Flower Moon in Quarantine
Astrologers say this moon in Scorpio is where we welcome the death of an old life, an old identity, old ways of being. It’s letting ourselves be reborn […]
Astrologers say this moon in Scorpio is where we welcome the death of an old life, an old identity, old ways of being. It’s letting ourselves be reborn […]
My father did not fight in Vietnam, as he was a young scholar with a family Until he left home one day without explanation, exiled himself from doing harm.[…]
How to let people know I love them without reminding them I’m real. Am I real? Would it be better if I was real? How many times can a real person say “I love you” before someone gets annoyed and straight-up murders them?[…]
In Theology, I learned Jesus called his father Abba, and passed because it’s the name I call my own—who feared that I would leave Friday Mass half-faithful, forgetful of the place where I learned how to be hated.[…]
trust me when I say I am not you. I do not know who you are, your likes & dislikes, why you care about this-that, him-her, why you cried or hours on end over at Krakow, burying yourself in the chest of a room I can’t recall[…]
the dying Italian mother of seven
raps the ceiling with a wood cane
as we make love in silence—no
less eager than a mother scolding
I knew for a decade just one way to die the one that took my uncle, my cousin, all the kids from my high school who didn’t leave town.[…]
not subtlety, and at sundown begin moaning. The veterinarians act more veterinarianly. It must be internal damage. It must be the liver rupturing. Yes, the liver. And that is how these prognoses tend. Diagnosis being […]
Poets are just whisperers, whispering the rose verse, Weaving words as a curse. They wander the groves In order to find doves. They wander the meadows, So they find adagios. They wander the streams, To find the crowns of queens. Poets are just whisperers, Who their lament makes ornate.[…]
your island, before storms and faces crashed on your shores with new names for death and stolen lands, whips and dark nights, histories of ancestors piled in the hulls of ships[…]
The auction block still rides on the black backs of ghosts hurling themselves town to town […]
The chapped lips of last season’s flora, the winter-cracked cattails slowly recovering their limber. Today I saw a willow precisely […]
I want our childhood back to watch the ice break off at the shoreline and float away when the sun begins to warm the waters of Lake Superior early spring. Or spend whole Saturdays planting the pink and purple candy-striped petunias you loved in flower boxes and along the borders of our little sidewalk. […]
Everyday the author takes the bus like a distant hum, I love that. I love that somebody leaves the author a voicemail and doesn’t talk about pain as a thin golden feather. I love that the author calls back.[…]
Two boys pull green oranges from the tree
that hangs over the churchyard fence. They
throw them into the street with such auto-
matic skill that they may be the same boys
sent to kill in any war that will never be theirs […]
With Cleopatra eyes and Sadé skin her words sting clear as Noxema lather:
“Mom, I’m not pretty,” she confesses. “What?” I accuse—“What do you mean,”
I spit and sputter, my mind scrambling to organize an understanding
of this violence she commits against herself […]
I almost see myself trip and shatter
us both on the stairs. I almost see
my arms slip and tumble you over
the balcony to crack on the sidewalk
below […]
The Shekhinah
Some say the Shekhinah is the queen
of presence, pulsing upward through
the living earth, bidding us to bloom
in our skins. The apple orchard
in full blossom. But when you see me,
I am a burning flame,
blonde hair billowing behind.
You have no throne festooned with ribbons,
no needle to embroider my plastic chair,
no silks to shimmer with my light.
I am an environmentalist drinking
from a Styrofoam cup. In cafes, I am silent,
can’t chat about good coffee and bad men. In the sukkah
sleeping under the eyes of myrtle, I dreamt I
was walking in Umm Batin and from under the main street
Hebron’s sewage rose till I was wading,
waste on my face, slogging until I got to a tent
to sip thick coffee and smoke a negilah, a minyan
of black-clad men in a corner bobbing. No
sewage here. It settled back into the earth.
I awoke shivering, sick under the patchy sky,
choking on ashes. I longed to tell my friends,
to dwell in the tabernacle of fellow feeling,
to harvest some compassion, to share
how our eyes always on Jerusalem blinds us to the stranger
who also dwells here, who doesn’t need the sukkah
to know everything is connected—new settlement
bathrooms, sewage leaching into the soil, meat, and cheese.
Next year in Jerusalem the chance of a Bedouin
getting cancer up 60 percent. I opened my mouth
but bees flew out, buzzing about a village girl
molested by her brother. Silence heavy in the sukkah.
In Wadi el-Naam, the health clinic I built to help
sits on a toxic waste dump. I ring out the last drops
of my strength in that village. I now pay to protect
the solar panels. My partner
accuses me of getting kickbacks from doctors.
This land holds magic and poison,
everything that sustains, every toxin.
It gets into your blood. I burn
to be part of the tribe, harvest rainwater,
farm like Ruth and Naomi, tend grapes and olives
without grabbing from those who have so little left.
