Books I put up next to you.

As close as I can without belonging. Gods in awe of other gods.

                     Digging up love as new each time. 

                     As I show a willingness to love

You in one lifetime. Rodin’s marble back. 

                     A fragment in my hand.

                     How you contract in me. 

This is what I know. I am here alone. 

                     Death is only good at one thing.

Small motors for taming grass moan, the day not so hot, in the Times the columns of the dead are short ones

dried fronds droop at the tops of palms, brown petticoats to fall on walkers as Santa Anas send husks flying

the dream with a bride upended, long white veil trailing

a dance performance where Apollo and muses create expertly crafted geometry with their bodies

meeting the friend not seen for a long time, her tanned and lipsticked face, amiably she removes a sleek wig from her bald skull

it makes me so hot, little sounds with the mouth like water stumbling

past café windows green and black snakelike leaves, brushstrokes from a phallic era of painting, crow feathers’ seismic rustling

gray ficus trunks easy to carve into, names overlay names, roots coiled inconveniently above ground slashed to fit corridors between sidewalk and curb

here in my body it feels crowded, bottles slithering in a recycle truck, cataracts of glass

from Crown for Peasant Heads

X. 

땅 파고 지랄 떠는 그 새끼

My language is a worry
the world can’t convince
me I’m right.

I’m a man who hugs
head-cocked 
into an abacus. I kiss

the dirt with my knees,
count the last bar
of my wife’s song.  

I lose my wife 
to a bet. Hang
a sign she can’t see

on her wrist. Tie 
up her hair 
in a pony 

knot, yoke her 
to a marketplace,
give up my riches.

My wife gives 
children I wanted 
and dies.

Pay off my debt,
debtor. Move her to a vault
where no fault

is this honest: endless
green beauty
with lightning streaks,

an odor of doubt
brocaded on my coat.
A bastard digs his own pothole.

You’re a bluffing   a color-matching. 

Fingers on the breeders cup.

You’re the gentle way that oxen pull a carriage

through a needle while people movers move people

into the breach into the Paraguay swampland love

green love the reptiles and brushwork so pretty.

You’re the movement of a letter 

               from one side of a corridor to the other.

In the matchbox hour     cars cruise by and leave me.     I must

carry water carry paper carry my life in little packages

upstairs. Delivery is a method. Disguise is a method.

I place a bid on a haunted dresser emboldened strident.

               I just wanted someone to live with.  

If the wayfinding

if the great wall if the subway         if there are no safe

destinations then voices in my head are set to music

               and they run amok in the shadows naked.

There’s no use reckoning with the       irritable television.

Faces sit on necks and necks plummet into dresses.

The number on my chest breathes in horoscopes and

exhales a model train kit. But the formatting

isn’t quite right. Fix the fingers with a splint. 

Can you be ready in a minute?

               When I want to touch stars and  

there are no arms to catch me I arrive

by night carriage      and step down    all pageantry into

quintessential wide night sky.    

CONSIDER THE WOMB

         With lines from Ewa Chrusciel, Nicole W. Lee, and the Babylonian Talmud

Consider womb as a bird.
Uterine lining lifting a wing as it rots the pink walls. 

Consider womb as a flickering candle.
There has to be somewhere from where words are born. 

If they’re born, do we mother them?
I’m not sure if I mother the words, or if they mother me.

I want to push books from my cervix. 
Consider levies and dams can’t contain the red mind of the storm. 

Consider sex as a contract between two menstrual parties. 
I dream of our daughter a fourth night. Now she is learning to speak.

There are words born from her too. From her nonexistence. 
Consider blood loves its own wickedness. 

Blood turns new wine sour. Blood barrens a crop.
Blood clouds the mirrors and blunts the knife blades.

Consider milk is forbidden to the bleeding.
Consider that those who bleed are not only women.

Bees fall victim to the odor of menses, drop from their hives.
Iron and bronze become groggy and rust-eyed in the presence of matter discharged from the uterus. 

Consider a place where the unbirthed babies live out their days.
It might be better than this savage world. 

As a result of sexual pollution, a man vomits persistently. 
As a result of childlessness, a woman becomes a goat. 

Fecundity, what is it? Vault, octopus, womb.
Thesaurus: a place that births words. 

On Thesaurus.com, womb can mean: hollow or void; chasm or cavity.
For God’s sake, it can mean hiatus, or tabula rasa. 

Interior, viscera, matrix, or source. 
Uterus, incubator, ink blot scribed by goat mothers.

Consider guilt as a womb. Consider the red badge of shame.
Even my brother says to me, I can’t help feeling medeival about it–– the end of our line. 

In my tradition, sexual abstinence flows after blood.
In Hebrew, dam is one half of the word for adam: human being.

Maybe, as the child of immigrant children of immigrants, womb is the forgotten country.
Or, the forged country.

