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Melt the fat around the heart; Leave only muscle. For us Spectators Leave Only muscle; Only trim the fat To depth. And, even if you Nick the heart, If you tear it Or scratch it, If you slice a petal off it, Don’t sweat it. Be mindful only That you leave the muscle Clean, Sheared of  fat. Or you can Char the heart, Melt down the fat, Then eat it With fucking Fava beans. Whatever you do, Be sure To leave the heart Muscled: thick and delicious. For we, citizens, have come To both see and to be The god and the heart; We have come to become The horns of the heart Splintered into Their plumpest sections.

is that you can never see the one you're wearing, that no one believes the lies they tell, that they grow to be more famous than you, that you could die in one but you won't be buried in it. That we use them to create dogs in our own image. That the dogs in their mortarboards and baseball caps and veils crush our hubris with their unconcern. That Norma Desmond's flirty cocktail hat flung aside left a cowlick that doomed her. That two old ladies catfighting in Hutzler's Better Dresses both wore flowered straw. Of my grandmother the amateur hatmaker, this legend: that the holdup man at the Mercantile turned to say Madam I love your hat before he shot the teller dead who'd giggled at her homemade velvet roses. O happy tragedy of hats! That they make us mimic classic gestures, inspiring pleasure first, then pity and then fear. See how we tip them, hold them prettily against the wind or pull them off and mop our sweaty brows like our beloved foolish dead in photographs. Like farmers plowing under the ancient sun.

A collaboration with Emma Lazarus Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Give me your gentrificatees of the Lower East Side including all the well-heeled young Europeans who’ll take apartments without leases Give me your landlords, give me your cooperators Give me the guys who sell the food and the computers to the public schools in District One Give me the IRS-FBI-CIA men who don’t take election day off Give me the certain members of the school board & give me the district superintendent Give me all the greedy members of both american & foreign capitalist religious sects Give me the parents of the punk people Give me the guy who puts those stickers in the Rice Krispies Give me the doctor who thinks his time is more valuable than mine and my daughter’s & the time of all the other non-doctors in this world Give me the mayor, his mansion, and the president & his white house Give me the cops who laugh and sneer at meetings where they demonstrate the new uses of mace and robots instead of the old murder against people who are being evicted Give me the landlord’s sleazy lawyers and the deal-making judges in housing court & give me the landlord’s arsonist Give me the known & unknown big important rich guys who now bank on our quaint neighborhood Give me, forgive me, the writers who have already or want to write bestsellers in this country Together we will go to restore Ellis Island, ravaged for years by wind, weather and vandals I was surprised and saddened when I heard that the Statue of Liberty was in such a serious state of disrepair & I want to help This is the most generous contribution I can afford.

With lines unseen the land was broken. When surveyors came, we knew what the prophet had said was true, this land with unseen lines would be taken. So, you who live there now, don't forget to love it, thank it the place that was once our forest, our ponds, our mosses, the swamplands with birds and more lowly creatures. As for us, we walked into the military strength of hunger and war for that land we still dream. As the ferry crossed the distance, or as the walkers left behind their loved ones, think how we took with us our cats and kittens, the puppies we loved. We were innocent of what we faced, along the trail. We took clothing, dishes, thinking there would be something to start a new life, believing justice lived in the world, and the horses, so many, one by one stolen, taken by the many thieves So have compassion for that land at least. Every step we took was one away from the songs, old dances, memories, some of us dark and not speaking English, some of us white, or married to the dark, or children of translators the half-white, all of us watched by America, all of us longing for trees for shade, homing, rooting, even more for food along the hunger way. You would think those of us born later would fight for justice, for peace, for the new land, its trees being taken. You would think the struggle would be over between the two worlds in this place that is now our knowledge, our new belonging, our being, and we'd never again care for the notion of maps or American wars, or the god of their sky, thinking of those things we were forced to leave behind, living country, stolen home, the world measured inch by inch, mile by mile, hectares, all measurements, even the trail of our tears. With all the new fierce light, heat, drought the missing water, you'd think in another red century, the old wisdom might exist if we considered enough that even before the new beliefs we were once whole, but now our bodies and minds remain the measured geography.

