windows left open
to dying daylight. Humid light. Foolish light.
11 floors up. Weeping. Trust. Trust
this. We still don’t. Give
a secret to a being. Each
collapsed. Complete. Fever made of touch.
*
God’s Island
Then a man is a place;
a room cluttered full of walls
within walls, wants within
wants, windows within
windows, mirrors and more
mirrors long and home
enough with hidden sharpness
to catch and reflect each
and every act without seeing,
without making even
the slightest shattering sound.
On Forgiveness
I am a half question seeping into cracked ice
leaning over the bar’s worn wood. Fear
weighted with ache, anxious in the fleshed
angles of two faces. Slurred symmetry in me
and my old man’s shadow when he cackles.
Saliva and vodka flick embers working
fire into my skin. No one else sees the sway
and lean in his bulk, the terror coarse
in his veins. His loose hands touch slick,
wet glass; a promise of sharpness. Don’t
murmur I love you, this time. Don’t
come close. Give me the keys and shut
the fuck up if I swerve in the dark
summer heat by the swamp
land you taught me to own.
Through
through (→) prep. 1. In one side and out the opposite or another side of: As in, after days of wandering, they finally carved a path through the deep woods; the littlest of them all couldn’t help but stare at how the standing water had soaked through his socks. When he opened his mouth to speak, the bigger ones looked right through him and continued forward toward the cave’s mouth. 2. Among or between; in the midst of: She watched him gently as he fell through his mind. They chose silence because the sound of their fear travelled so clumsily through darkness. 3. By way of: Through sex, they spilled loss and time. Through sex, they learned to desire their most intimate disguises. 4. a. By the means or agency of: She learned how to distinguish between different kinds of smiles through her trips to the general store with her mother, grandmother, and later on through her daughter. b. Into and out of the handling, care, processing, modification, or consideration of: They shuffled his application through the unemployment office at the same speed he went through each job. His stint on the steamboat casino was his favorite; he remembered the first moment the chips no longer felt like money, the way colors began to blur, passing through his hands like the gray chaos of river water. 5. Here and there in; around: He was sure there was something else speaking through his veins besides blood. As they walked through the antebellum home, he couldn’t believe the way the smells forced their way through his clothes, his skin, his nostrils; the staining scent of cigar, the musk of sweat and shame, the lingering hints of salt pork, sweet corn, and gun powder. 6. From the beginning to the end of: Through it all, he had known deep down that he had never wanted to be there. He didn’t know why he stayed through the rumblings and through the shatter; why didn’t he just say he had to go? He lay there through the night, eyes open, mouth closed. 7. At or to the end of; done or finished with, especially successfully: They were relieved to be through each phase of pain. They were through with every claim except exhaustion. 8. Up to and including: They went through the first eleven pages of the manifest without finding his name and he watched the man’s eyes as he scanned through the last one. She had gone through all her options; there appeared to be no way out. 9. Past and without stopping for: For years, they touched and moved smoothly through only the bodies they didn’t love; together they devised a plan and plot to get through the smaller deaths and desires. 10. Because of; on account of: She thought she could manage to survive through silence. He was sure that he could survive long enough through some combination of his grip and his feet.
after A. Van Jordan
Between
bliss and fear. I learn the waves before
the tides. Toes skimming the bottom,
what I do remember is
her farther out, in
the bigger waves and her body held
beyond, above my head in the swell—
the inrushing water, for a moment
a silhouette, a threat, dissolving, nearly
bodiless, riding, rising—turquoise light,
that is what the guilt is like.
Wherein I am
mostly in my palms
shoved deep in pockets full of red
dirt and tattered psalms pressed into skin
inside a threaded edge
around my waist
stricken
strained
*
a greased piston
of a vehicle passing
the asphalt beneath
the driver’s hand
slipping
from the wheel
succumbing to sleep
*
confined to a theater fearing
bullets on repeat
watching every motion
picture I was supposed to watch
only years too late
with acetate film meant to protect
my pupils
translucent
dripping
anxious blue
*
beetle-backed
exo-
and gossamer-winged
spreading
open until too far
until torn down the middle
until clouded
viscera splaying
exposed
*
moonlight extended
over an open
field in southern Illinois
its southing
I am also
the corn sheathed
nearby
its husk
shimmering in white light
St. Seduction
Eros eating my eyes, full-mouth rosy
smile ever so slightly righteous—
drooling. I do with my myths what they do
with me. I do not believe. I choose to eat
my way through dark bridges. I swallow
idle gods. Yours? Whose? They dance
they sex they hand they look they gut
whatever whoever: all and only
to distort the way I stilt and syncopate
through time’s violence. Distinguish me
from night that lives inside you.
