I.
depression as the contained
The white ceiling above my bed is swirling
Into flowers and faces. I should probably look away
But looking away means acknowledging the swelling
Of my abdomen and that means acknowledging
The advice I’ve ignored—to go for brisk walks
To eat a tablespoon of hot sauce
To pray for the faith to be restored,
As if I haven’t already prayed till I cried as if
That isn’t why I’m too drained to do much else
To roll over, to press my feet into the stirrups,
To push. Who am I if not pregnant
With stagnancy and rot? Is there anything else?
This burning like nausea, this deep squeezing
Instinct to escape flooding my dirty sheets—
God it’s stuck
Like a seed in my teeth
An eyelash in my eye
A tumor on my abdominal wall, God
Cut me open.…
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Driving down the Interstate 27 from Phoenix
to the Grand Canyon in the middle of July,
cacti along the road flashing the finger.
Passing by Montezuma Castle – the ruin
that never saw the Indian chief around.
It’s time-honored tradition to name places
after men we killed. The land we inhabited
was too unforgiving to bury our dead in it.
Skies hung so alarmingly low that ancestors
weren’t able to walk upright – we lifted the skies,
gradually, generation after generation,
until they ceased to be a factor.
On the plateau gravity, water, and wind joined forces
curving castles out of rocks, chiseling images
that make you believe it couldn’t happen at random.
So please follow a few simple rules:
Do not talk loudly. Do not make eye contact with a rock.…
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It’s Monday night, and a car is blocking the dumpster
with the DO NOT BLOCK ON MONDAY NIGHT sign on it.
And there was never any hope that things would go as hoped.
Walking home from my job I wanted, on the morning of day one,
to love, I might as well be putting a book over my heart and allowing
the bullet through anyway. There was never any hope for such a thing
as being born to be ecstatic about everything.
The traffic at this intersection is just terrible. The little store
sells beer to minors. I’m out of gum. I refuse to go in there,
where the light of the world is so dim.
God knows when you’re in a rotten mood
you should just examine your knuckles,
as much as your skin will allow, get home
from your job, or wherever you’ve been,
and sit down and examine your invisible
prowess.…
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When I was younger, my mother turned into
oncoming traffic & I was too scared
to interrupt her—to warn her of the cars
coming towards us. I thought silent was the right
thing to be. Since then I’ve never been confident
in my body & its abilities. I see full trash bags
in fields or on busy streets. I want to tear into them
& look inside, hoping I will find the body
someone went looking for, so it is no longer left
unclaimed—decomposing alone, becoming
a host & a habitat for everything avoidable.
If I can’t find my own, I want to search
the streets—spread throughout bodies
freely, a displacement of tons. I want to run
wildly across streets with animals before they hit
the cars, before they’re moved onto the solid white line
waiting for their pickup time.…
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It would be, I told
my mother, better though clueless
is, as smart people say, the only
truth in cancer.
Within the world
opposite us, smart people were leaving
Baghdad, war plans prepared.
A port appeared
beneath her clavicle, fluid in tubes
though eyes turned to a top general
fingering before smart people a vial meant
to worry nations.
…
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Because to appreciate
the natural world is to lament its swift decline
over the last
hundred years or so, on miraculous water
I not only walk,
but also stand still.
What am I saying?
Rain is still until it falls, I tell myself, as if
pressing a depreciated
leaf—mint or maple—branched off from an expired,
but not tired,
plant or tree—between two fingers, mine,
or my other hand’s.
Rain is
still until I listen
to it drinking from the roots of the tender young shoots,
but not tendrils,
of an elongated plant, or a minute tree, testing,
but not tasting,
the dead air, and falling and falling through it,
and adding,
all around me, nothing
new. Now I fathom all I can rely on when I rely on
the slow, so
slow, almost time-lapsed, natural world.…
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“What do we do now?” my mother asks,
sitting where my grandmother used to sit
at the kitchen table. Her siblings have joined her,
their four chairs cardinal points on a newly restored
compass. They think we, the six grandchildren,
can’t hear them now that they have sent us
to the living room to play Clue and watch the Red Sox.
But their voices are approaching thunder
to our listening hearts, which are soft and unripened
even though we have lost before and our ages range
from sixteen to thirty. …
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