Poemunity — your poem community

All the hills and vales along Earth is bursting into song, And the singers are the chaps Who are going to die perhaps. O sing, marching men, Till the valleys ring again. Give your gladness to earth's keeping, So be glad, when you are sleeping. Cast away regret and rue, Think what you are marching to. Little live, great pass. Jesus Christ and Barabbas Were found the same day. This died, that went his way. So sing with joyful breath, For why, you are going to death. Teeming earth will surely store All the gladness that you pour. Earth that never doubts nor fears, Earth that knows of death, not tears, Earth that bore with joyful ease Hemlock for Socrates, Earth that blossomed and was glad ‘Neath the cross that Christ had, Shall rejoice and blossom too When the bullet reaches you. Wherefore, men marching On the road to death, sing! Pour your gladness on earth's head, So be merry, so be dead. From the hills and valleys earth Shouts back the sound of mirth, Tramp of feet and lilt of song Ringing all the road along. All the music of their going, Ringing swinging glad song-throwing, Earth will echo still, when foot Lies numb and voice mute. On, marching men, on To the gates of death with song. Sow your gladness for earth's reaping, So you may be glad, though sleeping. Strew your gladness on earth's bed, So be merry, so be dead.

All their fences All their prisons All their exercises All their agendas All their stanzas look alike All their metaphors All their bookstores All their plantations All their assassinations All their stanzas look alike All their rejection letters All their letters to the editor All their arts and letters All their letters of recommendation All their stanzas look alike All their sexy coverage All their literary journals All their car commercials All their bribe-spiked blurbs All their stanzas look alike All their favorite writers All their writing programs All their visiting writers All their writers-in-residence All their stanzas look alike All their third worlds All their world series All their serial killers All their killing fields All their stanzas look alike All their state grants All their tenure tracks All their artist colonies All their core faculties All their stanzas look alike All their Selected Collecteds All their Oxford Nortons All their Academy Societies All their Oprah Vendlers All their stanzas look alike All their haloed holocausts All their coy hetero couplets All their hollow haloed causes All their tone-deaf tercets All their stanzas look alike All their tables of contents All their Poet Laureates All their Ku Klux classics All their Supreme Court justices Except one, except one Exceptional one. Exceptional or not, One is not enough. All their stanzas look alike. Even this, after publication, Might look alike. Disproves My stereo types.

As fresh garbage is. As dirt sucked out of a fingernail. As a wall clean of prostitutes. When I am this I am at the mercy of my nakedness. A pillar of undress whose power I do not know how to wield. I watch porn. I study the geometry of limbs splayed. Not the moan but the angle of a moan. I swallow. In this way I am a thief. Sometimes I forget my body & go untouched until I am touched & scream. Sometimes I want to eat my breasts down to their bitter rind & spit them out. I want to be the bitter rind without suck and easily thrown. Easily thrown I want to be the pebble thumbed & wished upon before enveloping the lake I sink in. I sink in you the lake & by lake I mean gutter a water that does not hold me well. Here we are not the bodies our mothers made. If you are to hold me hold me as a gun. Grip me & profit the dark. The unattended purse. The pair of heels darting from us in dull claps sharpening against the concrete as teeth against a stone.

One last meal, family-style — no family, and with suspect style. November first, my almost-groom fresh off his flasher costume discharge at the office. Harris tweed. I read it on his antisocial feed. The motel life is all a dream — we were, as they say, living the dream. I appreciate our quandary, hot-plate dates and frowsy laundry. Face tattoos are never a good sign. I hope his tumor is benign. I won’t forget the time he lent me Inches, which I gave up for Lent. Our love was threat, like phantom pain. An almost-plan for a bullet train. I’m weaning myself off graphic tees, not taking on any new disease. I walk along Pier 5 to kill the myth, of course another stab at myth. I pull my output from the shelf and wildly anthologize myself. I’ve adopted another yellow lab. I hope to die inside this cab. My lack of faith is punctuation — no wait, the lack of punctuation. Every intonation, one more pact with injury; my latest one-act: “Flossing in Public.” In the spattered glass of the republic.

