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My red pickup choked on burnt oil as I drove down Highway 99. In wind-tattered garbage bags I had packed my whole life: two pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts, an a pair of work boots. My truck needed work, and through the blue smoke rising from under the hood, I saw almond orchards, plums, and raisins spread out on paper trays, and acres of Mendota cotton my mother picked as a child. My mother crawled through the furrows and plucked cotton balls that filled the burlap sack she dragged, shoulder-slung, through dried-up bolls, husks, weevils, dirt clods, and dust that filled the air with thirst. But when she grew tired, she slept on her mother’s burlap, stuffed thick as a mattress, and Grandma dragged her over the land where time was told by the setting sun. . . . History cried out to me from the earth, in the scream of starling flight, and pounded at the hulls of seeds to be set free. History licked the asphalt with rubber, sighed in the windows of abandoned barns, slumped in the wind-blasted palms, groaned in the heat, and whispered its soft curses. I wanted my own history—not the earth’s, nor the history of blood, nor of memory, and not the job founded for me at Galdini Sausage. I sought my own—a new bruise to throb hard as the asphalt that pounded the chassis of my truck.

mIEKAL aND often incorporates alien scripts into his work. These can be undecipherable writing systems of history, scripts unfamiliar to most people, and scripts invented by him or others. He uses these to allow us to see written language with new eyes, to appreciate its visual forms, and to face the process of searching for meaning in a foreign textscape. His "mi'kmaq book of the dead" combines seemingly recognizable characters with apparently pictographic ones, encouraging us to pick out a meaning we will never quite find on our own.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

for Ed. Baynard buildings blend into the sky     the work goes on from where we left off and consciousness, by rights, is doors and windows a spritz of color in this life is what we can expect if we can expect anything and a breeze or two a quiet day     a little sun that 5-letter word "money" relying on no one for pleasure than the weather and the then discovered leisure to lean a little into more than can be expected let me explain we feel the heart against the ribs we feel the leg against the chair we feel two eyes linked as one looking into your two and rubbing your brow like a finger taking the sweat lengthwise off the brow and drying the forehead which is suddenly your we feel the nouns make emotions out of a sense of easiness the ability to relax the desire to simplify what we suddenly discover is meant because we haven't paid attention to exemplify something what it is, we forget we know it was something special something out of the ordinary a nagging something or other stupidly repeating itself in a vague way on the sill when we think the water still that's the silliest thing I ever heard of hearing everything through the air conditioner above the bottom line

Michael O’Toole hated going to school, He wanted to stay home and play. So lied to his dad and said he felt bad And stayed home from school one day. The very next day he decided to say That his stomach felt a bit queasy. He groaned and he winced ’til his dad was convinced, And he said to himself, “This is easy!” At the end of the week, his dad kissed his cheek And said, “Son, you’ve missed too much school.” “But still I feel funny, and my nose is all runny,” Said the mischievous Michael O’Toole. Each day he’d complain of a new ache or pain, But his doctor could find nothing wrong. He said it was best to let Michael rest, Until he felt healthy and strong. Michael O’Toole never did get to school, So he never learned how to write— Or to read or to spell or do anything well, Which is sad, for he’s really quite bright. And now that he’s grown, he sits home alone ’Cause there’s nothing he knows how to do. Don't be a fool and stay home from school, Or the same thing could happen to you!

—1509 I've already grown a goiter from this torture, hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy (or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison). My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket, my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings! My haunches are grinding into my guts, my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight, every gesture I make is blind and aimless. My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow. Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts are crazy, perfidious tripe: anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe. My painting is dead. Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor. I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

Ito ran to a window. He danced. He howled. He cursed the moon, interned in a camp before he was carted on a ship back to Tokyo. Hadn’t he almost died for art the evenings he ate bread soup? If he wished to forget those days & nights dancing in drawing rooms in London, or translating Fenollosa’s notes on Noh, he’d have to unbraid himself from At the Hawk’s Well, & then let go of the Egyptian mask Dulac painted him into — claws, beak, feathers, & legend. Why did that silly boy tell a story about his grandmother weeping when she first saw him dressed in his grandfather’s samurai armor to hold the gaze of Lady Cunard? He was again studying the fox holding a biscuit in his hand, saying, “I went to a great hill in Hampstead & I made my soul into the soul of a fox.” Finally, he would let go of his Europe, & not think of those he loved & taught, Isadora lost. Now, powerless & alone, he dances his ten steps again & again, wanting to know if a hawk could peck the eyes out of a fox.

I’m queer for nouns or verbs that end in -ickle, For bouncy trampolines, for trust and bluff. We’re told by those downtown that La Morbid’s dull Renouncing didn’t rustle up enough Bling to dazzle more than a few of them. Turn on a dime, a channel. Those we flip Ring truer than the frilly stratagem Fern bars used to unfurl, and we know zip About karate or brass knucks. To battle The meltdown blues, lay out your Cups and Swords. Don’t doubt the Duke will hop down from the saddle, His belt slung low. Check out the storyboards: Next year he trades his roan for a motorcycle.

Man of himself’s a little world, but join’d With woman, woman for that end design’d, (Hear cruel fair one whilst I this rehearse!) He makes up then a complete universe. Man, like this sublunary world, is born The sport of two cross planets, love, and scorn: Woman the other world resembles well, In whose looks Heav’n is, in whose breast Hell.

how to explain brazil to an extraterrestrial: your face on a flag. they’d recognize you as leader and knock you off. dirty part of the conquest. but it already happened, in another shape: aerial view of the amazon, a hundred-odd hydroelectric plants to fry your eggs in the microwave. and they’d finish you off: just part of the conquest. and what if they came to tour the waterfalls? or to be taught by the elite how to make a democracy? the spaceships cover the sky completely. all the offices and fast food joints declare an end to the working day. cockroaches and rats fled first. it’s christmas, carnival, easter, our lady of aparecida, and the final judgment all at once. lovers fuck for the last time. atms dry heave. the supermarket was a cemetery! the malls, the freeways! to explain civil unions to an iguana, to explain political alliances to a cat, to explain climate change to an aquarium turtle. it’s done, already. now, wait. eat an activia. dwell in philosophy. imagine! in our tropical country ... disastrous! not one river more. tragic! worse than locusts, your marvelous hydroelectric plants will be seen, in flames, from sirius: “my country was a sweet corn pamonha that a starving alien put in the microwave.” watch us burn: possible epitaph. Translated from the Portuguese

Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies. I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still air.