after Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary”

they work their fingers 
to the soul their bones 
to their marrow 
they toil in blankness 
inside the dead yellow 
rectangle of warehouse 
windows work fingers 
to knots of fires  
the young the ancients
the boneless the broken
the warehouse does too 
to the bone of the good 
bones of the building
every splinter spoken for
she works to the centrifuge 
of time the calendar a thorn 
into the sole dollar of working 
without pause work their mortal 
coils into frayed threads until 
just tatter they worked their bones 
to the soul until there was no 
soul left to send worked until 
they were dead gone
to heaven or back home 
for the dream to have USA 
without USA to export
USA to the parts under 
the leather sole of the boss 
they work in dreams of working 
under less than ideal conditions 
instead of just not ideal 
conditions work for the 
shrinking pension and never 
dental for the illusion 
of the doctor medicating them 
for work-related disease 
until they die leaving no empire
only more dreams that their babies
should work less who instead
work more for less 
so they continue to work 
for them and their kin 
they workballoon payment 
in the form of a heart attack 
if only that’ll be me someday
the hopeless worker said on 
the thirteenth of never 
hollering into the canyon 
of perpetual time 
four bankruptcies later
three-fifths into a life 
that she had planned 
on expecting happiness 
in any form it took 
excluding the knock-off
cubed life she lived in debt
working to the millionth
of the cent her body cost
the machine’s owner
Yolanda Berta Zoila 
Chavela Lucia Esperanza
Naya Carmela Celia Rocio
once worked here
their work disappearing
into dream-emptied pockets
into the landfill of work
the work to make their bodies
into love for our own

^{for Alison Saar}

Please approach with care these figures in black.
Regard with care the weight they bear,
                      the scars that mark their hearts.
Do you think you can handle these bodies of graphite & coal dust?
This color might rub off. A drop of this red liquid
                      could stain your skin.
This black powder could blow you sky high.
No ordinary pigments blacken our blues.
Would you mop the floor with this bucket of blood?
Would you rinse your soiled laundry in this basin of tears?
Would you suckle hot milk from this cracked vessel?
Would you be baptized in this fountain of funky sweat?
Please approach with care
                      these bodies still waiting to be touched.
We invite you to come closer.
We permit you to touch & be touched.
We hope you will engage with care.

I don’t want to say anything. What is it to be saying? Force speech, rape speech. I have no subjectivity or light subjectivity. Speaking, defunct. Land mass floats. And the forests have been felled. And the antlers, snapped. Morphed lips, already sewn. Most of us are keen to mouth the word, “beast.” Everyone is talking talking talking like dentures, clack clack, but nothing is really said. Or so much chatter static. I am not saying anything either, am waiting and breathing. My body is speaking. Expressing the thingness of the thing. It chats at me, motoring. In the taxi, a tree shaped purple fragrance floats across face.

--

To be a red 
scratch or 
red scotch, 
depending on 
your liking,
calculation 
of the sublime, or 
the sublime itself—

Memory fixed— 
—and 
then splatter.
My mother in 
her pink kitchen 
washes what 
the garden 
and its grey 
chemicals produced. 
Outside, the gate 
ajar, the dog 
run wild-ing. A thing 
called girl splay, 
or wheat heart. 
We could draw 
a chalk line there. 

This is not conceptual. This is a poem. You are a poem. I am. 

The hesitancy.
The undoingness. 

More secrets: humiliation as release. 

