I read that once in a while one must look
up into the tree branches & glimpse the stars
scrawled on the leaves’ pale underbellies.
The book says the ocean eats itself everyday,
coral & nematodes clinging to each other
against the scraping teeth of wave on wave.
I must live the life of the aesthetic
fortune reader, tea leaves for breakfast,
clamshells before bedtime, a silken shawl
on my shoulders to draw to myself
when the ghost in the fireplace howls.
The book taught me love must grow
in the damp places of the earth, mold
& mushrooms spreading out in rings,
spirals of moist heat, bugs crawling
upwards to find the sun, a million writhing
things pushing up through the loam & rot,
with nutrients in their mouths
& love escaping from their breath.… ...continue reading
I bring a newspaper to act as talking stick.
The back page stows away a story about
the imaginary future of capitalism
and its artifacts. Photos of oil cans
and fluted orchids graze inside copy.
The question I pose to the students is:
What’s inside your shrine? I pass the stick
around the circle. Deafening silence.
Not since a question on self-identity has such
an iron curtain of reticence taken hold.
The talking stick returns to me as wrinkled
as a shorn Shar-Pei. “Okay,” I acquiesce.
“I’ll add a few relics to mine.” They’re
as familiar as dying embers slumming
in my right ear.… ...continue reading
The tradition of sausage making required the meat grinder.
The crunch of the crank. A long lever
with an almost shine to it. An animal stacked on the counter,
bleeding. Room temperature.
A bowl of red spices. It’s the only difference
between us and other beasts.
Mother feeds the machine. I sit on linoleum and sip bird’s milk
out of a small, chipped mug.
I watch the blood leak through the seams of the shanty kitchen,
down the wooden paneling, warm.
I feel as if it were my own blood. I taste it.
I can’t stop chewing the inside of my cheeks.
Pink and festered. We sing through bells.
It’s almost Christmas. The smell of garlic enters
and we are on the verge of prayer
when it begins to scream and gurgle and scream again.… ...continue reading
In the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee
The license plates line up
in the gravel parking lot of Clingman’s Dome.
The fathers step out, groan, and unfold.
The children crack the road-trip hull
and their mothers do not scold.
The blue fog
of the Smoky Mountains brings them here.
A Cherokee curiosity,
the Shaconage. That sky-colored smoke
is sacred to the dead. The tourists tromp
to sunrise, and disappear—
and now it’s night.
The locusts boil under my feet.
They feed on chalky deer minds, skulls beneath
more skulls, from a thousand hunts
once holy. The topsoil turns
in the larvae-heating roil.… ...continue reading
Mama, you’ve been in this bed—
the covers molding to your chin—for weeks
and brother wants a bottle but I can’t
reach the cups and your face flushes when
I stand on the kitchen counter
and your tears are up to the ceiling
and I don’t want to drown.
Papa has left again with the wallet
from your purse and the last-standing
television and I’ve wept for weeks
and can’t swallow anymore. And I
wonder if the ceiling changes the longer
you stare at it—if you’re lifting yourself
up and out from here, far over
the broken furnace, the empty fridge,
the pawnshop wedding rings and into
a city where the sun always hits the backs
of your arms, transforms you
into someone worth saving, a golden girl. … ...continue reading
………….The firewood we can point to is consumed. That’s how the flame passes
………….on. And who knows where it all ends?
………….—Zhuangzi III, 6
…………..In the back, Archaeopteryx
…………..hangs, limestone relief in half-darkness,
Her cervical vertebrae bent backward,
……………………….she remains inert,
…………..a shepherd’s crook to the coming birds:
…………..feathers with sauroid claws, she blurred
the furcula in her breathwhile, as if Darwin
……………………….had drawn her from afar.
…………..Should I swallow my breath in this
…………..monster graveyard? Do her bones miss
flesh wrapping them like gifts? Does the air lay
……………………….lazily on her ribs
…………..to hear heartbeats?—All this flux froze
…………..for a moment as keen genes honed
transposons: fire, form and not, whipping up
……………………….… ...continue reading
This train has a lavatory like an airplane
and uniformed women in red tunics serve
snacks and beer. I close my eyes
and think of those boyhood subway rides
through the Bronx. My father jumped the turnstile
and told me to crawl underneath
so we could save the 50-cent fare.
I couldn’t wait to be tall like my father and hurl
myself over the turnstile, a sort of working-class
Olympic event. The turnstiles are different
today, more like revolving doors
with fortified steel gates. My father and his New York
are long gone, lost to America’s restless rusting.
My father never left the U.S., even when he served
in the Army. With my eyes still closed I see
him sitting beside me now: on a high-speed train
pumping through the veins of our Italian
homeland with my wife, who sips a Prosecco
and me a Peroni while I read Richard Blanco,
and I hear my father’s voice asking not how we paid
our fare but, rather, if.… ...continue reading