How can you break bread around the Shabbat
table with those who don’t care?
So I live in a flat in Tel Aviv
no earth between my fingers, no growth to tend,
gates to God closed. My land, my heart
cordoned off with eight meters of concrete
and spirals of wire. The Wall
where papers are checked
and compassion halts.
In Hebrew, the word for person
is adam; adama, soil, has the same root.
I want this place
to feel like home.
The Key to the Cinema
My psych of genocide
prof invited me to a Friends
of Palestine meeting.
There each spoke around the circle
of their connection with Palestine.
A woman showed an old
photo, opened a box
on the mantel, took out
a key. Outside Jaffa
Gate was my house.
It’s a cinema now.
Her son said he’d never
been home.
A long
walk and there it is—
the Cinematheque. Not
the same walls—abandoned,
demolished—maybe what Mahmoud
meant when he said a house
dies without its owner. So
when the dead or dreaming visit,
they see old rooms;
the children’s ghosts chase
each other with a toad when no one’s
around like the day I wandered through
(why open yet empty?), red
ropes holding nothing back,
and from theatre four I heard
Grandma’s soft snore
as she took her rest before suppertime.
The Very Breath of Children Is Free of Sin
from a short passage in Raja Shehadeh’s Strangers in the House
As children were walking home from school
men kidnapped a boy
walking home from school
and shot randomly into the crowd of boys
walking home from school
who ran to the hills for cover.
Children were walking home from school
but one boy had not returned. His mother went
to the prison where she was told her son was kept
she was afraid he was cold and brought a sweater
to the prison where she was told her son was kept;
the prison guard took it from her
at the prison where she was told her son was kept
and promised to hand it to him
inside the prison where she was told her son was kept.
Aching, three days. She waited, yet
the boy was not released
from the prison where she was told her son was kept;
a shepherd found the boy
dead above the village
killed by one of the men’s bullets
walking home from school.
The children pick
the peeling yellow
paint from the bathroom
pipes and lick it
while Mama is gabbing
on the phone with
her sister. Papa returns
from work at four
and takes the yellow
plastic strap out of
the second dresser
drawer and whips
their thighs since
Mama has delegated
punishment for their
transgressions
during the day:
failure to put toys
away promptly,
picking at sausages
at lunch, plucking
the neighbor’s
lilies-of-the-valley
on their walk
to Jewel.
Tomorrow they’ll go
to Headstart and tell
the teacher the first
thing in the morning
they see is rets and
she’ll inquire, “Is
rets your dog?”
in college, the men i
gave trembling permission to
scurry inside of me, would,
more often than not,
send me hobbling to the
student clinic. the nurse, as incandescent
as a light bulb with rage,
tells me that sex is not supposed
to require three tylenol. my
roommate, eyebrow raised at
the troupes of grubby-nailed
students, asks if i even
enjoy myself—and so
i allow myself to let them all go,
except for him.
he is so unlike the others in his stillness:
curled over as a comma at the back end
of the bar, hair rapunzel long
and perfumed against the heavy
leather of his jacket. i come to
him on purpose, duck my head
and listen to confessions:
how he misses the touch of newborn
animals now that he has
left the farm his mother raised him on,
how he wakes up with the
scent of birth in his nostrils
and finds it a comfort.
i remind myself
that nothing good has come
from boys who reverently speak of blood
under their nails but
maybe this one is permissible,
this outlier with eyelashes
stark and gentle, who passed a hand
over the flag on his jacket and
spoke of needlepoint with reverence,
who does not hide a soprano giggle
when i tuck a crocus behind the
conch of his ear and whispers,
sweet-eyed and limpid, that he
feels as if i am his
husband, in another universe,
another lifetime.
in this one, i close my eyes
and kiss him open-mouthed against
the side of his car, hands sure
and calloused on the curve of
a hip, warn him
that my body greeting his
is nothing short of a
magic trick turned miracle,
never repeated twice.
mother
1. noun. presence, as in constant
ex: “the mother is here.” see also: mama, mommy
see the child cry out in fear, in loneliness
see the presence quiet the child
see presence beyond himself
2. verb. to rear, as in to create
ex: she mothers and mothers and mothers
until she is no more and the child is
overwhelmed. see also: to tend, to weed,
as in gardens, as in minds, as in impulses
3. noun (archaic). one, as in symbol
ex: the gravestone was engraved simply
mother, as in “she longed to be—”
as in “they longed for her to be—” see also:
blessed; see also: have mercy, mercy on us
Triptych of the Adobe-Cotta Army
East Palo Alto, Circa 2000 AD
My fingers are desperate
to unearth the ruins
of my countrymen.
Only to find a Tesla
on the second floor
of our apartments
—now a parking garage.
The Amazon logo
smirks above me,
like a biblical cloud.