The men all say “I want to stretch you out,” feel themselves big in this small corner of the world. How chivalrous, the ache of any obvious sliding down. What would the poem be without wings to block out the light?

your shape is in the robe    worn or not
a roominess of you folds into its cloth

a sachet in the drawer from which the air
of the place was taken   fixed of    you’re here

the smell has temperature and space
the wider warmth that buttered popcorn tastes

and not you    it folds into a time’s clot
a sachet in a drawer   personage of its own still you

                                 *

I have to wear a bus to Rikers Island with
opaque tears up to my neck to get in       to see you

in your two inch thick glass robe I have to imagine
you naked under   to place my hand saying

I miss you against you where I can’t touch and love
has to break across insulating space       still warm

I have to stand my day in the folding up put away
given you as time   with you. I smell I need you on my clothes

                                 *

I smell gunfire folded in      to every turn
the city’s track laps into its hands on race

then files away not guilty    I smell the drawers
of the records they keep   folded away    from stands taken

away  distance doesn’t dissipate
the space between the bullet holes in you in me   folded

you are the map I have to sleep with in my pocket to be sure
I know how to get out of here

                                 *

your shape is in the robe    the sharp creases
of its fold when you wore it   blocked into

the counterpoint around you   that even
folded stood you out to me   that they couldn’t

see you   that one day   they would shoot
always folded into the robe you wore

gun or not   phone mistaken or empty handed   innocent
or not   there is this fold on itself  we sleep in

           in the fabric
           of this country’s culture

The snake is 
a sleeve the deer 

puts on, its mouth 
a beaded cuff 

in the haze men 
make of morning 

with each release 
of their fist-gripped 

guns. Is this a dream 
of shame? Is this 

a dream of potential
unmet, of possibility 

undone? School, 
no pants. Brush, 

no teeth. Podium, 
no poems. Open

door, all wall. 
Dear Monster,

none of the guests 
we disinvited arrive. 

In the darkness 
no lion comes.

I hear the sound of the sprinkler outside, not the soft kind we used to run through
but the hard kind that whips in one direction then cranks back and starts again.

Last night we planned to find the white argument of the Milky Way 
but we are twenty years too late. Last night I cut the last stargazer 
lily to wear in my hair. 

This morning, the hardest geography quiz I’ve ever taken: how does one carry
oneself from mountain to lake to desert without leaving anything behind?

Perhaps I ought to have worked harder. 
Perhaps I could have paid more attention.
A mountain I didn’t climb. Music I yearned for but could not achieve.

I travel without maps, free-style my scripture, pretend the sky is an adequate
representation of my spiritual beliefs. 

The sprinkler switches off. The grass will be wet. 
I haven’t even gotten to page 2 of my life and I’m probably more than halfway through,
who knows what kind of creature I will become.

Your ride home complains      the grocery store is freezing
they’d rather wait outside       the burly guy
with the walrus stache asks whether you want your Italian
with the works              You’re not sure what that means

So you ask and he tells you    laboriously surprised
and also do you want tomato              thanks
you lean on the counter and focus     on condensation
the chill on your palm and forearm    and under the glass

the meats in trays and butcher paper beds
some sausages            sad stacked-up tongue
a leathery souse or loaf            so out of it

that when he wants to know if that’s your order
and calls out loud         Is that your order ma’am
you startle and then apologize            for taking up his time
but he called you ma’am          so you don’t mind

one year, i carried the blues around
like a baby. sure, my coffee mugs cupped

amethysts :: water gushed, rose-tinted
and -scented, from the faucets at my touch ::
the air orange with butterflies that never

left me. meanwhile, indigo held fast
to my toes :: lapis lapped my fingertips ::

and a hue the shade of mermaid scales
bolted through my hair like lightning.

my eyelids drooped, fell, heavy with sky.
that year i carried the blues around

left me mean :: while indigo held fast,
the daily news tattooed azure to my back. 
true, festivals of lilies buoyed me. but what 

good could white do? the blues grow like
shadows in late sun :: stretch  creep  run.

there was the first horse
and then the last;

the scheme of horses in between
is immaterial (to say they were muscle

is being kind, they were meat)
but the first horse was the horsehead—

high angular white bones 
and sinew—and the great matter of him broke meaning open

like a disclosure, and there, where he lived, lay the river of the canyon,
all white-tipped like a righteous migration of spines,

and he stilled the water by his will alone 
to better see the startling symmetry of his reflection,

his charge moving him 
somehow faster than the breath’s steady luggage,

across the neckline of the field,
and up and over sugar cane, always

toward starvation: for as terrifying as it is,
forever is a solid,

and from that firstfoal followed his blood
like the flood that begins at the mount 

and streams and cheats and even seems to grow 
by rain that falls by the torso 

but loses itself through the corn husks 
and understory until it is thinner

than the water that comes from a wound
and it settles in the ditch of a cul-de-sac, at rest as a lie.