The giant world is no damned genius with its basket of latitude, its schedule for wanting to be touched. Now, slow asleep I’m song to break in on, a strength less lost than gone. I borrow minute, hour, day, day. The waves as cruel replacements pass for crutches.

winter sea over my shoes shadows and bright round stones at san gregorio every wave turns a season forests adrift empty shells memory of fire so faraway in the mountains and canyons silent pools raise my faces by early tide slight my hand shoulders almost ashore light breaks over the plovers certain steps my traces blood, bone, stone turn natural and heavy waves rush the sand

I washed a load of clothes and hung them out to dry. Then I went up to town and busied myself all day. The sleeve of your best shirt rose ceremonious when I drove in; our night- clothes twined and untwined in a little gust of wind. For me it was getting late; for you, where you were, not. The harvest moon was full but sparse clouds made its light not quite reliable. The bed on your side seemed as wide and flat as Kansas; your pillow plump, cool, and allegorical. . . .

I can play songs in my head Yes I can perfectly replicate (the) full-on orchestral every note (when the lights / do down / in the city) yet I cannot compose, for example and though when I was young I believed that the fullness meant I could recreate the sounds I heard in my head with my mouth I learned through painful iteration painfully unsatisfactory shameful the rendition so partial almost unrelated the qualities are: note tone scale register vocality musicality incapacity painfully shy of representation is there anyone? who is a record player

A flower needs to be this size to conceal the winter window, and this color, the red of a Fiat with the top down, to impress us, dull as we've grown. Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb half above the soil stuck out its green tongue and slowly, day by day, the flower itself entered our world, closed, like hands that captured a moth, then open, as eyes open, and the amaryllis, seeing us, was somehow undiscouraged. It stands before us now as we eat our soup; you pour a little of your drinking water into its saucer, and a few crumbs of fragrant earth fall onto the tabletop.

I. Although Tía Miriam boasted she discovered at least half a dozen uses for peanut butter— topping for guava shells in syrup, butter substitute for Cuban toast, hair conditioner and relaxer— Mamá never knew what to make of the monthly five-pound jars handed out by the immigration department until my friend, Jeff, mentioned jelly. II. There was always pork though, for every birthday and wedding, whole ones on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, even on Thanksgiving day—pork, fried, broiled, or crispy skin roasted— as well as cauldrons of black beans, fried plantain chips, and yuca con mojito. These items required a special visit to Antonio’s Mercado on the corner of Eighth Street where men in guayaberas stood in senate blaming Kennedy for everything—“Ese hijo de puta!” the bile of Cuban coffee and cigar residue filling the creases of their wrinkled lips; clinging to one another’s lies of lost wealth, ashamed and empty as hollow trees. III. By seven I had grown suspicious—we were still here. Overheard conversations about returning had grown wistful and less frequent. I spoke English; my parents didn’t. We didn’t live in a two-story house with a maid or a wood-panel station wagon nor vacation camping in Colorado. None of the girls had hair of gold; none of my brothers or cousins were named Greg, Peter, or Marcia; we were not the Brady Bunch. None of the black and white characters on Donna Reed or on the Dick Van Dyke Show were named Guadalupe, Lázaro, or Mercedes. Patty Duke’s family wasn’t like us either— they didn’t have pork on Thanksgiving, they ate turkey with cranberry sauce; they didn’t have yuca, they had yams like the dittos of Pilgrims I colored in class. IV. A week before Thanksgiving I explained to my abuelita about the Indians and the Mayflower, how Lincoln set the slaves free; I explained to my parents about the purple mountain’s majesty, “one if by land, two if by sea,” the cherry tree, the tea party, the amber waves of grain, the “masses yearning to be free,” liberty and justice for all, until finally they agreed: this Thanksgiving we would have turkey, as well as pork. V. Abuelita prepared the poor fowl as if committing an act of treason, faking her enthusiasm for my sake. Mamá set a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven and prepared candied yams following instructions I translated from the marshmallow bag. The table was arrayed with gladiolas, the plattered turkey loomed at the center on plastic silver from Woolworth’s. Everyone sat in green velvet chairs we had upholstered with clear vinyl, except Tío Carlos and Toti, seated in the folding chairs from the Salvation Army. I uttered a bilingual blessing and the turkey was passed around like a game of Russian Roulette. “DRY,” Tío Berto complained, and proceeded to drown the lean slices with pork fat drippings and cranberry jelly—“esa mierda roja,” he called it. Faces fell when Mamá presented her ochre pie— pumpkin was a home remedy for ulcers, not a dessert. Tía María made three rounds of Cuban coffee then Abuelo and Pepe cleared the living room furniture, put on a Celia Cruz LP and the entire family began to merengue over the linoleum of our apartment, sweating rum and coffee until they remembered— it was 1970 and 46 degrees— in América. After repositioning the furniture, an appropriate darkness filled the room. Tío Berto was the last to leave.