BLACK GRANDDAUGHTER CALLS JAPANESE GRANDMOTHER

I hold the phone
and my hand shakes.
I ask her why is it I’m not invited. 

She has no answer.

I’m too black to be shown. 

I knew before I asked her.
I knew she didn’t want to show me to her neighbors.

Now hear the dial tone. 

My mother danced to soul
under the light of a disco ball
and never returned to
kneel on a bamboo floor.

THE HOTTENTOT VENUS CAKE IN SWEDEN

The room is full of white people in a cold place. 

A government sponsored event.

They smile and use a knife to cut her open,
a life-size thick black female body
with an African bug a boo face.

They plate pieces of her,
lick her black icing skin,
fork to their lips, saying mmm, delicious.

Her inner flesh is red, perhaps red velvet,
classic American southern favorite.

A black male Sambo artist 
created the installation.
With each hack,
the artist would cry for effect.

One white man’s hands shake 
as he cut his piece away,
ashamed. 

Why did he do it?

The prime minister cuts the clitoris of Hottentot Venus.

A white woman whispers in the black man’s ear,
your life will be better after this.

I don’t know how close I was. 
I was not paying attention to him

or his raised middle finger, which
he was tired of holding up,

his face lowered out the window at me,
glass down, even though the air 

was freezing in upstate Vermont.
I have sped past, unthinking, it’s true.

I have sped past so many things.
How many miles until I know what I have done

is always the question. For a minute, 
I thought I should be afraid

and watched him in my mirror in case
he sped to catch me. I have sped past and have been 

unthinking so many times I want 
the world to know. Once, a man leaned out 

a passenger window and fired his gun at the sky
as I sped past. One time, a deer jumped 

across my hood, which was accelerating, 
while my son and I belted out, 

Why do you build me up (build me up) 
Buttercup, baby 

just to let me down.
And nothing was the same afterward.

He grew, next, into someone 
I’m desperate to track, to keep from harm,

to follow into the underbrush, wearing
orange vests or branches, depending.

The man crouched down in his fast, small car.
He stayed in line and left the highway

without closing his window. 
Which was when I knew I was still alone.

A sign: one semi-truck cab hauling identical cabs 
—one climbing up on the next, identical.

I know I was not wrong.
The way one carried the next, as if knowing

there was no other way to go.
And each was precisely like the other

so I craned my neck as I sped past them, too,
in case they, too, were astonishing.

The Threesome

Quintessence

Puritanical Life

Korrebrug Kafka

These Sisters

Everything Connects, ink on paper, 18×24″, 2018

Meditation XXIII (open heart), ink on paper, 18×24″, 2020

Everything Connects, watercolor on paper, 9×12″, 2018

but I’m just this tiny little thing
that was too quiet to become a prophet myself.

In the ocean, I’m not bothersome. Above it,
I exist and pretend not to. You forget who

you are after being swallowed. It’s weird, thinking
like this. You say things like home to a whale who

has already found one. In the digestive system, all you can do
is swallow and pray. You want to be cast out, like a fish.

Look at this world, trying to get above the trees.
I know nothing but the fact that we are fish, not saplings,

or that I will never reach the top of the mountain. Still,
I keep trying. Otherwise: no point. That’s not

the first disappointment I’ve had, which is to say that I
was the first, the one who stole the whale’s heart

because mine wasn’t pure enough. Did I choke on Eve’s apple?
If I yank on God’s vocal cords, will he sing me a hymn?