Sangre in Spanish from Latin: sanguen, meaning ruddy, or optimistic.
Maybe I’m considering not having a child so I’ll always have something to write about. 

Words born from the womb of the mind.
After we’ve all read Mary Douglas. 

After reading Nicole: If earth is female,
and we return to the dirt,

is death a mother?
Consider fecundity as the persistence of question.

The question: 
What is a womb?

Opal, birthstone of October, feels like a womb.
Glittered and dense, but clear like the ocean. 

Ocean, birthplace of sentience, feels like a womb.
Bellied and blue, and delivering mystery. 

Miriam, prophetess, her fingers making a pilgrimage through my hair. 
Through the hairs of song that slip from my throat.

Torah is silent about both her marriage and children. 
She gave birth to singing, crossing a sea in the desert.

Was it enough?
Consider womb as a song.

Consider a prophetess. Her mouth open.
Leading her people to freedom. 

DEATH IN SPRING

Death in spring. 
Mutinous birds. 
The message 
comes first thing 
in the morning. Gall 
of the jaundicing 
sun, rising sky. 
Quiet. Car engines.
Wisecrack 
of your blue 
hair. Lamplight 
of you. Death 
in spring. Trees 
everywhere losing 
control, inky 
knuckles, pink lace.
Trees unbutton
brown coats, green 
sequins revealed. 
Cracked bowl 
of you leaking. 
Death in spring. 
Wind readying 
to collect you 
as you drip 
away. God 
with you some-
where, beyond 
the language 
spring speaks. 
All the questions 
you’ve asked 
about God, 
with you now 
in the place 
beyond what 
the birds know. 
And us, saying 
your name
in the morning. 
Saying your name 
and the birds say 
your name. 
And the quiet 
creates a blank 
line. We sign 
your name 
to it. Memories 
of you, wiping 
your eyes 
with the 
stars. 

AFTER THE WEDDING

I fold my limbs onto the moss
of a rock, left plain in the forest,
big as two of me, spooning.

The sunlight aurous and hazel, filters in 
through hundreds of limbs, every spore, 
every stone of the woods 
rung and lucent. 

I married this forest. I married 
the strip of highway you loved 
to jog when you were a teenager.
I married the blue bowl of the sky

and I married the shred of ache 
at the heart of the world, where mass 
shooters and abortion clinicians 
have been hurling themselves 

to the gate. Unsearching a wall. 
Where all this pain and light 
drain from, and towards. 

I’m sorry, I say
to the trees, inhaling 
the gold of the forest. 

I’m so sorry. 
I think I’m not 
having a child. 

A thrum, the trees 
crystalline, limby. They inhale 
and exhale, sway softer 
than Sundays.

A ladybug crashes 
into my knee. 

I am small. 

Drinking the trees’ 
breath. Married 
to everything. 

into ل ’s       and Allah is
a mutilation
of meaning in 

prayers       are refrains
of nursery rhymes       the children
draw a fighter
plane below
names of the extinct

birds         and emperors
cross the Indus
for mangoes— light
sweetened, sweating

golden     sun-
-flower stalks
the indigo          labourer
on her way to where the day’s
poems are powdered to

an ellipsis        pierces tales of djinn
a Hazara mosque erupts
in pigeons         a boy
somersaults across embellished

Mecca, Mecca!
If you are home
to God and only 
hours
from Jerusalem      send
a message where
the map is still

green with olives. Look there, love
is a thing 
farther
than the bloody moon
where nuclei cannot be

split               daily
bread and pomegranates
with me, jaana, bite and
savour these
tautened globules

of blood       on tongues
I know one thing:
it alefs,
and it alefs.

           after Cathy Linh Che 

My grandfather walked in the snow
With his green jacket
& plastic bag

On the balcony we built
a short snowman
with a cold carrot

My grandfather had a very thick
head of hair
Long eyebrows…bright eyes

He told us stories
He made us toast
He fought in the war
He knew the word “MONSTER”
And also  “HELLO, EAT”

What kind of man was he
A short man
With a long walk
Good at walking
He could walk and wait
for a long time

What kind of man was he 
He had brown hands
A dark mole
A deaf ear
He fought in the war 
He wrote stories
Smoked cigarettes
Played solitaire
He had a green jacket

What kind of man was he
He had a secret family
He had a sharp and surreptitious 
brain

What kind of man was he
Dead now
A gone man

What kind of man was he
He walked in the street below
To fill his plastic bag with snow

Silks traveled through many hands, starting in the Orient.
Don’t tell me, love, God made the stars for us to orient.

Before we ever started, war gathered across continents.
Still, love, I’d forgotten your penchant to disorient.

Your ash rains again from the west, blotting the lords of the sky.
Tell me how to set fire to pearls—that blinding orient.

You return to the argument: Let me show you how to….
—always said I was too unsophisticated to orient.

