Before I’m born, I’m in no hurry to be born. So I arrive 
unhurried. A shape in the trees. Weighted, a fishing-line pinching 
                             the water’s surface. A voice like the moon, wordless
               but listening. I grow gold, then, slick as a raindrop, red 
as a hen in a doorway rent by daylight. I arrive early. I arrive
                              laughing—an inside joke—a belly-laugh 
               inside my mother’s belly, laughing 
and laughing.
                              A dog disappearing into a snow-pile, an elephant 
               discovering the ocean. I come to full-grown 
with a child’s body, asking: who are you to tell me I’m not a bird? 
                             I look (so they say) the way any baby looks. 
               The way my grandfather, quiet as a lamppost, looks 
five floors down from the hospital window
                             moments before I’m born and just in time to witness 
               his blue Toyota stolen and slipping up 7th street. 
Like a train to its uncoupled caboose, I’m born 
                             no good at math but here’s Buster Keaton’s sad eyes 
               as his hat drifts down the Seine. I’m the hat 
the train the caboose. 
                             The coal going in the smoke coming out. 
               I’m lifting the ties behind me, running ahead and laying them down 
different. A mill raising the river up in pieces until the same old
                              same old, electrifies the village. I lean
               -in, hunch-over, a jockey at the start-gate.
Horse-tremble. Ear-strain. Like a hammer 
                             coming down on a nail—Bang! I’m out 
               and into the hands of strangers, gamblers, horse-thieves. (You know,
“family.”) They lift and look me over. I look 
                             at them, they look at me (it seems 
               like the thing to do). When they untie me 
from the mother I was, I arrive asymmetrical and out 
                             of sync. Odd as an em-dash 
               in the river of things. Like rain. A sudden breeze. Like blood 
dappling the clear-veined light of an IV. When I wake
                             I wake as a building wakes, one
               window at a time into the unfinished evening. I wake
as my grandfather does, partway
                              through the night, newly widowed, reciting
               to no one but the ceiling: ‘I went to school,
I got a job, I met my wife…
                              ‘I went … I got … I met …’ 
               I come to in the middle of a shift and thinking 
only of sleep, work the whole way through.

Once upon a time, there was a young girl who lost her mother too soon.

Cinderella’s grief was bottomless. Every day she visited her mother’s grave.

“Where is my great love?” she asked.

One day her mother answered. 

“Cinder, dear, your great love is inside you. You must be yourself, for it is only then that your great love can find you. They may dress you in rags, you may clean a fireplace, but you are exquisite. Look deeper, honey. Let the love radiate from within. Be yourself.” 

Cinder’s home life was messy. Her father had remarried and her stepmonster hated her.

Cinder did the dirty work and kept her head down. 

Her stepsisters hadn’t gotten laid in a while, and they were extra mean about it. 

As she cleaned ashes day after day, her mother’s advice clawed at her. “Love yourself first.” 

“But how, Mother?” she asked.

Just then, a flaming ember burned her hand and a white-hot heat lit up within her. She remembered the bedtime tale of the phoenix her mother used to tell her.

She rose from the hearth and gave herself a smoky-eye by slathering the dark ash on her eyelids.

Cinder heard of a fancy dance in town, but she hadn’t been invited. 

She was tired of waiting to be asked. Meanwhile, her horrible stepsisters paraded their sexuality like marriage was an endgame. 

“Fuck this,” she said, and she decided to crash the Prince’s Ball. 

Her friends Pinky and Bluey helped her get ready.

Cinder had the best time at the Prince’s Ball by herself. She adorned her hair with peonies plucked from the centerpieces. She slurped oysters, wiped her chin with the back of her hand, and burped. She requested the chamber orchestra play “Free Bird,” then twirled and laughed and danced like no one was watching. 

But her stepsisters were watching. They were wicked jealous that all eyes were on Cinder. 

And the Prince was watching, because, you know, the male gaze. 

She’d admit later to her girlfriends that the Prince was great in bed, but he sold vapid promises and empty charms to all the other girls. He had a wandering eye. She’d seen the texts to his ex.

Cinder wasn’t buying any of it. 

“Don’t call me your Princess,” she said.

She went where her desire led. She was safe, not sorry, because girls just wanna have fun, too.

So, she ignored the Prince’s lame texts, tested negative for the STD he said he didn’t have, and bought herself a vibrator. 

She did what she pleased. She loved who she loved. Fuck the patriarchy.

Best of all, she finally came first. 

And she lived happily ever after.

