478 Identity poems

For Ofelia Camacho Delgado She wakes to the odor of sheep, trying to rub it off her hands. Dressed up in her native colors, standing by a tourist van, she is a dandelion, golden like the alpaca woven buttons of her sweater. She is done with the tourists taking her photo, holding a baby lamb. Without official papers in a new country, she briskly walks, and obscenely slow, a foreign tongue slithers by; its scales are the words she has not yet learned to trust. The baby girl hiding in her belly's nest will learn Quechua first,runa.                      the people The sick horses are pushed off the deck of a ship bound for Cuba. Pursuing, their heads bobbing, clearing the salt from their nostrils, they kick. As long as they can, they swim in the rushing swells, falling behind the ship's scent, swine and men. Know someone who needs their spirits lifted? Why not try a lavender or a rose scent? At the end of a hallway, a machine rattles and spits out ice cubes, some dropping, transparent on the dull vines of the carpet. Manuela pushes a cart of towels, shampoo, lotion, and soap bars scented with rose oil. Glancing down at the "Do Not Disturb" signs, she walks past the banker taking his third shower and the mother nursing her twins on a blanket spread across the floor. The peepholes are silent as a pile of dirty pillows, some dark never blinking, others bullet holes of light. Before leaving the Day's Inn on Mt. Vernon, she steals a few soap bars for her daughter, who places them in her dresser drawers, scenting her lingerie, fresh as cut flowers. A dandelion's root, far deeper, tolerant of drought and poor soil, is not an easily uprooted presence. Manuela hears the creaking of planks, the flapping of sails, and horses stomping, nervous, eyeing the full moon. She sees the marks of hooves in the sand, marks coming out from the sea and vanishing inland. She wakes to that odor again. This time she stands beside her Incan city, its green peaks cutting the sky open, painted on La Carreta Restaurant's wall. Her daughter is taking her photo, saying,"Sonríe, Mami , sonríe.""Smile, Mom, smile." The blindfolded horses are hoisted on board in belly slings, and their feet are tied, slightly touching the deck, suspended for most of the voyage, but once on land some will escape and revert to the wild. Know someone who needs their spirits lifted? Why not try a lavender or a rose scent? She lets the desert in, wild sage. The desert takes her back home while a farmer's pig crosses the highway. She sees her fake ID fly off the dashboard. The wheels of her upside-down car spin: Suspended, buckled to her seat, feet dangling, she spots the moon on the shards of her windshield, frozen tears, the peepholes blinking back at her. Death touches down like a hoof. A gust of wind pushes the seeds of dandelions upward, a flock of white, a gauze gown drifting over yuccas. Memory is the scent of soap bars taking refuge in a daughter's drawer.

I’m a frogman. Naked by the water Under a lean of canvas she’d sewn With a thick paraffin thread, She gestured.When we pulled him From the river His left leg was meal. Crayfish in the hair. The river bottom left his shoulder Layered and crocheted— My sister’s pearl knitting needles Clicking in my head. I told The sheriff I wouldn’t do it again. I knew him once. His Chevy threw a rod. I made it with him On the hood of the old truck. It was out at the dump beyond Yuma. It felt like I had bread crumbs All over my mouth. Wacky with the sun, I sure did it with him enough That afternoon. I didn’t Know it was him who’d drowned. They said it was his cousin. He had a three-cornered scar At the small of his back. And a deposit Of calcium on the tailbone. We’re not much, you know? He was tangled in yellow tree roots, He spun in the currents, A fishhook and line running From his thumb. A whole new ball of wax, I thought. I wanted to be an astronaut. But failed the mathematics Twice in one summer. So I raise Nubian goats. My favorite has a purple manure That comes out like steaming packets Of tobacco mulch. He sprays The shack with his seed— It hasn’t needed paint in three years. I just took my shorts off When you two came down the hill. It’s that rubber suit I wear When I dive into the chute and cave. Sometimes I just feel Like old air in a patched tire. Then, I get my Seagram’s and come out here. You two look married. Not that I care. You wouldn’t believe what I was just thinking— Your husband’s the only living man Left in this country Who knows that I bleach my hair.