The guests are floating in the lobby, walking but also gliding to the front desk then away, checking in, checking out, muscular souls adorned in cotton, wool, and rayon, chewing the future inside their heads, slicing the air with ironed pleats, avoiding the camera at every turn so as, so as to get it right this time, which is the first time. “First cut, best cut!” the director shouts since this is also a silent film for the deaf and therefore everyone. His aim is to get the cast to see what they’ve been missing, to disregard the very sounds that they don’t hear to begin with, but would notice immediately if they were gone. See how they glide on the ether above the floor. The insouciance, Lord. The insouciance! They are all here in the magic of the set, every soul in the guise of a guest going about her business, a rendezvous here, as assignation there, the solitary sipping at the bar. Someone striking appears at the door. The rain outside beats down on the streets with terrible force until all you can hear is the roar of the sky as it passes above, and then below, on its narrow tracks.

the stars The nights midweek are secrets kept. No soul on site, no signal/bars, and zilch for company except a zillion bright disarming stars. I’ll flit through ambers, quicker, higher. I’ll break each hamlet’s stop or yield. I’ll fix some noodles, start a fire and climb up to the topmost field. The stars at first are sparse, unclear. They surface in that drag between the darkened grass and stratosphere, of powder blue and bottle green. They blossom, thick and fast, in droves. They pulse, in clusters, magnify. The smoke that’s my potbelly stove’s frays outwards through each needle eye. I’ll head below. I’ll char till dawn some apple logs down to their core. By pewter light when stars have gone, I’ll do a bit, a little more. the rain You live inside its sound effects whole weeks on end: its pin machine, its cardboard drum, its soft-boiled eggs, its silent running submarine. It’s like the god of liquid rub- ber stirred at dawn to slip downstairs and sip a cigarette, to drub his fingertips on solid layers you poured across last summer’s drought. You love it, learn to, as it slows, and even as you come to doubt its dribs and drabs and pigeon toes. Forget the welcome rain outstayed. For days the leaves are parchment sheet and wind hangs chimeless in the shade. Still rain remains the point of heat. The rain is near. Like everything, it’s best those seconds just before: the broadleaf ’s backwards canvas sling, the fly strip flapping through the door. the wind The wind’s this ancient bloke below who chunters “we,” who wheezes “us,” though no one else will come or go. You want to ask the wind “Who’s us?” but hold your tongue till, in your head, the wind and him have somehow mixed, the type of wind that loves a shed and banging on of things not fixed: a belt-and-braces year-round wind, a kiln-dried cobwebbed hardwood wind, a greenhouse wind, a treebound wind, an end-of-season car-boot wind, a padlocked shower unit wind, an upturned wheelie dumpster wind, a channel not quite tuned-in wind, a hollow flight-path thunder wind, a dog-eared wind, a knocked-sign wind, a spouseless phantom ocean-blown autumnal graveyard Scots pine wind who speaks in plurals, moves alone. the grass One night last June, in cups, in love with pickled gin from bubbly flutes, our clothes in coils about the stove, we climbed the dark in birthday suits. It’s true! The grass was mown that day. Like hippies chained in meadow flowers, we tripped above the cut and lay in blades of petrol suede for hours. We listened to the lowing black. We giggled, kissed. We possumed dead. We woke as flesh and straggled back like beasts for parlor, dressed, then read. We trafficked grass in bedspreads, shoes, and never spoke of that again through winter’s interregnum blues, of being spooked by skin, of when the only care we had was grass, the only stir for miles around our freezing bones, our clinking glass, our dying to be rumbled, found.

