Just when hope withers, the visa is granted. The door opens to a street like in the movies, clean of people, of cats; except it is your street you are leaving. A visa has been granted, ‘provisionally’ – a fretful word. The windows you have closed behind you are turning pink, doing what they do every dawn. Here it’s gray. The door to the taxicab waits. This suitcase, the saddest object in the world. Well, the world’s open. And now through the windshield the sky begins to blush as you did when your mother told you what it took to be a woman in this life.
I was ill, lying on my bed of old papers, when you came with white rabbits in your arms; and the doves scattered upwards, flying to mothers, and the snails sighed under their baggage of stone …
Now your tongue grows like celery between us: Because of our love-cries, cabbage darkens in its nest; the cauliflower thinks of her pale, plump children and turns greenish-white in a light like the ocean’s.
I was sick, fainting in the smell of teabags, when you came with tomatoes, a good poetry. I am being wooed. I am being conquered by a cliff of limestone that leaves chalk on my breasts.
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Cotton Kutask Cotton Sweater Sweater Kutask Kutask Sweater Blend Cotton Blend Blend Cotton Kutask Sweater Cotton Blend Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?— Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.
Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, “even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.” You will be right. For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.
whatever slid into my mother’s room that late june night, tapping her great belly, Cotton Cotton Kutask Cotton Blend Sweater Kutask Sweater Kutask Sweater Sweater Kutask Blend Blend Cotton Cotton Blend summoned me out roundheaded and unsmiling. is this the moon, my father used to grin. cradling me? it was the moon but nobody knew it then.
the moon understands dark places. the moon has secrets of her own. she holds what light she can.
we girls were ten years old and giggling in our hand-me-downs. we wanted breasts, pretended that we had them, tissued our undershirts. jay johnson is teaching me to french kiss, ella bragged, who is teaching you? how do you say; my father?
the moon is queen of everything. she rules the oceans, rivers, rain. when I am asked whose tears these are I always blame the moon.
no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well62
your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.32
no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land112 no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied
no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it Blend Cotton Cotton Blend Cotton Blend Cotton Blend Sweater Sweater Cotton Sweater Kutask Kutask Sweater Kutask Kutask no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough
the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home10 unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here
Before I knew how to fill my onyx body with slick measures,
dip every curve in my skin with dark sway, I needed a picture.
Before me stood a long black dress I called Woman― you stand opaque
with your back to me, a statue of witness, Kutask Sweater Cotton Blend Sweater Cotton Kutask Cotton Blend Cotton Sweater Kutask Blend Kutask Sweater Blend Cotton the door of Yes―
I can Return Kutask Cotton Blend Sweater Sweater Cotton Sweater Kutask Cotton Kutask Blend Kutask Blend Sweater Blend Cotton Cotton to the monument of your silhouette
to find my longest muscle. We both stare down the ocean to stillness.
Sure, I want to believe a poem can block a bullet too that a poem could save me at the end of the world, my bug-out bag teeming with “Good Bones.” My friend’s husband sells guns. He’s a republican. His sales boom under a democratic president, and sometimes he feels strange-weird about making money off his opposition. But people are afraid, he says, that their guns will get taken away, so they load up and up, and now that Trump is here people are pushing poems around the Internet like a salve, slathering feeds with verse as sustenance for the apocalypse. I’m getting emails about my work, they read: it’s so important right now. I think right now has always been for sale. I was always born writing poems about my skin and country. Anyone in marketing knows about fads. Sometimes when I enter a new house I wonder if they have a gun hiding under their bed, locked and cocked… when I just have a poem in my pocket or stuck in my head. Like when I’m in traffic, sometimes I say out loud: I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves. Sometimes I’ll mess up and say it again until the line rolls over my tongue like warm milk. Boutique leisure leisure Aqua Aqua Boutique Boutique Romper leisure Romper r6xw1RrpqUIf someone breaks into my house and wants to kill me, do it. I’ll have nothing but a stack of books by my bed that I’ve been wanting to read or am in the middle of reading or holding a gift Blend Kutask Cotton Cotton Cotton Kutask Kutask Blend Sweater Blend Cotton Kutask Blend Sweater Sweater Sweater Cotton from a friend who said you need this book right now. I thought of you when I read this book. See: when you [ ], everything be a poem. Everything be – my life still standing – a loaded Gun. Every. Thing. Be, a deadly foe bent on my destruction. No, I can’t separate my politics from my family or my body from my body. You say you love me/You say you love me/You say you love me, then love these parts of me you didn’t vote for, and then say how Sweater Sweater Cotton Cotton Blend Cotton Kutask Blend Sweater Cotton Kutask Kutask Cotton Blend Kutask Sweater Blend much you love me again. Say it louder. Say it till you’re tired like I’m tired of forgiving and explaining myself. Sometimes, I don’t want to forgive, or explain myself. Yes, I write what I know and what I want you to know (and what I don’t know): is everything, how everything be so in right now, yes, everything might be falling apart, but the center must hold, because when you [ ]: it has to. The center can hold—the center can hold and still sing.