Does my little son miss the smell of his first mother? I wonder as the mewl of his mouth opens toward a plastic bottle that is not her breast. Sudden new mother, I bury my nose deep into his skullcap of ringlets, his starry cheesiness. In her good-bye letter to him sealed in his album with a birth certificate, which now list my name as Mother, his first mother writes she nursed him briefly after he emerged into the second room of his world. I think of milk, volcanic and insistent, answering the newborn’s gigantic thirst, a primal agreement between generosity and greed. Sometimes I press my nose to the glass of that place where a mother and my child belong to each other; I cannot imagine coming between them. But then I want to lick him all over with a cow’s thick tongue, to taste him and mark him as mine so if the other mother returns, she will refuse her handled calf smeared with my smell.

I In September beyond the breezes and the smoke when autumn unveils its fiery shell, I think of you fragile and severe, small and immense II You were a traveler through demented and subtle geographies with your magic wand singing about Yugoslavia and Lebanon Chile and Peru —Those details on imaginary sheets, doubtful you would get lost because true history was made by women the girl-women and the old women. III When the children of war become a nebulous flame when the earth's shell is a shawl afire with gold, I name you, Marta Alvarado, arriving almost at dawn with your bony woolen gloves to open the school's doors and the defiance of your notebook.

Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would say screen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry. In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Would ride it up onto his forehead for brief intervals, then down, pulled by hand that still worked. A bit. Sometimes shaking too much so just cried eyes. Cried now now. Once cried out light— more like a hiss — was there for that. Yanked it quick. Needed it so badly, the bandage, the world is a short place, wanted the illustration of it gone, wanted to not see out, wanted no out. But I am guessing. The vineyards down the slope, each latent bud beginning to plump. In the distance, mountains. Beyond sea. All of it distraction, but from what. A waste of what. The red sleepmask. I should have burned it with the rest but kept it. The pane made trees look painted on. Silky. Not good silky. In the next valley once, hammering. Thought it human at first. The woodpeckers went on for days. A carnival of searching for void. How full void is. Small tufts of grass growing so that I can keep track.Taking root is not an easy way to go about finding a place to stay

I found me in a great surging space, At either end a door, And I said: "What is this giddying place, With no firm-fixéd floor, That I knew not of before?" "It is Life," said a mask-clad face. I asked: "But how do I come here, Who never wished to come; Can the light and air be made more clear, The floor more quietsome, And the doors set wide? They numb Fast-locked, and fill with fear." The mask put on a bleak smile then, And said, "O vassal-wight, There once complained a goosequill pen To the scribe of the Infinite Of the words it had to write Because they were past its ken."

After BIGBANG’s “Fantastic Baby” Matarose never comes home She’s hungry like a wolf She’s rosa de mota in lacroix all the girls hail on queens boulevard All the views she’s killed in the name of iman & yasmin le bon Mata’s quite meta Mata means kill Rose a curve from the real meat of it all She’s part my little pony into bronies she has loved & loved not by astro-pony compatibility chart She’s the queerest part of me What’s left after the clubs close & has yet to go home she never goes when she writes I always write in bed just woofed down a 3 musketeers                          mata’s on a mission which is to say I’m my most           queer my most mata- rose when she & I don’t need all the girls in the yard don’t need all the girls in the yard by which I mean the one who’s not the one whose blocked texts & torn up wish you wells flicker still      That riddle get you killed kind of a woman for whom matarose almost cut off a foot Went to the end of twobuck ghosting rails My man is a little afraid of mata            he accepts her tho Lets her come & go because I stay I am always with him because mata just wants every 7 train to dissolve into g-dragon sound wants you to howl boom mata mata boom mata mata wow g-mata dragonrose The most pony of them all g-mata 7 dragontrainrose Don’t wait up Never last stop never comes boom mata mata boom mata mata home

Forgive me, if I wound your ear, By calling of you Nancy, Which is the name of my sweet friend, The other’s but her fancy. Ah, dearest girl! how could your mind The strange distinction frame? The whimsical, unjust caprice, Which robs you of your name. Nancy agrees with what we see A being wild and airy; Gay as a nymph of Flora’s train, Fantastic as a fairy. But Anna’s of a different kind, A melancholy maid, Boasting a sentimental soul, In solemn pomp arrayed. Oh ne’er will I forsake the sound, So artless and so free Be what you will with all mankind, But Nancy still with me.