I don’t know. I’m not Jonah. Just a wannabe tidal wave,
a stranger. Scratched in God’s throat.

let the wind take care of it 

crack the door, a window, let the air crack
            open the books stacked & strewn, too many
to read in the clutter of one life,

let blast into the burnt expanse of forest
            in my mind: each day the mirror
                      invites me beyond the need

                                         to be liked, into noticing:
            slopes of collarbone, bowl of pelvis,
what i am being moved toward: an image

of myself, running      out the car and toward
            the singed trees, smell of gasoline
                      faint but clinging—

pluck a softness

i am belly up beneath the dogwood plucking petals
when night comes out sprawls out beside me

they say, if you want a name
i have a fissure

night knows i long for a new name
night’s pronouns are they/them

i nod                     we toss
            voices in familiar lilt &
                      scatter

they say, you are swooned by seeming ground
what is beneath that?

i glue stamen to stigma
pollen’s lip-lock untethered
                botany of another wish
                                          to-have    to-do
                                the shattering into

                                                                                  once upon a time
                                                    in an alley, city gave night their quiet back
                                                    at what cost i do not ask

night is matter of fact: no matter
how much salt
is in your head            you still have
a body

KIN                                    

       (after Joseph O. Legaspi & Larry Levis)

Mother and smother are such similar words,
I can’t help but wonder if it’s by coincidence
or design. Same goes, I suppose, 
for father and farther, though I’ve tried with my kids 
to be present and knowable, no flicker
of myth, but like a Midwestern turnpike 
lapped in steady light. Last night, my mom called
to tell me I don’t call her, though I could tell
through the cellphone that each line 
was rehearsed. I could tell she was parked 
outside Pathmark or Foodtown while my father 
practiced takeoffs out of Republic Airport— 
his pale Cirrus curling the traffic-
controlled skies. Last night, my son beat my ass
in UNO—a barrage of prime numbers 
and primary colors, then a Wild + 4
put me to bed. Not bad for a four-year old
who sleeps cat-like across our pillows 
to nuzzle the fantasia of my wife’s midnight hair 
while I get skull-stomped by tiny bare feet. 
How will my subconscious calculate 
these improprieties? My father, a good man, 
flies farther from me daily. We see each other
the way a field spots a peregrine  
migrating south. My mother left me
another voicemail today. In UNO, the objective
is to be free of all cards, to detach 
from the very contours of the game—but I remember 
after he won and yelped quietly with delight, 
how my son’s small hands pressed
the scattered cards together, both together 
and towards me to reshuffle the deck. 

BIRTHDAY                                                  

When my daughter turned seven,
she missed being six. 

She didn’t want, she said,
to leave her old self behind. 

And I, who had turned seven, 
then eight, and many more, 

sat on the edge
of her warm twin bed 

and said, you take it  
all with you, you bring all 

your selves with you 
into the future. I don’t know

what I believe, but I think
she believed me. 

I told her nothing is ever lost,
and kept repeating it

till she rose in her nightgown
in the morning dark.

How he reads the paper, his frail
then firm exhalations gliding along each word,
breath dancing a sentence’s waltz
and driven spin just below my ear,
swaying in the quiet of a house
otherwise buried beneath the din of my thoughts.
The labor of my own reading is silent,
corralling all of these book’s voices in my head,
refusing to let any out into the pasture
of the room while his tongue’s soft percussion
clicks in time with the folding
and unfolding of his brow. Each comma
gives him a chance to suck in more air,
the noise of which sends my attention
careening from the page, away from its castles
and systems of magic, and toward his measured
gasps that move me between fascination
and disgust like the sounds of a loud chew.
The muscles in his face must twitch then stiffen
out of habit. No. He has only made 
this practice of meeting the printed word
recently, turning the newspaper’s box scores 
and block quotes into speech, morphing his voice
into music not his own but in his key.
My father blowing quarter notes
into this pasture, this field, this meadow,
while the farmhands in my skull sigh
at what seems like wasted work: keeping
the boy and his wizard inside the fence.

I left the sky forever and became
nurse to fish that frequent muddy water.
I buoy everything lonely and pregnant.

my family was here before legs
or seawater carried them. some leapt early
to be reborn under my skirts. others were tossed.