The myth: of me. The want to want
to be. Wanted. Sacred. Silent. Magnetic—how
so hollowed by light. Maze of
body. Wracked with pulse and touch. Curve
and arc and eye. Again. Quick. Smile.
The guilt of whom I—we—you aren’t
throbbing. I spy the wild bedrooms in bodies
porous with instinct. Smell. Orgiastic loss
grasps—conspires. The ache
of expiration—exploration. Look. At me
through them in us, restless foot dangling
off the curb over the puddle into the glance
of the other—there—upside down inside
you falling. Up. Rushing where with whom and why
ecstatic and hazed delicious light caught
lost falling. Loot loot—Look through
into— my face is not a door my face
is not a door my face my— as if the truth were
most important. And it, I, too, seduce
the same way warm sea rises higher
by the hour. I do not believe
in righteousness. Such lonely power.
On Surrender
The soft dark rope of prayer and dream,
its weight, what I pull, and am pulled by
into night. Crude apparat
us. I walked into what seemed
to be a wake in the ordering line
of a 24-hour McDonald’s downtown. I was camouflage
contraband, everything I looked at looked back
black and white. From my peripheral, I witnessed
my counterfeit life: the only police
officer I’ve ever trusted, an ex-lover,
a savior, a martyr, a brother, all there
waiting: worldless, anxious, hungry – so many leaned
their shadows on each other. Someone I knew once
spoke aloud to no one: Who broke me open?
The nightwind and what it carried made it hard
to know. Time was a threat we noticed so
I gave in to slow sex that felt like a memory,
got zip-tied by that police officer, then haphazardly
released. I never got my food.
White people
I vaguely recognized talked shit about Detroit
comfortable between the cramped
bathroom’s piss and stone and I felt
myself swell to defend a city within
whose limits I’ve never lived. I’m ashamed
I don’t trust anger. I’m ashamed I don’t trust
the idea of home. Outside, I saw the war
again. I wanted
to sit on the floor, sit until I was served, and eat, but I knew
nothing, no one, would come. Until too late, our bodies
couldn’t grasp the incoming weary glory of the out-of-date
military drones, gunning at us, until they were less
than the height of an abandoned tenement above
the ground tattered with violence, spitting up
crumbles. Before anything else: the numbness
of this danger, this power. We pushed
each other into the parking lot’s narrow
sorrow and threw hand-size chunks of rock
into the sky, and hated the way the child-like
among us paused in awe of the destruction.
You are less if you miss, we’d say. Keep fucking throwing.
Each one of us, on our own, gave up. I went back
inside to find someone I still love. The two of us rushed
to stash our bodies together in condiment cupboards
beneath the cash register. We made ourselves pray
but my knees wouldn’t bend enough
to close the little door, so I left her there. Went back again
and pressed my hand on the glass
exit, took in the sudden emptiness, and felt the toll
stir my body, full, and hopeless.
Seed Beneath The Dark
The fretwork breaks. The sanctuary abandoned, burns
up through the ends of stars. I name each blamed
forest Today and Why and Year and Gone. Trust
the wolf, the owl, the crag, the lip of rock above
the vulture that murmurs look. I counted. I took.
I wove myself in with the leaves. My fortune refused
to surprise me. Thought, then forgetfulness – what if
I believe fear is its own low country? I know
an hour behind an hour and the tower inside
an elegy. I am anybody helpless, listless, near
as whisper, as prayer. There is a quiet inside every
valley and door. I build hundreds of my own angels
and dare the cold to mold me daily into a bridge
between what I have forgotten and what I owe.
Elegy for Apogee
Drowning? Consider this: What is desire? Who or what devours
what or whom? How close is absurdity, is irrelevance, is danger?