I wake in the golden belly of this abode
and sense some diurnal grace at work.
I take my body to the fall, to bathe
and anoint my genitals with shea.
I have made my journey to the cold hills
to commune with my people there.
I come for the second beautiful harvest
and have waited long to look into its eye.
The harvest hosts libations, the meal
and my desire—so I drink the deep
heady liquid of its languid stare, under
the hum of many voices: burgeoning
friendships and reunion in the low light.
I break into the soft weirdness of injera
and dip my fingers into the meat stew,
to celebrate the glory of the kings.
The clear splendor of the serving boy,
his slow blink as of a camel, does not
distract me—here to reap but seduced
by the second beautiful harvest.

A tryst.
That ends
in a nightly dose.

A contradiction,
emptiness
refused by starlight,

the dark
enflamed with error.
Tell me again

what crime you are
so guilty of?
The hot tub,

26 Seconal—
the moon
like ejaculate.

Delicate.
Poor
Barlow,

you felt
so alone;
you were

the only queer.
January 1, 1951.
In the semantics of

your translation
you intend, in Náhuatl
a long while,

to abandon
your cadaver.
There.

My old lover was Catholic and lied to me about the smallest things. Now he's dying and I'm trying to forgive everyone standing in line ahead of me at the grocery store. I keep painting objects intuitively. I keep saying I've never been in love. It's not quite true but I keep describing the same things differently, as sailboats through the locks of reversed rivers or as streaks of red across the sky, visible only in one eye. The sensation of decision-making won't stay put. I forget who I am and wake up exhausted. I had a teacher once who died, it was as if she removed herself into the forest. I scatter leaves to read them like pages as if she's speaking. She was in love. I don't know if I'm worried I will or won't ever give up my fictional autonomy. I'm choosing between two trees with two hollows. One begins breaking as I step inside, as I try to sleep. The other is already inhabited by a rooster. I pluck a feather and run to the pawn shop. How much is this worth? Can I buy it back for my Sunday best, for the suit I never wear? Maybe if I go to the church I don't believe in I'll meet a man I can. I'll wear my Jewish star and pray for his belief to convince me that I too want someone to hold my stare.

             or better
when the training dedicated
            to what lines my eyes cast
braids me to that skein
            then I know I’m a thing
that can take itself away

            maybe etched with the man
on a horse leaping
            into the lithographed
German windmill’s open bay

            refined, involutely resolved
to curving inward
            while touching the outside,
screaming isn’t looking

            like when my mother died
of being a woman,
            poor and eventually
American, the nerve I had
            to fold time
in my mouth as if to call
            back an escape line
from a life

            and who would think
to hide in a windmill
            and the horse
amenable?

            I really was
looking at that print
            thinking without rancor
of what fraction of hateable men
            I’ve known
and been
            who work so hard
at fleeing into private chambers
            only to find
some uninvited thought of me

            eyes closed, whispering
exactly there, spectral
            and unwanted as I am,
It’s just easier for me
            if you’re not around

                      After Iqbal

Brother on the threshing floor, body like wheat,
and the red dirt that binds us, that nothing will release us
from. The fig tree, the date palm, the treacherous murder

unleashed into us now, the call blazing from vanity’s lungs,
jutting us to a future of mindless rain, wayward blizzards
of sand and snow. We were born to ward off this desolation

that grinds mountains into floss, bores into our books
for a whim that ordains blood, our blood
and others, our sisters, mothers. Without such fear

who will we be? What will we do without
this aching chord, without the bright morning that tore
the silver’s towers? Fire and the parched red dirt

that binds, the water stolen from our wells,
a black magic dredging the lower rungs of earth.
We dream of clover. The soft scent of young lambs

is the first letter of our alphabet, and the prophets
who tighten ropes around their waists to stifle hunger's
pangs, supplicant brows seeking light from earth’s core.