I am headless without my children.
my mind is the moon.
I am an aching creek, a loin of lake.
my innards spool the earth.

droughts dry liquid flesh, the mudfish
and flatheads; they breathe air and live, die, or leave.

somewhere else, my grandchildren take and eat
distant cousins, fins and heads removed.
they throw what is perfectly good away. most beg
grace from father and son, and sometimes
a ghost resembling me.

they forget my restless body broken,
and instead imagine flight, stardust,
lakes on fire, mathematics. some know
they all return to me, that heaven
is a muddy riverbed.

She named us Yuri and Sergei and Boris. 
The first verbs we learned were to smoke, to drink, 
to live. We were thirteen years old. We learned 

through repetition. I smoke, you smoke, 
he or she smokes. We live. She named me Masha, 
Mashinka when I was good, Mashka when I was bad, 

which was often. We memorized charts 
of endings. How neatly the language 
fit together, like the nesting dolls 

she carried from Russia in a suitcase, 
Ded Moroz and his granddaughter 
Snegurochka, nestled inside each other. 

Everything worth having, according to her, 
had been carried from Russia in a suitcase,
except for Levi’s jeans and ballpoint pens.

She named me Slovar, which means dictionary. 
She promised us, one day, she would take us 
to Russia, suitcases filled with Levi’s jeans. 

We could sell them for one hundred USD a pair,
she promised. She never wore jeans.
She wore leather mini-skirts, orange or purple, 

and matching turtleneck sweaters with high heels. 
She had great legs. She liked to sit sideways 
at her desk, legs crossed to one side. She liked 

the lights off in the classroom except for 
a small desk lamp, its glow circling her head 
like a spotlight. She named Steven Bledny, 

which means pale. She named him Peasant 
when he spoke with a Ukrainian accent. 
She wore brick red lipstick, a permanent smirk.

One heel dangled from her foot as she crossed
her legs. She liked to tell us the dirt on Peter the Great,
on Anastasia. Her large square glasses shone,

her high rounded perm circled her head
like a halo. She showed us a movie about Rasputin 
and the czar’s hemophiliac son 

and Bledny almost fainted at the nosebleed scene. 
She told us how Catherine the Great
had a machine built so she could fuck horses.

She didn’t say fuck, but we understood,
or thought we did. She started every story,
I know you think I’m lying. We never 

thought she was lying. We chanted after her, 
kuda ty idesh. Ya idu domoy. Where are you going? 
I’m going home. She promised to tell us 

how her family escaped Russia. She used 
the word escaped. She promised to tell us 
if we all got an A on the quiz 

and we did. I’m not in the mood, she said. 
She was never in the mood. She never 
brought us to Russia. In the dark, 

she wrote all thirty-six letters on the board 
in swirling cursive. She named the letter 
she liked best, the pretty letter. Once, 

when we were bad, she left the classroom.
Through the window, we could see her walking 
across the parking lot, her high heels clicking.

She got into her car and drove away. 
The lights were off. It was winter outside. 
We remembered the song she taught us,

the one she made us sing over and over.
Pust’ vsegda budet solntse, pust’ vsegda budet nebo, 
pust’ vsegda budet Mama, pust’ vsegda budu ya.

Let there always be sun, let there always be sky, 
let there always be Mama, let there always be I. 
Each line had a matching hand movement.

We had practiced it a hundred times. 
We believed everything she told us. 
Her name was Olga but we never called her that.

We sat in the dark and waited for her. 

A story told this many times becomes the forest.
No beginning, no end, no longer a narrative but the air
we breathe. For centuries, a woman with a name
rises from her sleep—becomes a tree—rains back down
again into her rest. One myth for how poetry began:
a man, reaching. Violence. Myth: Apollo finds the tree
inside of a woman. Apollo translates fingers into leaves,
hears a voice and calls it wind. I am not interested in Apollo.
I am interested in the father-god who could not stop
the rape but could turn his daughter into a tree—

                               what kind of power is that, and how does it still river through
                               our world? Why does nobody ask these questions? I carry more
                               keys than I need. Walking home from the library late, I thread
                               silver teeth through my fist. I am not a tree, and I am asking.