In denial? In the divine? In dilated eyes? In sunken hands
scrubbing pans in the kitchen that cooks hunger beneath fish-
greased dish water? What is that tremble in the feet and the mouth
of the fly romancing the crumbs on the brim of the sink
from the night before? Do we have to eat everything? Do we have
to chew endlessly and never burn our tongues or choke
gobbling soup or razor-thin hidden bones? This deliciousness
still too hot? Too piercing to the throat? Can you choke her
if she asks you to squeeze hard no harder no keep going but don’t
enjoy it too much? Do we have to lust for nights fucking fucking
otherness until we hear the clink of new armor gleaming
sweat-polished and mooned by breath turned noise? Can we lie
there in our sex exhausted and still swallow and still remain
touched, halved, inside, conscious of conscience? Whose
conscience? Whose collateral? Whose collapse? Whose end? Who’s
dark as the id? Breed the id? Eat the id? Be exotic to myself? Enjoy
the translation of my body in whose mouth? Who can work
with hurt and urge and rage like words, like puzzles,
like bodies, like whose? Bring out which tantalizing bodies
from the stockroom and wild reserve of my own? Pile platters high
with meat and cheese cultured and aged in the skin of a what? Cut
it how? Watch for what to gush? Spread it how? How much of this
mind is mine? Where is my canary? Who has the brand new onesize-
fits-all jumpsuit and boots, the helmet with its dim light barely
carrying? And what should we do with the soot seeping into the
porous pornography of my taboo-being giving up? Who owns
the other wild canaries kidnapped from their islands for cages
of coal-fraught mines? Who can explain what happened? Dondé
estaban? Y dondé estoy? Como vas ahora negrito? Negrita? Como
andas adentro conquistador sin doors? What did you ever love
enough to try to take, to force open, to touch, conquistador?
Disfrutas de deseo tanto como dices? Do you hate as much as you
say you hate? What about the tired yellow disappearing from all
these delicate feathers? How long do we have to wait
to coat our quills with kindling before we explode? Forget
my ancestral antique cave? Forget my myths? Forget my holes?
What about the spilling-in cold? Where’s the hair? Where’s the bulk?
Who’s been shorn? I am on display as owned bones in what
museum-made-home? What want won’t leave me alone?
Why and how do bodies fuck and war, pattern and rattle
the windows in the ecstatic upper rooms of the special collections
gallery? Who can say they love the ache of their anger?
Who can really say they trust anger the way they trust want? Who
doesn’t ask? Who’s anxious? Who’s anchored to the brutal arc
inside of eyes? To drunk fumbling hands atop the antique dining
room table? To the loll of heirloom lace? To felt green worn
corners on whose pool table? To the sacrosanct crawl
space? To the naked hangers clattering in whose closet?
To the craters of the body’s moonscape movie set backed
by big-time producers of what reeling nostalgia? To which actors
delivering breakthrough after breakthrough performance after
performance? To which decrepit theater of my body, collapsed
and taken back by the roots and vines of trees,
an abandoned stage dim and splintered with what kind of want?
[American Dream] See
two black people [what] in an alley naked
[am i] having sex frantic in a cop car
with the cop lights chaotic [silent?] circling
across the walls [what]. See two black
people in an alley naked having
sex in a cop car cop lights writ frantic [am i]
across the walls [gone]. The sirens fracture
shadows, whir, ne
ar – unsilent [?] – drawn.
St. Trigger
I’m idolized I’m backhanded eye
taboo backward
who holds you in myself
close like fire I’m split heat spilt
I’m no thing from human ripped
new but void and nova loosed
to you I’m wire I’m scar
soaked cloaked I’m contrived
in anti-antidote wind antennae
hole in hope looped— meant to be
I’m end of obsolescent sex slewed transmitted
pressed marked man music—
beneath ruthless
I’m a ready finger I’m admission and
a ready thumb— ambitious suspicion
I’m hum derision
unclocked time and tick and boom
I’m lobbed brick doubled hymn
look daemoned delicious decision
spewed into Pantocrator devoured
the truth I’m symptom attended
I’m sum man-i-fold masque religioned
I’m debt of angels fate-taken
made afraid face-stricken
I’m learned ache ace I’m what happens
burn and want divided born
and doubt adept ashamed I’m rabid
I’ve had it aped—
St. Trigger Page 2