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O melting rainbow that embrace this roof O persistent covenant hangs around giving us nothing, leaves its muck in the water expects us to be knocked out by its fine colors weren’t you nothing too, weren’t you sea bottom crunched down into fuel and when that eggshell roof busts through mama’s gonna buy you a rainbow ride for free an illumination, an inflammation hyperion flame headdress dream pins in the fuel balloons of Koolaid burst down to cool the sticky baby’s head plus a credit card a glock a new bible a princess dress a mermaid princess dress so you’ll be twice submerged or an erased Indian princess pajama set now go to sleep

1 It is calm. It is as though we lived in a garden that had not yet arrived at the knowledge of good and evil. But there is a man in it. 2 There will be rain falling vertically from an indifferent sky. There will stare out from behind its bars the face of the man who is not enjoying it. 3 Nothing higher than a blackberry bush. As the sun comes up fresh, what is the darkness stretching from horizon to horizon? It is the shadow here of the forked man. 4 We have eaten the blackberries and spat out the seeds, but they lie glittering like the eyes of a man. 5 After we have stopped singing, the garden is disturbed by echoes; it is the man whistling, expecting everything to come to him. 6 We wipe our beaks on the branches wasting the dawn’s jewellery to get rid of the taste of a man. 7 Neverthless, which is not the case with a man, our bills give us no trouble. 8 Who said the number was unlucky? It was a man, who, trying to pass us, had his licence endorsed thirteen times. 9 In the cool of the day the garden seems given over to blackbirds. Yet we know also that somewhere there is a man in hiding. 10 To us there are eggs and there are blackbirds. But there is the man, too, trying without feathers to incubate a solution. 11 We spread our wings, reticulating our air-space. A man stands under us and worries at his ability to do the same. 12 When night comes like a visitor from outer space we stop our ears lest we should hear tell of the man in the moon. 13 Summer is at an end. The migrants depart. When they return in spring to the garden, will there be a man among them?

don’t expect too much. Well I expect you to go into the fucking human tunnel I’m going. pink grimy glossed entabulature, welted and tattooed. Enfolded in ropy ceiling-hangings but it isn’t a room, and bumblingly sliding out, little legs of a little girl, bum on the wall/opening pink legs sticking out like a hermit crab’s, she’s coming! shudder out the little-girl legs with a little girl head mostly eyes, no ears, bug brain, aimless Send her to school It’s cold, and where should she go, she will eat her legs with her mandibles her eyes will retract inside. Stroke her riding hood Settle down, little nobody will hurtcha by breaking off your little legs, six little legs, if you come.

to mama who on the eve of my birth beat a bitch with a kool-aid spoon for taking her eldest child’s red balloon (if i wasn’t wet-fisted, all hemmed up inside cecelia, i’da jumped in) to the bazaar of milk & afterbirth that once was her body, piping hot almond dark with laughter & memories of fenced-in two-stepping late night in a brownsville park to mama’s hands, mad stallions pummeling dough for biscuits, cherry-scented butter-smeared fists or floured moons to ms cloritha, professional crier for dilroy’s funeral parlor (stuffed the dead fulla who knows, once saw some geezer’s toupee slid back like a yarmulke, a woman’s wig bangs in her ear, mourners too busy kiki-ing in the back to tell the woman’s kin her fall fell forward & dipped to the side cloritha wailing all the while, earning her fifty bucks off the books) to ms sheronda who daily bugged mama for dried black-eyed peas, swore her son looked like a jackson (the eldest sissy, what’s her face, bee bee, cee cee you know, “centipede”) to the hungry black power thief who snatched nefertiti off our wall, public enemy off the turntable, platter of mustard glazed tongue picked clean in the kitchen sink to cuban ruben cross the hall who loved tongue & chuck D, father figure by george michael (also gone from the crates), who OD’d at the tunnel (stuntin’) in mama’s leopard print dress

This is my last report: I wanted to speak of existence, the ants most of all, dressed up in their naughty flame-trousers, the exact jaws, their unknowable kindnesses, their abyss of hungers, and science, their mercilessness, their prophetic military devotions, their geometry of scent, their cocoons for the Nomenclature, I wanted to speak of the Glue Sniffers and Glue Smoothers who despise all forms unbound, loose in their amber nectars, I wanted to point to their noses, hoses and cables and networks, their tools, if I can use that word now—and scales and scanners and Glue Rectories. I wanted you to meet my broom mother who carved a hole into her womb so that I could live— At every sunset she stands under the shadow of the watchtowers elongating and denying her breath. I wanted to look under the rubble fields for once, for you (if you approved), flee into the bullet-riddled openness and fall flat, arched, askew, under the rubble sheets and let the rubble fill me with its sharp plates and ripped dust— alphabets incomplete and humid. You, listen, a little closer to the chalk dust—this child swinging her left arm, a ribbon, agitated by unnamed forces, devoured.