What will we do without the angel’s voice, a tide
sending us heavenward, a harmattan ushering us into the hell
of its lows. How can we live without such turbulent hope?

How can we accept the certainty of our quiet graves?
How can we stop waiting to witness the Lord’s face?
And what will we do without the hardened gaze?

The girls walk past, hair fluttering like commas
between poems of musk, a dream of touch like water
gently falling on smooth, warm stone.

What will we do without the anemones’ mournful dirge
stroking the dagger’s spine and the gelding’s nightmares.
Our hatred for our scoured hands, our love of the moment

when the sun drops only for our eyes? Who else will hear
birdsong as prayer, who will cleanse himself with the stroke
of sand? Who keeps the earth rotating with praise

of your name? And what will this spinning,
hurtling mean without our voices shouldering it
toward some ripe, sweetened pause?

What will you do, dear God, without us? How
will you fare, alone again in the empty vast, in the dark
of your creation, without us giving you your name?

Our world goes nowhere except its own elsewhere
What kind of sentence is that? 
No one is responding, but everyone is vibrating with address
All of us stationed before the same absence
Like glass sheets; we see right through us to the air
Real life is Elsewhere
It is right Here
The bald child 
Is a failed clairvoyant
But he can peer through walls to teeth and other things: soap
Mathias kisses Lucy’s Head
Someone shoots my book, shoots it straight through
I allow a relation 
Between addiction and adore

When I get to where I’m going
I want the death of my children explained to me.
                                                       —Lucille Clifton

They meet over tea and potato chips.
Brown and buttermilk women,
hipped and hardened,
legs uncrossed but proper
still in their smiles;
smiles that carry a sadness in faint creases.
A sadness they will never be without.

One asks the other,
“What do they call a woman who has lost a child?”

The other sighs between sips of lukewarm tea.
There is no name for us.

“No name? But there has to be a name for us.
We must have something to call ourselves.”

Surely, history by now and all the women
who carry their babies’ ghosts on their backs,
mothers who wake up screaming,
women wide awake in their nightmares,
mothers still expected to be mothers and human,
women who stand under hot showers weeping,
mothers who wish they could drown standing up,
women who can still smell them—hear them,
the scent and symphony of their children,
deep down in the good earth.

“Surely, history has not forgotten to name us?”

No woman wants to bear
whatever could be the name for this grief.
Even if she must bear the grief for all her days,
it would be far too painful to be called by that name.

“I’ve lost two, you know.”
Me too.
“I was angry at God, you know.”
Me too.
“I stopped praying but only for a little while,
and then I had no choice. I had to pray again.
I had to call out to something that was no longer there.
I had to believe God knew where it was.”

“I fear death no longer. It has taken everything.
But should I be? Should I be afraid of what death has taken?
That it took and left no name?”

The other who sighs between sips of lukewarm tea
leans over and kisses the cheek of the one still with questions.
She whispers…

No, you don’t have to be afraid.
Death is no more scary than the lives we have lived
without our babies, bound to this grief
with no name.

                                “There’s a lot of waiting in the drama of experience.” 
                                                     Lyn Hejinian, Oxota 

No signal from the interface except for a frozen half-bitten fruit. 
Other than that, no logos. An hour is spent explaining 

to the group what I’ve forgotten, to do with the mistranslation 
of a verb that means driftingbut can imply deviance.

The next hour goes by trying to remember, in the back of my mind, 
the name of the artist who makes paintings on inkjets.      