just overnight. America goes to sleep and they’re there and they wake up and they’re not
the scary part? ______stick with me they’re not gone. YOU JUST CAN’T SEE EM _____think about it _____they can see each other _____but you can’t see them _____and they could be anywhere
the girl you passed up for the promotion she could be in your car ready to yank your head back by your hair right when you’re at a busy intersection
the woman you grabbed on the subway escalator she could be in your living room looking through your tax returns
the group of friends you whistled at might take turns whistling back at you from hidden places shrill, and off-key, until you go mad
the one you prodded and whispered about Cotton Cotton Cotton Sweater Sweater Cotton Blend Kutask Kutask Sweater Kutask Blend Blend Kutask Cotton Blend Sweater she might be lurking in the men’s room Blend Cotton Cotton Sweater Kutask Sweater Kutask Sweater Sweater Kutask Blend Cotton Blend Cotton Blend Kutask Cotton with a sharp letter opener and a roll of duct tape
the girl you lied on again and again might be on the back porch where you smoke and she’s dousing your cigarettes in lighter fluid
all the ones whose hair you touched all the ones whose names you mocked all the ones whose pay you cut the ones whose houses the ones whose jobs Shorts Dressy leisure Banana Boutique Republic zwXIvw6qthe ones whose babies the ones who the ones who the ones
they could be anywhere with knives or guns or poison or machetes or things they have to say to you about you and you have to listen
i mean let’s be real maybe they would just leave go somewhere warm and secret, string up Christmas lights, raise goats and chickens, grow zucchini and fire up the grill, make every night for cards and barbecue, let their hair grow or cut it all off, let themselves get fat or skinny, talk about things that are not you
but then again maybe they would do everything you did to them do it more and faster and harder with all the mean they learned from you. the witless cruelty the smirking dismissals the rope across your wrist all the twisted words and lucky punches
and you wouldn’t even see them coming
***
horror movie pitch 2
this one is even better than the last. you’ll love it. it’s like_____ your typical Exorcist-type situation you know not religious, but Old Testament inspired. like, rivers of blood.
it goes like this
the men who climbed to acclaim on our backs digging their knees into our kidneys dirty nails into our thighs
all of their books, films, albums, whatever they made in this life catches on fire. but before it burns it bleeds. stigmata, on paper staining the nice office carpeting of important people and then turning their hands to boils when they reach out to touch the thing they once loved.
the men don’t burn, just their work. and they watch it all happen from comfortable chairs they didn’t pay for before the locusts come
Fortunately, the family, anxious about its diminishing food supply, encountered a small, possibly hostile pig along the way. The daughter happened upon it first pushing its scuffed snout against something hidden at the base of a thornbush: a blood-covered egg, maybe, or small rubber ball exactly like the sort that snapped from the paddle my mother used to beat me with when I let her down. At the time the father and mother were tangled in some immemorial dispute about cause and effect: who’d harmed whom first, how jealousy did not, in fact, begin as jealousy but as desperation. When the daughter called out to them, they turned to see her lift the pig, it was no heavier than an orphan, from the bushes and then set it down in their path. They waited to see whether the pig might idle forward with them until they made camp or wander back toward the home they’d abandoned to war. Night, enclosed in small drops of rain, began to fall upon them. “Consequence” is the word that splintered my mind. Walking a path in the dark is about something Casual Boutique Old Navy Dress winter t0x08wTqpthe way a family is about something. Like the pig, I too, wanted to reach through the thorns for the egg or ball, believing it was a symbol of things to come. I wanted to roll it in my palm like the head of a small redbird until it sang to me. I wanted to know how my mother passed her days having never touched her husband’s asshole, for example. Which parts of your body have never been touched, I wanted to ask. I’d been hired to lead the family from danger to a territory full of more seeds than bullets, but, truth was, in the darkness there was no telling what was rooting in the soil. Plots of complete silence, romantics posing in a field bludgeoned by shame. The heart, biologically speaking, is ugly as it pumps its passion and fear down the veins. Which is to say, starting out we have no wounds to speak of beyond the ways our parents expressed their love. We were never sure what the pig was after or whether it was, in fact, not a pig but some single-minded soul despair turned into a pig, some devil worthy of mercy. Without giving away the enigmatic ending, I will say, when we swallowed the flesh, our eyes were closed.
