the sunbelly fish rolling in the clear pool so fat but restless the leader leaf dips fingers twitch tongue on the dew on the apple skin tunnel eye contact green need eats sun then rocketing away coins rattle on the seat the senseless interstate paintbrush investigates button a breath is too much my breath slapping the backdoor shut never said. I want a family with you I love you as you are. wanting makes a self of me, but I want to fling myself relaxed on the dawn keys the spinning sea will swallow a single salt tear the warm green fabric we tear pelted with salt the poppy sun sprouts, bleeds ease, horizon relief, I love as I am.
Tag: Poetry
Argument
I smear toothpaste on my fingers I am hasty a skateboarding dinosaur bandaid I come down undone Fall will warm and spin and set us New friendship loses its dampness, dries in a ditch when the rains freeze Circumlocating exquisite don’t look at the beam gleam in your eye it is heartbreaking in the hydrating light of the mood funny how you still scare me I come down the curtains suck and blow our teething conversation our billow threads over me light a coin rolling over oak I wish I could give you weight and comfort I am my intimacy forethought, I am preproduction never without angles never ever without scuttling I am crippling my lizard I am making a mistake it is the season of eating thistles No I am right to hold to hesitate This is how I reason with my fingers
ethics II
What’s that gone-peached
breeding-fly warning smell?
Ripe skins blown taut,
Am I a taut rope, am I convenient for your laundry?
Lovers for a week doesn’t mean lovers this week
Desire nets us like black birds at the purple time
Black walnut tree cut from haze outside my window
But the cicadas can decide to die,
With relief, at last, winged rain
In a forest in Atlanta I loved to bat at a branch that hung over the bike path
Come to find it was poison oak and that’s why my hands were all flesh-bumpy
That’s how I feel, needing play with someone that makes me itch pinky
I am authorized to act autonomously
I know the ground of my body: knowledge is a product of geography
House of cards collapsed into combat boots
You smear, you cook twice with butter
Flies play chess in the musty kitchenette
And the leaves leave us: to come down is sacred
I don’t govern you
but we can govern us
Ahora vuelvo a ser yo / Now I Become Myself
The following poem was originally composed by May Sarton, a 20th-century Belgian-American writer. I first encountered this poem in 2019 when I was going through a difficult breakup. I confided in a friend, melodramatically saying that I “had lost myself.” They countered by reciting this poem in its entirety, which at the time I found to be insensitive, as they were stealing my thunder. But as the poem has stuck with me, I’ve come to appreciate it as a gift.
Sarton is not a very famous writer, and I haven’t yet found an English – Spanish translation of her work. So, I gave it a go. But, I have translated only the first stanza, which I consider to be the most focused and illuminative.
Ahora vuelvo a ser yo Now I become myself Ahora vuelvo a ser yo. Había tomado Now I become myself. It's taken De tiempo atrás, muchos años y sitios; Time, many years and places; Me había disuelta y alterada I have been dissolved and shaken Usada las caras de otras I have worn other people's faces Corro tontamente Run madly, como si El Tiempo fuera allí As if Time were there, Abuelo fatal, grita una advertencia Terribly old, crying a warning "Ven, serás muerta antes de-" "Hurry, you will be dead before-" Qué? Antes de que llegas al alba? What? Before you reach the dawn? O realizas el fin de la poema? Or the end of the poem is clear?
Refuse
Water made from words goes lamenting
Ice on the bee’s wings
Grandma trees enter me
Whimsy in a scarf she knitted
Kittens with curry breath
Noses hung on gravity
Glassy the eyes refuse their object
The sun sinks the playground throughly
snowmelt
migraine blue, grass rituals,
hoofprints, screams, thirst
crows with finger wings.
occupied by airplanes, foreclosure on my hearing, sense bandwidth.
rodent-deer, eating houses by the hundreds.
I found poop, on the path
and butterflies eating it.
snowmelt is training season
can stay light and go long,
no need to carry water.
decades unboxed like boxcar songs.
good sweat wet earth tongues
explorer streams until thirst wanes
inner water dries where it is,
mid-chase.
mouth and tentacles poem
No matter how slow we go the dogs will follow us down. If they're mean dogs they'll hurry us if they're good dogs they'll hurry us. Friends! - friends know when to hustle a lie through tactical customs, circumventing cancerous trailers, like the kind the Feds provided to the houseless after Katrina. [Fatal trailers, and still in use today.] A dog finds sweetness on a salty cheek, as do I. Pull me sweetly. I surrender. I let go. Pull me in closer - I see your mouth - Ah! it’s full of mouths - I see the walls of teeth of mouths - I see the moon - bitten - nursing - Euclid's geometry - no - Non-Euclidean geometry - no - It's double lips - a talking cross - roads - It's winter, dead as toads - no - Sleeping - a catalog of spell starters - a dream carnival - Now she's drooling - now a tongue in the wall - Sated with a tip of dew tasting - Walk among your dogs.
poem for digging up rocks (putting googly eyes on them)
for gbe.
