Poemunity — your poem community

I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled. Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone. Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust. And yet it was not death, but her body in its green dress I longed for. That’s why I stood for days in the field until the grass turned black and the rain came.

Born, I was born. Tears represent how much my mother loves me, shivering and steaming like a horse in rain. My heart as innocent as Buddha's, my name a Parisian bandleader's, I am trying to stand. Father is holding me and blowing in my ear, like a glassblower on a flame. Stars on his blue serge uniform flaunt a feeling of formal precision and stoicism. Growing, I am growing now, as straight as red pines in the low mountains. Please don't leave, Grandmother Pearl. I become distressed watching the president's caisson. We, we together move to the big house. Shining, the sun is shining on my time line. Tears, copper-hot tears, spatter the house when Father is drunk, irate, and boisterous. The essence of self emerges shuttling between parents. Noel, the wet nimbus of Noel's tongue draws me out of the pit. I drop acid with Rita. Chez Woo eros is released. I eat sugar like a canary from a grown man's tongue. The draft card torn up; the war lost. I cling like a cicada to the latticework of memory. Mother: "I have memories, too. Don't let me forget them." Father: "I'm glad the journey is set. I'm glad I'm going." Crows, the voices of crows leaving their nests at dawn, circle around, as I sit in a gold kimono, feeling the subterranean magma flows, the sultry air, the hand holding a pen, bending to write, Thank you, Mother and Father, for creating me.

As I punch the time-clock, I know men will be gunned down at dawn in a distant continent, someone will dart into a café with a bomb nestled in the belly, by the roadside a woman will moan over the body of a man, shrunken, stretched on the earth, that God will finger the forehead of a dying country, all of it funneled through the news on TV. But tonight, instead of tuning in, I’m going to kneel beside the window, recognize myself in the croak of the crow, high above the black tree of winter, claws hooked and rough, wings swept back and hunched, face masked with exhaust. I’m going to try, even if I fail, to see myself whole, complete in the cry, in the beak of the crow.

She don’t believe in shootin’ stars, but she believe in shoes and cars . . . —Kanye West, “Flashing Lights” Always growing out my bangs, childhood, that strange small. The place written for me invites me to hoarder and not mother, so I’m living in this mirrored chest of drawers called the body—my brother is hidden in there, next to all of 1996. I have predictions for my cancer—colon or breast— a tattoo artist exacting areolas above the dark canals of my heart. Yes . . . I spend too much money, I cheat on everyone I love, I know what it’s like to desire everything & nothing at all, the air inside a potato chip bag. I count the sweaty, greasy envelopes on my nightstand, each a letter for every person I’ve wanted & never had. I don’t trust the guiding powers of stars, but I do believe in the Magic 8 Ball of the city, night the shaken blue inkiness of Signs Point to Yes, Reply Hazy, Try Again, or Outlook Not So Good. My happiness I can point to on a map— New Orleans, legs swinging, red stilettos poking their noses out the window of Big Daddy’s in the French Quarter, gone now, torn down. The strippers’ legs perpetually swinging, each dark fold keeping time.

ninety-nine names for my god though i know none for my [     ] a failing not of my deity but of my arabic      not the language itself rather the overeager mosaic i hoard      i steal       i borrow from pop songs          & mine from childhood fluency    i guard my few swearwords like tinkling silver anklets     spare & precious & never nearly enough to muster a proper arabic anger      proper arabic vulgarity     only a passing spar always using the names of animals i am not polite         i am only inarticulate overproud      of my little arsenal a stranger blows a wet tobacco kiss through the window    of my taxi & i deploy     my meager weapons [dog]          [pig]         [donkey] & finally        my crown jewel i pass my tongue across my teeth crane my neck about the window & call        [your mother’s                  ]

Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in. She sat here in her chair, Smiling into the fire; He who played stood there, Bowing it higher and higher. Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day; Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!

1 So door to door among the shotgun shacks in Cullowhee and Waynesville in our cleanest shirts and ma’am and excuseme were all but second nature now and this one woman comes to the door she must have weighed three hundred pounds Would you be willing to tell us who you plan to vote for we say and she turns around with Everett who’re we voting for? The black guy says Everett. The black guy she says except that wasn’t the language they used they used the word we’ve all agreed to banish from even our innermost thoughts, which is when I knew he was going to win. 2 At which point the speaker discovers, as if the lesson were new, she has told the story at her own expense. Amazing, said my sister’s chairman’s second wife, to think what you’ve amounted to considering where you’re from, which she imagined was a compliment. One country, friends. Where when we have to go there, as, depend upon it, fat or thin, regenerate or blinkered-to-the-end, we shall, they have to take us in. I saw 3 a riverful of geese as I drove home across our one-lane bridge. Four hundred of them easily, close-massed against the current and the bitter wind (some settled on the ice) and just the few at a time who’d loosen rank to gather again downstream. As if to paraphrase. The fabric every minute bound by just that pulling-out that holds the raveling together. You were driving all this time? said Steven. Counting geese? (The snow falling into the river.) No. (The river about to give itself over to ice.) I’d stopped. Their wingspans, had they not been taking shelter here, as wide as we are tall.