For Yogita and Anish “Ah neva seen this before in all ma years.” Testify, Sis. How we grew accustomed, Spoiled almost, by decorum, now try Mosquito larvae cultivating at speed In standing bodies of water. Pigeons Flock rooftops, twist, launch, shout As one, spin sky, turn skulls porous. Car repair shop drills sing industry. Tires feel out parking, meters freed. First horn blare triggers this chorus. Step up pistons, fire motor mouths, Say our only worry is our worst fears Come true. Mosquito straw proboscis Drinks from my arm, bam! Adios asterisk. • But, really, am I eyeballing an armored truck? Says one dung beetle to half earthworm, Who replies, as Gloucester, I see it feelingly. Who gave those uniforms permission to storm School car parks, automatics drawn? Finches ask Robins, who, channeling Auden, whistle — Bang! WTF! Bang, bang, Lulu, Lulu gone... The calypso worked its juju On my digital radio. Flags at half-mast for this Union. Taps on trumpets dawn till dusk. Guides, Scouts, look out for rainbows Projected on a disused warehouse in LA County. Clocks throughout the land tell one contiguous time. Rain and shine stop dead in tracks on borderlines. • Cat asks me if dogs can ever be cool. After two of my kind pin down one of his On a front porch until chased off by our rulers. I open my mouth to spit some piety about Lions lying down with lambs but only bark What my genes say I should, ears pulled back. Do you remember Judas Iscariot? Thirty silver Pieces and a certain last supper just for this. A taser for every problem warns the bee With an empty bonnet, sting for emphasis, About why one plus one never makes two, After voting from sea to oil-slicked sea. Look at her, look at him, hold, kiss babies In photo ops, all gaga, minus bathtub Never mind water, in this national soap, This wait for the next sentence whose weight “Illegals” carry on shoulders they look over Nonstop, even in sleep, one eye open, Breath held when police cruise by, Car backfire skin jump heartbeat skip, Day in, day out, glory hallelujah, do I have A witness as empire zips into bonfire. For what? To dip wrists in fresh water From an inverted fountain in a square. • Black lives matter but blue lives matter more. Duh. Veins, blue, blood, plus or minus, B this or A that. Epicurus, I find your coin staring up at me From the bottom of my beer mug, too late For Troy, for Trayvon. I need a flotation device, A buoy, Woolf’s lighthouse and single room Garvey’s Star Line to beam me up Scotty. Where is yesteryear’s full moon that silvered Towers and made a midnight lake of the city Where lovers strolled, hand in hand, one black, One white, with no mind for anyone and no two Minds in their business? Gone the way of drones Whose shadows crossed the moon without trace On GPS to sow grief in the name of cod, liver, oil. Spell it out or risk talk stuck in ecofriendly caves. Black and blue, both, why can’t we, intoned, Rodney (not Walter), get along? Because, Because, because (fill in the dots) with your Trotsky (or Brodsky) and your Marx (Groucho). Laugh therapy narrows eyes, blocks ears, Hurts jaws, ribs, merrily, merrily, cha-cha. Cha. • Eek-A-Mouse blasts my buds, as I read The instruction manual, which says One thing but leads to another When I piece it together, finally. It being the thing I refuse to name. My nerves, porous as that strainer I hold over a tilted pot full of spaghetti In hot water. Pavarotti in the shower, Malcolm before a cracked mirror, Gaga at each news item competing For part Fool. Ornate, abandoned nest Left in place, in my suburban rafter, Squirreled from without a note, Unless feathers could ever be a sign Of things to come, of what once was. • Face Beckett’s door, imperceptibly ajar. His stage direction, for how things Turn out here if this show goes on. Sir Ian, why reserve your last check For your flies, before you take the stage? Because all eyes alight there first. Mr. Spock, where is the logic in this? I marvel at comics from my youth In 4K, LED.Captain, put me ashore. By which I mean at sea with sirens, Ears unwaxed, sternum lashed to bow. What is your name? Kunta. Whip. Am I not a ... asked Sizwe in Fugard. You are trans, on loan from genes, Dust, waves, particles, here, today. • Go-go in la-la land whines craft for art’s saké. See that chrysalis hanging like a mural. Should it stop unfolding, hold back Dues, suspend when wings peel gloves, Snake free, take flight, remind the greed In our chi, Che, cha, what turns without Turning? If you must know, but first, Shush, write milk in lemon juice on foolscap, Read by passing over Bunsen. Mercurial Chemists, we were all Curie. Cooked crack Ready to pay any price, to find out if love Could ever be a portion, all you would need, To spin Mercator a tad faster on whiteout Poles, match our heart, tap, rat-a-tat burst. • 1.  Hummingbird feeder needs refill 2.  Peel sticker, off window, that says glass 3.  Buy T-shirt with directive, mind the gap 4.  Sip tea from mug, of civil rights dead 5.  Breathe in, sure, but really exhale 6.  Note how breeze lifts a whole branch 7.  