Value Theory
Maybe the body I prefer sits between two singing birds, like the song
itself. Because people are used to comparing women and songs,
maybe it’s necessary to say, I’m not. I’m interested in the communal making
of like things, which happens to be a song in this instance.
Or the scent after one rosemary bush as I approach another I
cloned from the first. I don’t like rosemary. I love the thing I can make
again and again from itself. The way, for two years, every chicken
is a golden goose. Collect the eggs. Then you eat it.
I used to think it was brutal, how Lolo lost his fingers at the Hitachi
factory, but he lived long enough to collect SSI. People I admire
believe we can survive the number of days before
retirement. Really I tried, but it only takes one coworker death
to lose faith in your pension. Every day after, I obsessed
over how easy it should be to survive an office building. Connect this
to what we know about time. Every minute I’m happy now
makes me happy later. Mom’s best friend used to report all the days
Dad spent at the beach. When she sold the beach condo, she said,
Maybe Bill got it right. I mean, he never kept any money
but he got to spend a lot of days at the beach. After
she could no longer distinguish between Mom’s face and mine,
she’d talk to me about the beach she missed and Bill, whom she remembered.
Maybe the Body is a Loved One
Even the chimera has siblings and children
she resembles. Her lover has a hundred
minds, all of them snakes that emit
fire and every kind of noise. Her children
come out almost all lion, barely any snake,
no remaining goat. Her daughter
speaks and has human breasts. But sits
like a four legged creature. She conceives
questions instead of children, so want is some
undeveloped skill that mirrors the skills she has.
If asked to describe the sphinx, we’re given
the limbs. From animals, she sits at the dining table
with one leg up on the chair, knee to chest.
Wading into the River Beneath the Interstate
A germination space. Then, the glass
between what you love today and what you loved
yesterday. Vibrant, rich actions. Vibrant, rich
growth. After Eden, everyone goes home.
To plant seeds. To say we love the unrelenting
aspects of the world and carry them with us
into its aftermath, which is full of potential.
You are rebuilding the garden someone taught you
to love. Tucked into the erosion (The river at work.
At work, semi trucks above us. How do you decide
which of your parts you won’t submerge in freshwater?)
on the bank, a bird rebuilds her nest above
the tideline. Mothers say, happiness is inherited.
Sometimes the garden is made of stones.
Care first. Decide about love later.
After Florida’s Six Week Abortion Ban Takes Effect
The mail courier comes to the door to say she’s been watching
the peach tree for weeks, so I give her the fruit I’m most jealous of.
A friend’s analysis: You gave up a responsibility
I think? Or you gave away your vice. Now it’s delivered.
It’s early May. I pick peaches in the dark by smelling the red cheek.
I think I could have kids like this. Probably the most mundane
thing to do in early summer. Everything right now feels heavier than it looks
and that’s how I know it’s time to eat. I take fruit to the airport
to sweeten my appeal, but really, I distribute the raw fruit
so I don’t have to plan for the future. The airport
is on the other side of the forest. When I drive through at 4 a.m.
I can’t distinguish the tree tops from the night sky so the trees
take on an impossible height. I count 15 deer before I stop
counting. She asks, are 200 peach pits not enough? I say, I could eat,
though I’ve reached the point where any unripeness erodes my tongue.
Like the brand of candy we ate in the early 2000s and celebrated
for its total destruction, as we ourselves engaged in new warfare.
Then, I thought peach was not a possible Warheads flavor because
lemons and watermelon and apples are more transportable, more war-like.
This week, the U.S. Navy is engaged in live and inert bombing
in the Ocala National Forest, movements not far from where I live.
On Facebook, a man calls them “freedom seeds.” Mine too, is a comparison
that undercuts the exercise being prepared. Which is more violent?
The answer should be obvious, but I’m concerned lately
by how I grew up eating candy with a whitehead exploding
into a small mushroom cloud and how this is typical
of settler-colonial order—so much so that I don’t recognize the bombs
as bombs, but as something innocuous and natural, with a future.