A moth lies open and lies like an old bleached beech leaf, a lean-to between window frame and sill. Its death protects a collection of tinier deaths and other dirts beneath. Although the white paint is water-stained, on it death is dirt, and hapless. The just-severed tiger lily is drinking its glass of water, I hope. This hope is sere. This hope is severe. What you ruin ruins you, too and so you hope for favor. I mean I do. The underside of a ladybug wanders the window. I wander the continent, my undercarriage not as evident, so go more perilously, it seems to me. But I am only me; to you it seems clear I mean to disappear, and am mean and project on you some ancient fear. If I were a bug, I hope I wouldn’t be this giant winged thing, spindly like a crane fly, skinny-legged like me, kissing the cold ceiling, fumbling for the face of the other, seeking. It came in with me last night when I turned on the light. I lay awake, afraid it would touch my face. It wants out. I want out, too.

After you left me forever, I was broken into pieces, and all the pieces flung into the river. Then the legs crawled ashore and aimlessly wandered the dusty cow-track. They became, for a while, a simple roadside shrine: A tiny table set up between the thighs held a dusty candle, weed-and-fieldflower chains placed reverently there by children and old women. My knees were hung with tin triangular medals to cure all forms of hysterical disease. After I died forever in the river, my torso floated, bloated in the stream, catching on logs or stones among the eddies. White water foamed around it, then dislodged it; after a whirlwind trip, it bumped ashore. A grizzled old man who scavenged along the banks had already rescued my arms and put them by, knowing everything has its uses, sooner or later. When he found my torso, he called it his canoe, and, using my arms as paddles, he rowed me up and down the scummy river. When catfish nibbled my fingers he scooped them up and blessed his reusable bait. Clumsy but serviceable, that canoe! The trail of blood that was its wake attracted the carp and eels, and the river turtle, easily landed, dazed by my tasty red. A young lad found my head among the rushes and placed it on a dry stone. He carefully combed my hair with a bit of shell and set small offerings before it which the birds and rats obligingly stole at night, so it seemed I ate. And the breeze wound through my mouth and empty sockets so my lungs would sigh, and my dead tongue mutter. Attached to my throat like a sacred necklace was a circlet of small snails. Soon the villagers came to consult my oracular head with its waterweed crown. Seers found occupation, interpreting sighs, and their papyrus rolls accumulated. Meanwhile, young boys retrieved my eyes they used for marbles in a simple game till somebody’s pretty sister snatched at them and set them, for luck, in her bridal diadem. Poor girl! When her future groom caught sight of her, all eyes, he crossed himself in horror, and stumbled away in haste through her dowered meadows. What then of my heart and organs, my sacred slit which loved you best of all? They were caught in a fisherman’s net and tossed at night into a pen for swine. But they shone so by moonlight that the sows stampeded, trampled one another in fear, to get away. And the fisherman’s wife, who had thirteen living children and was contemptuous of holy love, raked the rest of me onto the compost heap. Then in their various places and helpful functions, the altar, oracle, offal, canoe and oars learned the wild rumor of your return. The altar leapt up, and ran to the canoe, scattering candle grease and wilted grasses. Arms sprang to their sockets, blind hands with nibbled nails groped their way, aided by loud lamentation, to the bed of the bride, snatched up those unlucky eyes from her discarded veil and diadem, and rammed them home. Oh, what a bright day it was! This empty body danced on the riverbank. Hollow, it called and searched among the fields for those parts that steamed and simmered in the sun, and never would have found them. But then your great voice rang out under the skies my name!—and all those private names for the parts and places that had loved you best. And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung. The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar, and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment, and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles, and the runaway groom, and the fisherman’s thirteen children set up such a clamor, with their cries of “Miracle!” that our two bodies met like a thunderclap in midday—right at the corner of that wretched field with its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle. We fell in a heap on the compost heap and all our loving parts made love at once, while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyes and then went decently about their business. And here it is, moonlight again; we’ve bathed in the river and are sweet and wholesome once more. We kneel side by side in the sand; we worship each other in whispers. But the inner parts remember fermenting hay, the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense, and passion, its bloody labor, its birth and rebirth and decay.

You flinch. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. My Heart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongue To turn it down. Too late. The something climbs, leaps, is Falling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainy Lord. I chose the wrong word. I am wrong for not choosing Merely to smile, to pull you toward me and away from What you think of as that other me, who wanders lost among ... Among whom? The many? The rare? I wish you didn’t care. I watch you watching her. Her very shadow is a rage That trashes the rooms of your eyes. Do you claim surprise At what she wants, the poor girl, pelted with despair, Who flits from grief to grief? Isn’t it you she seeks? And If you blame her, know that she blames you for choosing Not her, but me. Love is never fair. But do we — should we — care?