blossom into your face. Aphids along the lashes. Little girl, don’t forget              to take care of  the chickens, squawking in their mess and stench. Did our mouths buckle                                at the sight of  you devouring slice                after slice of  pizza and the greasy box too? Does this frontier swoon for you? It’s time to wake up. Wake the tapeworm who loves his home. Wake the ants,                  let them do-si-do a spoonful of  peanut butter. Tell us, little girl, are you hungry, awake,                               astonished enough?

In memory of Octavio Paz not even lost in death the memory of why we burned, and therefore still a fire consuming all obsequious delay, now polvo, dust, of a desire but still alive and aching, not even lost to you within our common urn, urgent as an ash still burning alma, soul, still and moving toward you, la muerte, my amor— not even lost in death, memoria, and feeling some reply, alma, memory and ash, ash burning still, still and moving toward you, dust and dust, ash alma and amor constante más allá de la muerte, constant even in our common urn, polvo enamorado.

I would never have wanted to see your sad face again Your cheeks and your windy hair I went all across the country Under this humid woodpecker Day and night Under the sun and the rain Now we are face to face again What does one say to my face Once I rested up against a tree So long I got stuck to it That kind of love is terrible

Their jeans sparkled, cut off way above the knee, and my friends and I would watch them from my porch, books of poems lost in our laps, eyes wide as tropical fish behind our glasses. Their football flashed from hand to hand, tennis shoes gripped the asphalt, sweat's spotlight on their strong backs. We would dream of hugging them, and crouch later in weird rooms, and come. Once their ball fell our way so two of them came over, hands on their hips, asking us to throw it to them, which Arthur did, badly, and they chased it back. One turned to yell, “Thanks” and we dreamed of his long teeth in our necks. We wanted them to wander over, place deep wet underarms to our lips, and then their white asses, then those loud mouths. One day one guy was very tired, didn't move fast enough, so a car hit him and he sprawled fifty feet away, sexy, but he was dead, blood like lipstick, then those great boys stood together on the sidewalk and we joined them, mixing in like one big friendship to the cops, who asked if we were, and those boys were too sad to counter. We'd known his name, Tim, and how he'd turned to thank us nicely but now he was under a sheet anonymous as God, the big boys crying, spitting words, and we stunned like intellectuals get, our high voices soft as the tinkling of a chandelier on a ceiling too high to see.

ON THE BIRTH OF A SON When a child is born, the parents say they hope it's healthy and intelligent. But as for me— well, vigor and intelligence have wrecked my life. I pray this baby we are seeing walloped, wiped and winningly anointed, turns out dumb as oakum—and more sinister. That way he can crown a tranquil life by being appointed a cabinet minister.

I can’t touch you. His face always returns; we exchange long looks in each bad dream & what I see, my God. Honey, sweetheart, I hold you against me but nothing works. Two boats moored, rocking between nowhere & nowhere. A bone inside me whispers maybe tonight, but I keep thinking about the two men wrestling nude in Lawrence’s Women in Love. I can’t get past reels of breath unwinding. He has you. Now he doesn’t. He has you again. Now he doesn’t. You’re at the edge of azaleas shaken loose by a word. I see your rose-colored skirt unfurl. He has a knife to your throat, night birds come back to their branches. A hard wind raps at the door, the new year prowling in a black overcoat. It’s been six months since we made love. Tonight I look at you hugging the pillow, half smiling in your sleep. I want to shake you & ask who. Again I touch myself, unashamed, until his face comes into focus. He’s stolen something from me & I don’t know if it has a name or not— like counting your ribs with one foolish hand & mine with the other.