Lobster in the bathtub. Christmas Eve. Scrub the tub first. Hand off cleanser. Rinse well. We don’t want Comet in our lobster. He’s clicking against the porcelain. Everyone leery of going to the bathroom. Bubbles had risen when we lowered him in, now he’s limp. Stare into the water that wears a similar gooseflesh. The lobster is dispatched.

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is– I hold it towards you.

This one appeared to me in a dream, was forgotten, only to reveal itself on the shower wall this morning. It must have been the water. • That one was on the full moon last night, clear as a bell. Someone projected it there. • This one was on the ground, on crunchy pine needles. The moon projected it there. • I forgot about that one . . . How was I to know it would be significant? • Every time I see this one, I'm angry. It doesn't diminish, either, from that first time. • Oh, that one! To tell you the truth, I never actually saw it, but I could feel it as it was described to me by a blind person over the phone. • This one I spotted on the back of someone's shirt in a crowd before she disappeared. • That one evolved, and is still evolving, on that big, flat rock over there; something scraped it, scratched it, the heat cracked it, the frost coated it, tiny plants took root, sheltering insects, and it rained, and it rained, and by the time I showed up, a butterfly had just flown off. • Not this one again. It makes me so sad . . . • I was glad to receive that one as a gift. So glad, in fact, that I went and had some copies made. • Believe it or not, this one has a sound. Just listen. • Oh, boy—that one! I'll never go there again. • This one often arrives in the smoke of incense. • I tried to turn that one over— it burned my hand. • This one I tried to discard— unsuccessfully, obviously. • That one speaks to me of space, and negative space, of open and filled spaces, and the among that comes between. • Whereas this one is the opposite— you get the picture. • Oh, my goodness— I've never seen that one before! • This one, from what I gather, is an accident. • That one, however, is intended. • This one took some getting to— waiting for the thaw, for instance— but it was well worth it. • That one, well, you can have it. • Whenever this one comes my way, it's déjà vu, but I'm ready for it. • That one is owned by the dentist. • This one has been proven to be a fake, but I still like it. • Alas, I lost that one once, in childhood, and it took me until now to find it. • If you can only have one, choose this one.

The first morning after anyone’s death, is it important To know that fields are wet, that the governess is Naked but with a scarf still covering her head, that She’s sitting on a gardener who’s wearing Just a blue shirt, or that he’s sitting on a chair in the kitchen. They look like they are rowing while instead outside in the mist Two boats are passing on the river, the gardener’s mouth Is opening: A white, screaming bird lifts off the river into the trees, Flies a short distance and is joined By a second bird, but then as if to destroy everything The two white birds are met by a third.The night Always fails.

After the 2010 San Fernando massacre Para Luis You novelize a route with flesh dumped at the ranch, can’t backtrack the courage of miles we traversed in the dark, on a sighing speedboat, through jungles that spat only shoes, calzones, bodies twisted as guitarras when there’s no grito left in them to pluck. Back home, we priested our mornings with sun-dried sombreros, communed with our ghosts & had no wish to sacrifice our bellies, our terneros, our Consuelos. With wings from acero, we’d crash latitudinal 
objections, mystify Bengay on the mouths of our map-torn feet, pay no heed to grief’s ambidextrous strophes. If we choked on our own blood we harpooned optimism. But when the vans deadlocked our 
pilgrimage we knew our shadows had crumbed the anesthetic vultures. They pressed their loaded beaks upon our backs until our knees bent sour orange. One asked if we served the enemy, but we took enemy to mean a seed that sits quietly underfoot, abashed to vestibule the grating sun. Blindfolded, we faced the gloom volcanoes of their mothers. How those mothers might’ve screamed like ours in their tortured independence: bloody thunder in the brown-starched symphonies, a wind that howled & shoved its thumbs through feral lands probing for judgment or commiseration. Chingado god that copycatted these legs from monotony. Chingado god that hewed our wrists, a pair of stems to strap behind our wrested boots & jeans. Whoever supplied a plea to that deviant afternoon’s rationed blessings neglected to add chile, sazón, a nosegay of tortillas to the long road. Mothers who’ve come to reclaim our tongues in the dirt: remind us of the braids in the phrasings of our dreams before we vanished. Pat the ground for the bodkinned orchids. Wasn’t it yesterday we were siphoning forecasts with our fingers roving on the table? Or caught your chests pain-leavened & stilled them with the rumpus of our hopes?