I crawl and kneel and grub about I beg and listen for
what can go away (as easily as love)
Cotton Cotton Blend Sweater Sweater Cotton Blend Kutask Sweater Kutask Blend Sweater Kutask Blend Cotton Cotton Kutask or perish like the children running hard on oneway streets/infinity doesn’t interest me
not anymore
not even repetition your/my/eye- lid or the colorings of sunrise or all the sky excitement added up
is not enough
to satisfy this lusting admiration that I feel for your brown arm before it moves
MOVES CHANGES UP
the temporary sacred tales ago first bikeride round the house when you first saw a squat opossum carry babies on her back
opossum up in the persimmon tree you reeling toward that natural first absurdity with so much wonder still it shakes your voice
the temporary is the sacred takes me out
and even the stars and even the snow and even the rain do not amount to much unless these things submit to some disturbance some derangement such as when I yield myself/belonging to your unmistaken body
and let the powerful lock up the canyon/mountain peaks the hidden rivers/waterfalls the deepdown minerals/the coalfields/goldfields diamond mines close by the whoring ore hot at the center of the earth
spinning fast as numbers I cannot imagine
let the world blot Casual Dress Navy Old winter Boutique t0I8vqxyobliterate remove so- called magnificence so-called almighty/fathomless and everlasting treasures/ wealth (whatever that may be)
it is this time that matters
it is this history I care about
the one we make together awkward Blend Kutask Kutask Cotton Sweater Sweater Kutask Blend Sweater Cotton Blend Cotton Cotton Cotton Blend Kutask Sweater inconsistent as a lame cat on the loose or quick as kids freed by the bell or else as strictly once as only life must mean a once upon a time
I have rejected propaganda teaching me about the beautiful the truly rare
(supposedly the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore supposedly the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore is beautiful for instance) but the truly rare can stay out there
I have rejected that abstraction that enormity unless I see a dog walk on the beach/ a bird seize sandflies or yourself approach me laughing out a sound to spoil the pretty picture Blend Sweater Blend Cotton Sweater Blend Cotton Sweater Cotton Cotton Sweater Kutask Blend Kutask Cotton Kutask Kutask make an uncontrolled heartbeating memory instead
I read the papers preaching on that oil and oxygen that redwoods and the evergreens that trees the waters and the atmosphere compile a final listing of the world in short supply
but all alive and all the lives persist perpetual in jeopardy persist as scarce as every one of us as difficult to find or keep as irreplaceable Cotton Sweater Blend Cotton Sweater Kutask Sweater Kutask Blend Blend Sweater Blend Cotton Kutask Cotton Kutask Cotton as frail as every one of us
and as I watch your arm/your brown arm just before it moves
I have always believed that love is an overflowing, an abundance one needs to be rid of, to pour into another. That other can be a man or a woman, dog or hillock or headdress of ostrich feathers; it can be sculpture or shoreline or even a sunless day seeping its silvery light over the Thames. It may arrive quietly, a moment between moments in the river of talk, after the hot soup but before the mutton; or it can be the mutton, too - its ginger tang and musky finish. However it comes, the sensation is massive, inconvenient, undeniable.
If one were to banish extravagance, all longing would take on edges. Witness the general, poised on the smoking field, as he surveys the strewn body bits with a ghoulish mix of rue and relish, he has won another snippet of territory and is hungry for more. Love is rounder and less dignified; if love brandished a sword I would kneel and bare my neck.
Some call me gaudy, capricious; it’s true that I drool when I drink and cannot walk the path from bed to breakfast tray without wheezing. I’m gouty, corseted, flatulent, - but it’s all because I cannot refuse a thing it’s chance to shine, to sigh or deliquesce. So let there be stars in every glass and fireworks over the park, spun sugar pagodas on mirrored lakes, diamonds, a footman in ancient armor, crimson drapery; and down the center of the banquet table set for two hundred in the Gothic conservatory an actual stream - pure water cascading between banks of real moss with tiny flowers - and fish flashing, gold and silver, down the sluice.
More pineapple, more cherry wine! Tell the other two thousand guests gathered in Carlton House that we are here to show the world England’s swaggering heart; and that I intend to celebrate all century, until something even grander arrives - more outrageous and beautiful - to swallow me in its monstrous, invisible embrace.