*
Out here, hooded saints
tore the covenant
of earthly silence.
Passed out Zig-Zag
leaflets, to preach
the gospel of skin.
Whirling dervishes
in long white tees,
bum-rushed me
at a bautizo. Pressed
against my lips,
the cholo chalice
kill it blood.
My chest flushed
at watching boys bronze
into adobe-cotta.
A driveway floodlight,
the barrio’s moon,
casted their bodies.
As they placed bets
against the armors they carried.
A fist tucked
inside a hoodie,
his knuckles spelling
the names of ex-lovers.
Each letter tatted
with a rusted clip.
Cocked belt-buckle
whose colors shouted
to the block
who he fucks with.
Until asphalt swallows
him again, and Marías
now mourn Jesús
outside a sagging fence.
Wreathe his chain-
link with lit candles,
cardboard signs saying
“We miss you.” Streamers
without the heated balloon
that promised flight.
*
Consider the clothesline as a bandolier
slung over weathered soldiers,
whose uniformes still clung
to apartment balconies.
Quien cedieron sus tierras
to raise the wrinkled flags
of blusas and neon vests.
Consider this Aztec sacrifice:
a father offers an empire
his daily flesh. Kneels
on the melted tar
of its tongue, winces
at the body turned legal (tender).
All to nurse the newborn
with this vision,
una vida mejor.
And so Father cradled my head
inside asphalt. Prayed
for our rite
to simply wade.
los frijoles ya se quemaron
voy
a tenderlos,
as suitcases chuckle
through our home.
sobres stashed
in gabinetes, cash
in chamarras.
mamá inside her black
mustang, rezando
bluetooth misteros
con cuñadas.
what’s changed,
i think
es que ahora,
la creo.
that in reno
or fresno, or
the broad shoulders
of a califas carretera
is her—
a fitted red dress,
botas de tacón,
freshly dyed hair
blushing—
at the nights
that paint
her face
con la misma fé
she once had
for these walls,
burgundy,
off white,
rosita.
that is to say,
i wish i’d been there
amá,
by your side
in the courtroom,
when apá buried
his face
inside the bench.
realizing then, he
wasn’t the sole owner
of this house
named grief.
cómo quisiera
levantar
su cara,
para que viera
the broken pieces
of me,
on car seats
& bedsides—
where the water broke
from your eyes,
birthed me
a man—
& see, the exact moment
i buried
my boyhood,
amá sabrá
que hacer.
Apology to Her Majesty, Queen Cardi B
Whereas Jimmy prolly can’t pronounce
your name; whereas that green mink’s
mad loud for primetime yuppies; whereas
pasty mugs quietly sipped the Bronx
in a canned Q&A; whereas tickle-me-
white, the color they blushed
after you hollered, Eyyuum!;
whereas was it with, or against you?
Whereas dey prolly ain’t ever seen
homegirls wreathe you
as their patron-saint—
lil’ Lauras wit dey laurels,
whose mouths run the block
searing chisme over hot concrete
and toe straps; whereas blessed b
the scented velas of acetone and plugged-in irons;
and still you trill
the hymns of jainas;
You who told the limelight,
Don’t get too close cuz I ain’t put
no lotion on my hand; whereas se ríen
as you explain your name, how Henny’s
the suture of Black and Brown hands
who killed a forty for each hour
on the job, who lick wounds
with liquor’s promise of numb;
whereas the smh tías who gawk
at the peacock tat running your thighs,
and sigh, cómo hemos caído; whereas
that part in “Motorsport,” where you bent
in front of butterfly doors, hollered,
I’m the trap Selena!; whereas the bark
that tickles my skin, as it does in the shade,
when me and the fellas untuck
the gaze we’ve longed to spliff all week;
whereas errtime I aimed homeboy’s head
like a slingshot, a young women-turned
pair-of-legs passing through the quad,
and eyes carve onto bare flesh;
whereas I chewed a human being
with a dangling mouth,
and called her redbone, feigned
to stare at the dead men
she hefted; whereas I respected
the spine of a book, the tattered
cloth of hardcover,
more than her own.
Whereas these temples of Hoteps
whet teeth with passed-down
stones, our crumbling masonry,
beret down plazas chanting
freedom, yet in dorm parties
bite off a brother’s tongue,
so he speaks nothing
but our worst hungers;
that snarl, who’s the lookout
today, as we try to outsmoke
each other, for the dogs we is.
May I catch the fang she spits
back, chew on my own question
No, are you with or against?
And I too am inside that studio,
clapping with them.
Therefore, be it resolved, Cardi,
Queen of the Bronx, this apology:
may the two-legged perros
claw this gangrene out,
so the tender vespers
that flock our word
not recite our catechisms.
May you, and all the women
who’ve guided my life,
never see the eyes
I once hawked.
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