Category: Poetry

Because I have a large spleen

and can hold my breath

but am traumatized enough

to keep my head swiveling,

I ask Nani, an island child like me,

What’s the most landlocked

state you can live in?

The salmon are flocking                     we got in the habit

of doing            without them             their scales         scraped

prickles across       clotted current                      and made us whole

You are asking the wrong question—

that is my fault

in part;

 

it’s not about any bird but why

the bird is nothing like

you and how you

must therefore take it

as far down your throat and into the soft cell

as possible.

Changing leaves colored

Cruel luminous

Red then yellow safety

Was it all a confused dream?

That week when August

Tripped into September

People trapped in a sports stadium

A woman carries

a collie to safety

I try to banish it from my brain, these dreams where I am bulbous & beautiful. where I am the butternut & she is the squash bug, burrowed into my bosom, my bowels, the base of my spine. her vine. a buzz betrays a blush of bees & bougainvillea above me. I blink & the bubble-gum blossoms crumble into beetles & blistered bark. the little bug . . .

After Eli Clare

 

The night we pushed the old

blue Mazda through cold

flood waters and bruises

bloomed like bayou algae

on my shoulder, neck, arms

Low rooms, poor light, cold water, figures on their knees or backs, lay down

boys, gonna be trouble in Cumberland Gap. Close my eyes, try to count

the conscripted fathers, husbands, sons, leased to Tennessee Coal and Iron,

They arrive in the autumn

for the Day of the Dead

 

three days of celebrations

the Purépecha tossing oranges

into the coffin of the grinning corpse

The world was warm and young.

Poplar fluff burned into smoke, into poplar smog.

We grew up quickly; what was honey turned into copper.

We saw the seam that runs in the heart of the universe.

I drive four hundred miles to my grandparents’

Angus cattle farm near Nestorville, West Virginia.

And walk up the knob, zenith and center of meadows

they mowed, cow paths, rust-roofed sheds, silo,

shrinking pond. Once, I knew how to find may apple,

trillium, and jewelweed. A crow says caw caw caw.

Maybe my lost ones are reaching for me. I stand

on the knob, I think . . .