Where moonlight angles through the east-west streets, down among the old for America tall buildings that changed the streets of other cities circulate elevated trains overhead shrieking and drumming, lit by explosions of sparks that harm no one and the shadowed persons walking underneath the erratic waves not of the lake but of noise move through fog sieved by the steel mesh of the supporting structures or through rain that rinses pavements and the el platforms or through new snow that quiets corners, moods, riveted careers. Working for others with hands, backs, machines, men built hard towers that part the high air, women and men built, cooked, cleaned, delivered, typed and filed, carried and delivered, priced and sold. The river and air were filthy. In a hundred years builders would migrate north a mile but in these modern times this was all the downtown that was. And circling on a round-cornered rectangle of tracks run the trains, clockwise and counter, veering through or loop-the-loop and out again. Why even try to list the kinds of places men and women made to make money? Not enough of them, yet too many. From slow trains overhead some passengers can still see stone ornaments, pilasters, lintels, carved by grandfathers, great uncles and gone second cousins of today—gargoyle heads and curving leaves, like memorials for that which was built to be torn down again someday, for those who got good wages out of all this building or were broken by it, or both, yet whose labor preserves a record of labor, imagination, ambition, skill, greed, folly, error, cost, story, so that a time before remains present within the bright careening now.

Not that anyone will care, But as I was sitting there On the 8:07 To New Haven, I was struck by lightning. The strangest thing Wasn't the flash of my hair Catching on fire, But the way people pretended Nothing had happened. For me, it was real enough. But it seemed as if The others saw this as nothing But a way of happening, A way to get from one place To another place, But not a place itself. So, ignored, I burned to death. Later, someone sat in my seat And my ashes ruined his suit.

I want to reach you— in that city where the snow only shimmers silver for a few hours. It has taken seventeen years. This trip, these characters patterned in black ink, curves catching on the page like hinges, this weave of letters fraying like the lines on my palm, all broken paths. Outside, no snow. Just the slow pull of brown on the hills, umber dulling to a bruise until the city is just a memory of stained teeth, the burn of white marble to dusk, cows standing on the edges like a dust cloud gaining weight after days of no rain. Asleep in the hot berth, my parents sway in a dance, the silence broken by scrape of tin, hiss of tea, and underneath, the constant clatter of wheels beating steel tracks over and over: to the city of white marble, to the city of goats, tobacco fields, city of dead hands, a mantra of my grandmother's— her teeth eaten away by betel leaves—the story of how Shah Jahan had cut off all the workers' hands after they built the Taj, so they could never build again. I dreamt of those hands for weeks before the trip, weeks even before I stepped off the plane, thousands of useless dead flowers drying to sienna, silent in their fall. Every night, days before, I dreamt those hands climbing over the iron gate of my grandparents' house, over grate and spikes, some caught in the groove between its sharpened teeth, others biting where they pinched my skin.

A few days before the first snow the soldiers dressed like children began to appear. “Come quick,” said Beatrice, fetching Walter B. away from his scripture, “and bring candy!” Walter B. pulled on his robe and joined Beatrice on the balcony. “Oh look,” said Beatrice, “you can see their small, sweet eyes peeking through the bramble.” Walter B. threw a handful of red gumdrops into the air and watched the soldiers dressed like children scatter, and raise their arms in glee. “Feels sinful, doesn’t it?” purred Beatrice. They watched them stand in the field and chew. “Which one,” asked Walter B., “do you think is the hero?” “That one,” said Beatrice. “Definitely that one. The one with the mittens.” “Yes,” agreed Walter B., “the others seem less... festooned.” “And which one do you think,” asked Walter B., “is the traitor?” Beatrice bit her lip and looked around. “Maybe that one,” she said. “The one with the orange flower in the pocket of his vest.” Walter B. agreed, but to be certain he thought that he should ask. “Little traitor,” called out Walter B. The traitor looked up. “I knew it!” said Beatrice, clapping her hands. The traitor came closer. The wind shook the orange flower loose from his pocket, but he did not run after it. He missed his mother. The traitor came closer, but then he stopped. He curled into his flowerless vest and fell asleep. Walter B. and Beatrice yawned. The soldiers dressed like children opened their mouths as wide as they could, but there was no more candy. There would never again be more candy. And so they sailed away to another land.