If my lips are zipped—if I keep our delicious and contagious secret
—if I am amnesiac or too hungover to remember your mouth 

on mine—if I forget the imprint of your body indelibly stamped—
if I search for you, call for you, lover, stranger, alien—if I offer up 

gratitude to the air—if I rob you of your signals and energy (are you 
battery-powered?)—if we fuck again and again all scorching night—

if we lock our power up to prevent a meltdown—if we twine ourselves 
together like an interrobang—if we cross the imperial sea holding hands 

or recycle our bodies into danger zones—if we do not yield—if I let you 
come deep inside me (finally)—if we buy more time—if your body is a 

snow-covered mountain—if your body is an emergency—if you sing 
Karaoke (I will Survive? The Boxer?) under the stage lights at Tokyo Rose—

if our bodies become facsimiles or ghosts of themselves, like melted 
snow or animal tracks—if you leave me—I need to say this, so listen: 

if you go, do it quickly—the way a rabbit darts into the brush  

emoji poem by Traci Brimhall / ‘translation’ by Erika Meitner 

Often one of my daughters 
howls me to her bed, 

and like a trained victim I trance
to their denned room

to comfort a face
shaped by some dream

or another—eyes pressed shut,
lips in the nightlight

the shade of a dried peach.
Isn’t it absurd,

an old prince like me, 
stirred by their delicate mouths?

I nuzzle my head into hints
of urine and Vick’s.

Then, too awake 
inside the ticking, I gnaw away

at the latest tragedy 
from Florida or Mosul

or simply dwell on 
the wrecked condition of my kind—

wondering what I can do 
about the rapidity

of my daughters’ heartbeats
and my own human

rapaciousness over their lives.

I propose an elegy
the shape of
a cairn for my father.

with 63 wooden objects,
one for each year of his life

One object is the cube.
Some cubes made by laminating wood
with paper, fabric, tool dip,
tobacco leaves, eagle feathers.

Another object is the box.
Some boxes made into bird houses,
filled with neon fishing line.
White cotton bolls.
Some boxes made of twigs,
filled with broken bottles, shotgun shells.
Some as shadowboxes stuffed with 
charcoal, shredded newspaper,
cigarettes. Random bones, maybe.

Most objects have language
on them via
carving, writing, painting, etching,
embroidering, burning, incense, spell.
Some have language on paper
floating on their surfaces.

The elegy is anchored by a heart,
a lump of stoneware
spiked with 63 nails,
that bubbles with red glaze
& rests on a shallow bed of ash.

                           After Jana Lynne Umipig  

Capitulo lullabye. I dreamscape mesmerized 
              by ruination sky. Inordinate and restful like 

forgetfulness. 
                           At wreck. 

                                          Catch me in the morning 
and I fleck. As in, as shock, 

              the intro only 

                                                        masquerades: we’re in the middle since. At play, at effervesce 
glow-tide my destination, journey hurts my name: 

                                          don’t be questing me, don’t labyrinth my style. I pathway 

like gamayan, macadamia frog-leg in a rice paddy with lime. In agarbathi 
              smoke—I float. Kalabaw-

                            English when I shop. Chop 

because I’m hungry, chop chop like 
                                                                      the rendezvous’s the pathway and the crossroads 

                                            what you smuggle. I put this on your blood, 
dapple skulls with ancestry and chime. Straggle, grandchild, 

              if you want to live.

—Isaiah, 54:1            

Her hand sharp in the small of Hagar’s back, Sarai, that barren
punster, pimped her handmaid to her husband, saying, “As I am barren

please consort (bo-na, in Hebrew) with her” by literally saying,
“I shall be built up (ibaneh) through her.” A barren

women can still be clever, though rabbis tea-leaved this to imply
a childless woman is a ruined structure in need of rebuilding. Barren,

however, was not a ruin forced on us, but a path my wife and I have chosen. A choice
not so much against a child as for other things—our art, each other: a life barren

only of all we’ll never know. God said, “I’ll call you 
by a different name and your destiny shall change.” Sarai, barren,

had no children but Sarah did. Mom is a name I’ve cried times beyond counting,
yet is a name I’ll never be called—less a name than a state of being; once borne,

innate as DNA. “Wife” or “writer,” though, are titles non-familial,
vocational, requiring daily upkeep, a renewal of Yes, I will still bear

this—and be stronger for it? Who can say. Perhaps we’ll end up
most defined by what we are not. Yet bared

by the roof of our ruined structure, we count the countless stars, grow
our shared life in place of bearing

a new one. Because before Sarah and even before Sarai
was the first of the three names she’d eventually bear:

Iscah, whose root might be sakhta, “saw,” which would make her sight a prophet’s, 
divinely inspired, or is sokhin, a duller lot, meaning all “gazed upon” her beauty: barren

Iscah—precursor to the name Jessica—like all women, torn between being a seer
and being the one seen. So, prophet, tell me: Is the only happy ending really a baby?