Oolong uncoils in my cup, your sugar on my tongue.
Who thought I’d turn infidel? Your sense of orientation?

I can’t pay your price anymore—my useless milk, wasted blood.
Only your skill to distract. It’s ornamental, almost oriental.

The moon covers the sun. It’s God, not astronomy, remember?
Never mind where I’ve gone—the sky’s too overcast to reorient.

The Rough Beast Would Like The Future To Be Clear

That he is made of the past like a junk shop 
with split-frame washboards 
and dolls with crazed, crazy eyes: some composite 
that doesn’t age well. Like human history. Some experimental glue
and plastic and silicon carbide known to be
flammable and cause cancer 
in the state of California (how dangerous everything is 
if we read the dangly little tags). That he is tagless 
and lethal as any living thing. Made 
of single-use bicycle tires and animal cookies 
with ice-rinky icing and nose bleeds 
from the first few weeks of antidepressants, a dark joke 
turned inside out. A bad surprise party. That he is made 
like all of us of darkness and inopportune floodlights, of falling 
from frying pans to fires and back again.
That he is our brain that is an egg that is
sizzling in that 1980s anti-drug ad
that forgot how few people eat raw eggs
and how much we want to escape ourselves. He is our brain 
that’s like that Simon game with its flashing 
lights in patterns repeating repeating: red blue green
blue blue red, like a random emergency. 
That he is us trying to get the pattern right.
That he’s a myth to tell us why we never do, why we lose
every person, our sanity, much 
kindness. Why every generation someone shouts, My mind’s 
not right, and people nod and sing along, stuck between future 
and finity: a word we use less often than its opposite 
because we live in it. Its one-way-exit box. 
That he is made of it too: whatever we’ve ever been made of. Electric 
kettles on the fritz, color-coded file 
drawers and brain scans and a thousand 
lost pencils. The distance between where we’re going 
and always are: flashing pop-up ads, horoscopes, horror, 
red wheelbarrows repurposed as junk-store planters 
because so much depends on
feeling as if something depends on us. That he is 
inside whatever fur we imagine him, an inside 
joke like all of us. I guess you had to be there. That we say this 
when we can’t remember what was funny either. That he’s less 
mythology, more mothball, like the Goodwill sweater 
we try on saying Someone made this for me, 
though we know whoever made it
never knew there was an us at all.

The People At the Bottom of the Lake Write Up

We were convinced by the man who said
think of how beautiful the fish will be, like stars, rippled into daylight

constellations; how beautiful the stars will be when they appear
to be swimming. Or we saw the Hubble Telescope’s cosmic gemstones

sent back from the future, and read the scientists who said
it is good for the mind to feel small inside vastness. Think of the water

as a galaxy, a word that came from milk, pouring closer. Think
of the stars strung like lures on invisible string with strange blue

feathers. The scientists say we forget who we really are inside our walls.
We need the water to rearrange us; we were trying to give our bodies

like ripples to what came for us: someone like the Piper of Hamelin
who promised our children (forgive us) the music of motorboats.

We sent them swimming after him; we sent them their lunchboxes
dented as meteors. Or we read about a sky-blue plate that was all a king 

would eat from; no one could say why the glaze turned out that way;
the ceramicists tried everything. In the legend: the answer is a riddle

of bird bones. The answer: a ceramicist despairs and throws himself
into the flames. We were trying to recreate an accident of beauty. We were

trying to eat from the color of what could be. No one told us
water is heavier than everything; it is a peacock with a hundred-thousand

eyes and wings. We were convinced by the man who said we’d fish
upside down and hook the soft white bellied stars, their skittish

flickering. How could we know we’d drown in what we were?

With its scent the acacia tunnel bends air.

She enters, not bent.

                             Mother, tongue

                             of a bell never asleep: Betrayer, you

                             have betrayed. She can no longer tell her name

                             and wallpaper apart.

God is motion: twigs

growing up, past and not into each other.

At each end the tunnel reaches in and out. An idea

willed to cast a shadow

stretched across centuries with fluctuating gradations.

                             Why not brighter, why not

                             thunder longer.

The white ash stands spiked

with string bulbs.

                             No one else in town saw ghosts

                             sprout out the tree, trapped

                             alight. Shadows of blood clustered under like gifts.

                             Prise open your throat, they chanted, and choked

                             on electrical cords.

She withdraws here, her mind

reaching across itself. 

It is a hard

fact: hunger has tusks, tears.

In the thicket birds were taloned to death.

                             How to ever backstroke to shore. How to find

                             a land soaked not in blood, far

                             from the dead. Their world is a string

                             searching for the kite

                             in their eye sockets.

The air is no longer bent–her being, as bent, here.

The tunnel stirs alive with starved insects.

A beekeeper knows each colony, alive with one

hunger, is a taste

of its own on the tongue.