The most terrifying deer are the ones in motion—doesn’t matter
if they’re moving away from the road or toward it.
My Mother Says I Never Learned Language
Because she didn’t want to speak to herself.
Which makes it sound like I have no language.
I know about noise, endlessly
human. The first thing I said today
was welcome. I woke up before anyone
else in my house and in one version
I say welcome to my own little animal
scampering to its breakfast
and in another I speak to open
the doors of the office. Both have happened.
Some days, the first thing I say is a decree:
French toast or tea or I think we should go
to Tasti-Os, even if the donuts are fried at midnight
and wait in the window until dawn. I know for sure
I would have lost whatever my mother might have said
over her infant. I am also quiet and distrustful.
I have not learned to convey
anything more than meaning, and I think
when she says I never learned language
she worries I will be lonely. On the way back
from work I call Mom
to describe a new bag of rocks by the railroad
crossing. Someone else’s
mysterious labor. I am envious of it,
a new bag every week. Cumulative. I want
that certainty and perhaps, to know what’s coming.
Yonder
Light breaks the window. You don’t recognize light
as a hard hitter. Moonlight moonlighting as meteorite,
curtain rod come loose, cabinet collapsed at dawn, a sign
you must go out into the world, received by the reproduction
of gardenias and orange blossoms hungry for visitors.
Love bends the balcony in water weight. Once,
a neighbor cried out for help, collapsed under the collapsed
trellis of passion flowers. Maybe the best omen
for moderation is the thing we love pinning us down.
I check the value of my house on Zillow. My house moonlights
as a more expensive house online. Even the comfort of numbers
scares me. Then there is the comfort that the end of us isn’t the end.
I’m Interested in How Animals Teach Us Pleasure
Sometimes the thing that may destroy
your home sings. I love that song too.
Room for uncertainty.
Make room in yourself for the longest sentence
you have yet to say. That was my only singing lesson.
For safety, I abandoned any clothes preoccupied with language, even
a dry rotted rice sack
with the word sweet. Even hair clips inscribed
with clarity: don’t and touch.
Today, I looked for the smallest iteration of myself.
I am thinking of ordering plums from California
because at this moment they are on the tree
and at 11 a.m. they will not. I am in love
with this kind of transparency.
Room for uncertainty.
A friend reads fortunes in my hair when my lover won’t, love
refracted between us to make everyone in the room more beautiful.
And still, someone enters to ask if I wasn’t born lucky.
I keep a whole rabbit to help me survive. Oh, it eats
and eats at what I was born with. Beloved, if I titled this poem
My Mother’s America, would it contain her mother? How long
before you know the urgency of this sentence is lost?
At the Ecologically Engineered Stormwater Retention Basin
Cottonmouth sunning on a pine berm
after a loud shake in the leaves,
by shake I mean earth-shaking. Green
lizard after green lizard emptying
out of the forebay. I send a snapshot
to a friend who says, Yes, that’s a thick
snake. I want to see more. The world
isn’t miserably sad here. I expand
and live in the warm days. All April,
little sucking marks on blackberries,
popped seeds and filament in the shape
of a tiny mouth. Osmanthus flowers
kneeled into the oak hammock patrolled
by one worried cardinal. There is only
one egg in the bush. I think this is my fault.
I set an appointment for the first of May,
which is the earliest I can schedule
a subdermal birth control implant,
then ask everyone to visit me in June,
before Florida’s most recent
legislative agenda takes effect.
Note: An earlier version of “My Mother Says I Never Learned Language” was published by Waxwing. “Yonder” first appeared in print in The American Poetry Review, “I’m Interested in How Animals Teach Us Pleasure” first appeared in print in Copper Nickel, and “At the Ecologically Engineered Stormwater Retention Basin” first appeared in print in the Kundiman South Zine.