Throw a rock it must Sit where it lands. That's how I feel accepting another unexpected run-in, Sun to rock synergy, And he's wearing pearls. Before, there we were. Flesh of a wrinkled-sheet morning, fish of light buttering the ceiling Opal screens winking, I sustain, I'm good like corn pancakes. And the covid-weather is mild. So considering, we went. Friends teabag Fluid osmosing thru their thought bodies. The stars point downward. We were six hours late to the function. But for tangerines- bitch, free food is free. I dozed in the car I danced in my soup. The more I shouldn't The better it is, we call that forbidden makes the fruit. Isomorphically I'm a wool-eyed yes before we hit the vote. My lubed throat Unfit, stitched with paranoia, lying or denying or imagining covid tickle. I'd rather not know. Never going to maintain friends this good Once they know. I should say no more often than a rock Which can't. Moon trickles into the bathroom and I follow her Looking for restless vibe-check or better yet Principles, and she leads me out, to where the people are, and then you call, Just to show off the disappointment in your voice. Perfect. Here, let me practice. Pedestal-carver, Let me let you down easy, Let me let you down.
That sucks.
We are, thank you, doing just fine. Between forkfuls of cheese S. thrice mouths the word Assault. Twice she invites me to anger and I do, expanding space-time as a witness nighttime eyeballs-in-the-bush. I tell her, That sucks! Kicking my own sins quiet under the table. I am maybe overeager, to take up responsible arms. To perceive is to suffer. To conceive- Of her filial mood as playing princess on the veranda, cantilevered property, waving, cold, lonely. Our waiter sweltering under two masks, us eating out on some narcissist sputter of puissance, adulting like lubed artifacts shine the anal end of innocence. But I am here. Alcoholics well-labelled. So is S. Bellwether multitude. Our flocks giggle us. We're ditzy like the toddlers, how they laugh at pooping in the toilet, Here it comes, here it comes, there it goes, there it goes... Have you noticed every story is about going home? Let's go home. Home hours later O. and I calling on our Latino neighbors because our landlord just died, which makes for convenient evictions. V. answers the door with her giant baby and invites us in, wet boots and all. V: we don't speak much English. Me: hablo un poco Español... then three miles of time crawls by while I'm mutely remembering how to talk and V. has already called her husband J. to mediate between us women, which is practical but shames me, and what does she feel? I say Eviction, tripping over it, like I was trying to say it and not say it at the same time, it could happen, but it might yet not. V. is justifiably stressed and hunted and attends to the house and the escaping baby to envelop them in place while traveling through time, our bilingual conversation. The walls are dirty. The plumbing is broken. The landlord is a bastard. The landlord is a bitch. The landlord is an ingrate, he stole money from me. The landlord is a miser, he upcharged our electricity. May he rest in peace. Will you come to our Tenants' meeting on Tuesday? I understand my own Whiteness best as it relates to power and who wields it, and this is my neighbor's house. It’s a house at risk of losing its people. That sucks. Again, again everybody: Tenants' Meeting on Tuesday. The more tenants we can get together in one room, the more power we have, the less chance of anyone being evicted. It's a seed-debris game. The sowing of seeds explosively expands space-time. Expanding, cooling, slowing: My home currently precariously Had: let's go to that Had home now and think privacy thoughts. A bed, a bed, a bath, a book. A bundle of January herbs dry and bitter on a hook. The perverse desire to matter balanced with the cooperative need to act, and act correctly. Balanced and empty for now, though I could talk or make love forever. I take my literature and grow it, at the speed of bloody conception, home.
don’t be shy, we all got high
A friend. Let's call him M
was dating, I mean seeing on dates
and seeing in dreams
of future dates, which always involve spontaneous paintbrushes,
M being an accomplished hoarder of art, trash,
and other sex positions, M was dating
someone from Kenosha,
who was merced (his softening of murdered) by Rittenhouse
fifteen months ago,
and tonight M is on the floor, at our house, amid
a wreckage of mugs and sense memories,
angry, getting up, pounding head,
and laying back down, like any worker
working through this world of trauma:
he saw me watching him hand-roll and said
don't be shy.
A cousin. Let's call him S
was flying high, as in, he was a pilot,
training, until he actually got in the cockpit solo
and panicked under the gravity of responsibility,
imagine flight as void pregnancy, one drink too many and
a hundred boatlike moms and diarrhea babies wave bye-bye
anyway S vomited and vertigoed
down, down until the cold white psych ward
for threatening to kill a cop and his brother and himself.
my family is white. when we're sent to a room
that feels like ourselves not listening, we think,
I deserve to die here. it's not helpful.
S is in the ward now. I'm not helping,
I'm with M saying to him nothing he needs to hear (not listening)
because I'm pretending I'm talking to S
so many crossed wires it's hardly talking at all.
I want to show both the way I crawled out,
but when I turn around, it's tiny as a chicken-hole
made narrow with shit. don't be shy.
I used love as a hitch, let it tug me from place to place.
don't be shy. so M and us we all got high.
there's no redeeming my anger at S, this poem or the death it hides. this poem ripped its way out like a fart. sorry. violent: it just had to come out.
cdzhouse 