兔年

after Victoria Chang

The omen birds are sharp 

in their auspicious bands.

But my eyes are still adjusting 

to the new prescription:

the old one reversed.

*

Character I confuse, quarry or ghost.

Lucky days drain their oil

on a paper towel.

*

I follow nausea’s braid 

downstream. My thoughts dam 

the creeks of sleep.   

My mother’s warning: don’t be the poet 

chasing light down a well. 

*

Sometimes I scream in my head

& a little leaks onto my shoulder.

I can’t tell my voice from other voices

& other voices are always with me.

*

婆婆 could tell the future. 

All it took was a hand on the stomach. 

*

My selves speak different dialects

but read the same scripts. 

They can never finish a sentence.

*

All my life I entered 

through the back door.

How else could I have turned out? 

*

No, I am not who I thought I was.

I must be the master of my mind. 

*

There’s no reasoning with the past,

its feral silence. 

I introduced it & it doubled

so now I must kill it. 

The skin makes for a warm coat.

Symphony of a Restless Night

after Fernando Pessoa

Time crinkled like a brown bag 

given to the hyperventilating.

Yet still the night was blue, 

its skein unruptured,

no hand had come to drag me 

into what prophesy I’d spun 

from the window.

Like anyone my mouth wants 

to be gentle. 

Still my lover told the dispatcher

She’s screaming in agony.

The paramedic said I’d sleep it off,

spin together by morning. 

Night’s right arm itches the left.  

Lonely Soares wrote, 

Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake.

Still I am the girl waiting 

for who she should have been, 

the finch 

smacking against the silverware

waiting for her wings 

to sprout 

in a blitz of viscera. 

Still I am the woman trembling 

beneath the shock blanket

light shining across her eyes. 

How many times has the world ended for me?

I’ve always been the same. 

Nude in my devotion to elsewhere. 

With my miraculous dreams. 

My spinning sundial. 

Zuihitsu

Once you carried me 

to the end of the water, 

& the infinite lake 

dammed into a white room.

Then I knew paradise 

is a tightening circle, 

a diamondback 

swallowing its rattle.

*

Sometimes I hallucinate God

is a monarchic bloodstain

down the front of my shirt.

Sometimes God spits

dip into the grass,

voracious, singular,

the look in His eye saying

there is nothing private 

that cannot be slit down the stomach

for the surgical theater.   

*

No cell service. No cable. 

We pull each other taut 

over a deck of cards. 

Twilight sections your face

into light & dark meat. 

You call me your feast

& then I’m the carp

nailed to the deck, releasing

the cologne of flood

onto your hands.

An ace matching an ace. 

*

If I stare long enough at one point

an abyss opens at the locus 

of my looking, cinching

the color around it. 

Then the face your face holds 

crawls forth. 

*

I want a new perspective. 

Hold me upside-down 

by the mouth. 

When the alarm pulls

its forceps along our legs,

it bruises me like a child 

mourning her jarred firefly.  

*

Pared down to my essential part,

what could I say about beauty:

its mutability: that I am 

muscle & blood all along

like any animal crossing the reservoir,

& the forest of terrorized virgins 

tells nothing to the wind

pleating their leaves—

*

Sometimes I see God: some fugitive 

stepping out of the water

with six eyes & the body of a crow—

It’s true. I’m overgrown with images. 

Sometimes I hallucinate. 

The interior is a country

divided by a river 

& a sniper on the hill. 

*

I walked down the pier

& the lake stood up 

more hominid than animal.  

I walked down the pier

& the center of the world

is not the navel. It cannot

be pierced with a needle

or traced with the lips.

I’ve seen it touching 

the closed eyes of children

praying their important prayers,

though it only touched me once, 

in a line of wind that droned 

like a widow pressing forehead to dirt. 

I walked down the pier

& thought I could see divinity

up a column of smoke or fire,

or some human manufacture—

how do I return there—

I walked down the pier

& you will not bring it to me. I am sure. 