Why I’d think of him escapes me. Now my gaze circles the yoga bun 
of the tall woman in front of me. I didn’t pay $20 to contemplate 

the back of her head. It’s killing me. The pillars and plaster 
saints with their tonsures floating amid electronic sound waves. 

At such volume they could crumble. The virgin safe in a dimly lit 
niche as the tapping on my skull and the clamor of bones or killer 

bees assaults the repurposed church. This is what I sought, while 
in another recess I keep hearing Violeta’s “Volver a los diecisiete” 

and seventeen-year-olds marching against the nonsense of arming 
teachers. If I were an instrument. A bassoon. In the source language

we don’t say “spread the word.” Pasa la voz is our idiom, easily 
mistaken for a fleeting voice. From the back row all I see is fingers 

gliding in sync with her vocalizations. How fitting a last name 
like halo. Lucky for us here time is measure and inexplicable 

substance. That’s when I decide to stop fighting the city. Use it in my 
favor. Speak to strangers. Demolish the construct in the performance.

Were it possible, I would be naked. Of the nude philosophy:
consider the globalization of the expensive american sound. 

Should we worry? We should work. I believe you’re right.
I distrust the word “white.” It’s sanctified propaganda. 

Repetition is my language of origin, the highest technology. Anyway
the body is only mine provisionally. For reasons that I’m not sure of,
I am convinced that before becoming music, music was only a word. 

I prefer to destroy the composer, renew the concept.
Extraordinary limitation playing freedom.

“...style...”

Grind me Nautica, Vic Tayback.
Line chef para Alice arm hair,
fore-sausage & anchor tat,
snatch, a silvered chest, V-
neck, sleep hard Weezy—
Zebra-Jive-Turkey.

As in how do you do that?
Glimpse, a tad, pecking
the surface glaze, or Dove
Men+Care. iNot be puppy breath,
tan streak down the cheek, scar,
or Bowie’s bass: VANILLA ICE 

tricks a pompadour. Jim Carrey
a detour, when slips the tongue.
Airborne pellet in seltzer fizz. ED— 
father had a junk business...barrels 
of jimmied pistols...they wouldn’t fire 
...but they were good for kids.

we are
prayer in the long boat

                                               a rhizomatic scream
                                               surrounded by the dark dagger
                                                                        of the ocean

                         scripture
                         in its entirety
                         is anticipation of the lilt
                                                   and yet

there is no word
for the rhythm
             we endure
             across this dirtless moment

                                                    antibird, we sing like birds
                                                    textured and untrained

             rugged the love
             that claps
in the chasm of our black palms

i decided i was a ball of clay
                                                                                             spherical temperamental
                                                                                             poetic

i was a thing to be held and not known 
a grid of interconnected variables 
saying, me, me, me, me, me
 

what goes around, goes around again 
pote/ port/ pot
soil a skyline scored in                                                     slip

there are so many ways to situate oneself as
vast sagging field                                                              giving shape
to
meshwork of soldered ideas cylinder
 
 
it doesn’t matter
and yet what you hand down, over, hand out 
is just one-way to live
 

in stressed and unstressed shifts i
am one edge away from disappearing
an expanding idea, a space where more space          is making space is
this sympathy vs. empathy?
 
 
such landslide
where is this all going?
all this                                                                                 orbiting round to become
                                                                                             a dinnerplate turned in 
                                                                                            on itself

It was at first fire
Then volcanoes 
Now the latest fear keeping 
My daughter’s door open
Through the night
Is that of being afraid
Is there a narrator in this show 
She asks as the authority  
Of the voiceover in the cartoon
Loses what I imagine as credibility 
In her six-year-old mind
It’s a creation myth
The one she’s watching
Because it was intentional 
For months before her conception 
I was afraid of having sex
As though there’s an answer 
That would eclipse this 
New-found complication
How can I not be scared 
Of being scared she asks
Never trust the authority 
Of the narrator I want 
To tell her but I’d be lying