Whose green skirt shows white undies • I mean certain legends about flight that grow up with right minds to help them come to terms with change that may be out of their control. Lone branch ranges from a curved palm 90 feet over LA’s 1914 craftsman in historic Adams. How flayed branch cruises broadcasts a specific gravity geared to flight of the right kind, slow, bracing, reluctant, noncommittal, inevitable, and resigned to its fate. Through double-glazing I hear, so I believe, that swoosh of storied capital decline, swish perhaps, almost a whistle, as you wish, much like us as kids with a clasped blade of grass held to our pursed lips for that didgeridoo that was elevator music to us atonal types. But how can a branch sing if made to move on by wind and rain from where it began, and thought it would end, even if a philosophy spread among shoots of a final sail set for another dimension? As word of government raids spread through town and university we forwarded emails, Instagrams, and stopped with neighbors in streets to exchange the latest. Is this time for emergency measures or are we too blind to know what we can feel coming a mile away, where someone who knows someone we know stops for bread, milk, eggs and is grabbed, handcuffed, and carted off to detention? Imagine us as branches dislodged in a sea change helped by soft water. We cling, not to give up on all we know. What for? That fall, we must accept as fate. • Juggernaut ancestors shape-shift cumulus, March across dull blue grass to bagpipes. Change bandages on Grandmother. Amputated right hand she says she feels Rainy days in Georgetown as a firm handshake That rattles all 27 phantom bones, makes her shiver. Grandfather never averts his bifurcated lens From his Golden Treasury, unless his hanky readies To catch eyewater at the blurred sight of her. In a time of airships, of toothpicks operated Behind hand cover. Whoever you vote for, (Runs the calypso) the government gets in, Ting-a-ling-a-ling. Doan tek serious thing Mek joke, bannoh. WTF. Twin towers got us Here. Nah, Reagan. Nope, slavery. Try again. Irony, that republic of deferred action. Hummingbird smashes into that glass door, My mother walks absently into it too. I glance just in time, brake and catch a face That I look through to my final destination. • K Street in South London? Now? How? One morning at 6:30 I crossed Blackheath Hill. On my paper round Met a scrawny fox halfway Uphill, down, not sure. We paused, inhaled each Other, fox-trotted away, In a slight panic, Me thinking tabloid Headlines, rabid animal Chases paper kid On delivery route. Follow as I buzz myself Into a tower, Board elevator, a man In a suit exits, With the merest nod. Climb 8 floors, carry That fox, and just as I plunge The folded Mirror Into letter box, Door, ajar, flies open, wham! A very pregnant Woman, naked, swollen breasts Blazing redhead, small Burning bush at crotch, Fills doorframe, scrambles my head. She takes one moment To compute I am Not her partner, slams door, smack, In my wide-eyed face. That moment, as she Processes me and I her, Stretches out enough For me to see her Shoulder-length, red, flaming curls And inverted red Triangle tuft at her crotch, Bright stretched skin at her Distended navel, An outie, as though I crashed at high speed and could Recall the lead up Frame by stark frame for Posterity, mine and hers, Her child near its term. The rest of my round I peer left, right, near distance, Round bends, for said fox. I conjure woman, Pregnant, framed by her threshold, Here, now, with only Me, you, these measures, This emergency, all three, To foster, connect all. • Lap up 70s Airy Hall, Guyana. One road in and one road out, One of everything village, Caiman, donkey, peacock, And mad expat Englishman Footloose and fancy-free Who we stone with red sand That crumbles on contact Grabbed from the roadside That acts as giant bow, Strung with two-story house, Whose Greenheart frame, Tensed, held all this time. English pelted for saying, Down his big burnt nose, That he was sent here To rule us half-clad children That he in his better days Seeing better times before Guyana’s famous red rum Got the better of him, Helped sow high and low, And everything between Our town and country. • Maestro, we played shoots Planted in one place Sprouts in disorderly rows, Up whole feet if you look away For a spell, all loaded In one hammock strung Between rafters in a back room Empty until harvest Stuffed paddy from roof To pillar to post. Rice husk smell for days. Rocking chair song and dance On full moons, donkey-bray At midday, peacock-scream Various most afternoons. • Now help bring barefoot Pale instep, cracked heel, stamping Englishman back, not to curse, Stone or ridicule, but to hear How he would remedy this now So out of sync with then. • Once more help us • Parse wheat from chaff, • Quantify this voting • Result that tests our gall. • Stepped-on alligator, Uncle • Takes for a log bridge • Until it lifts, shakes, yawns. • Velocity of legs cycling air, Caiman, not alligator, Lassoed between two poles, Fetched back to the house, Cut loose in a fenced field For sport for that day, Lost to me every day since. I bring it back, steady Its shine, against this time, • Where I am told one past Counts most, all others Must be put down to what That alligator, jaws open, Head reared, presents, Ready to lash with tail, Charge at anyone Who takes it for a log. • X marks the spot where Englishman walks in half Circles, pumps his bent Arms as if to fly, cackles Like a peacock, only to get The real thing started, The two in a quarrel thrice Removed from that magic Flower duet from Lakmé By Léo Delibes. Peacock, Donkey, caiman, village fool, Be my ally, bring it all, Cow, moon, dish, spoon. • Yo-Yo Ma follows Eek On democracy’s Shuffle Play. • Zebra asks me in Queen’s English peppered with Esperanto If he be black whiff white stripes Or white wid black stripes. I wake with this atonal pair On the edge of my edginess: “I do not care, I do not care, If the Don has on underwear.” “But don’t you think or worry some, That his nudity is zero sum?” “I cannot see for the life of me, Why that should concern anybody.” “I fret when all’s said and done, We leave him be, he has his fun.”

What brings me alive is less than simplicity, is a company of soldiers in shiny blue jackets boiling chickens in the shade by the Erasmus Gate, is the fact that my grandfather died begging for mercy in a hotel in Atlanta, and that my grandmother, in 1910, mourned because her breasts were small. I know four men who paddled the length of the Mississippi in a dugout they hacked and burned out of a beech tree. When anyone mentioned rivers they would look at each other and their eyes would soften with the memory of mists and sand bars, of the grave black brows of river barges. I come from a country as large as Brazil, but all I remember are the wet silver webs of golden jungle spiders netted in the cane. I wake up thinking of my brother, who, on a July morning in 1954, killed a boy without meaning to. And I can tell you that this isn’t true, that my brother didn’t, as he swept back a four iron on the lawn of our house in Sea Island, crack the temple of a boy we had only met the night before. I can say Yes I am lying again, about the boy, about Sea Island, but as you get up to fix another drink I will tell you a story about sleeping in a hay barn in Turkey and of waking in the night, as, one by one, the farm hands stood out of the rank straw to greet us. I want you to know that my life is a ritual lie and that I deserve to be loved anyway. I want you to smile when I tell of the purple hyacinths caught in the gears of the raised bridge over the Chickopee River, I want you to pretend you were there. My sister’s hips were two ax handles wide, she wept that no one would love her, my sister, who waded among yellow poppies and wondered if she were really alive—I want you to wish you had married her, I want you to say Please, why did she leave me, Get her back, O my God, how can I live without her. I’m not even amazed that I want you to say this. Listen, I came downstairs this morning and somebody had filled the house with flowers.