You bring only the rigs

& that drizzling music,

pitching up 

from the throat like a hand. 

North

Hand-shaved days fall into the pot. 

The water fills with starch. 

I move backwards & forwards

while sleep reapplies its lipstick. 

Enter: blades of twilight. 

Eight inches of snow 

between the angels

& my skull-cap.

I slide my knife 

between the vertebrae of my belief. 

Use the bones as my guide. 

Borders loosened at the joint, 

I can crunch light 

with my fingers. 

Far off I am being 

stitched into the groove

of someone else’s fantasy. 

My dreams

hum a low tune. 

*

When I was north

I ate elderberries

& read songs about the sea

as the empire of loneliness. 

The laments convinced me,

their cold air & hopeless gannets. 

When I was north 

I dreamt of hares.

Cast stones to strike them

from memory’s dark ravine. 

I’m wired to see patterns:

to turn the hip & shoulder,

to protect the neck & wrist. 

& know my tells: tapping foot,

heaving chest. 

When I was north

I ran through tunnels 

low tide brought back 

from the underworld.

A man slammed into me 

like an Atlantic storm

& it made me a coastline.

Is it possible to write about north 

without mentioning escape?

Or fields of lavender, forever.

*

Death cuts its immigrant braid. 

Its black hair is strewn
all through the laundry. 

New year: I call off

meat again. 

Balsam & cedar

ignited—green. 

What lives is plastic

or feed. 

I’m a bobcat squinting at fire.

There, I did it again,

lived to another winter 

turning over

to show its soft belly. 

Isn’t it miraculous enough

to have survived to here?

Still my questions follow,

a key aquiver 

on the piano.

* 

Dear memory—

When will you be done with me?

Every sentence 

trails back to you.

I want to be pried smooth 

of my callouses,

I want my feet to leave 

no tracks in the sand. 

Dear memory—

You’ve come to me 

wearing that olive coat

that belonged to my mother, 

brass button dislocated 

in the ocean. 

You startled child, 

your hair is shorn 

kernel-dark.

& still 

your lip curls—

& the caves 

part their sandstone hands—

pupils dilated in low light—

Perhaps Embodiment Is So Bewildering, Even God Grows Wrecked with Doubt

after Robin Coste Lewis

I was hired to cry lacuna! lacuna!

& press the flesh of my pubic bone—

bust of a woman rising from shipwreck,

grinning at all that flotsam. Little five feet 

of Venus hips, shedding my gold hair 

all over the mattress—deathless 

goddess of the spangled mind, I dream of being 

planted in water, my cut part growing a verdant limb. 

I want someone to address, but o darling 

is a Bloody Mary chant to apparate 

my own panting self. What have I got to do 

to prove my body steeps in a cast-iron kettle, 

that my herbal scent blooms with sugar? 

Fine, I am another woman painting herself

in thin glazes over wet white ground. 

On my first bleed, a girl spat in my face

that I was nothing but a walking uterus.

Sun-skirted sister, where are you now? 

All night your laughter threads Cassopeia’s 

spread arms. May the winds carry you 

out of your own self-hatred.

We All Have Our Own

The past shifts behind red spray paint: 

small but beautiful, if you’d like to see

I take whichever menu is offered

Be polite: buy a drink & you can watch

Voices boil, reduce

My face dips beneath an unknown meridian 

& crests out of reach

*

Wind from the desert diverts the boats back to port

Comfort plunges to meet the water’s temperature

Once the divers groped for oysters

Now only pigeons roost in the grotto

Your face, the guide says, 

it’s too angry for a pretty girl

Of course I smiled for him

I was a prizefighter in the last town

*

The church of bones is open only for worship

It’s an honor to be interred in a wall

I follow the seam of the Atlantic 

through tunnels at low tide

The layman can’t tell what’s God & what’s nature

What I can tell—

Tree: fig, almond

The princess weeping for want of snow

The graffiti says

every day someone drowns in the beautiful water

Return the way I came

An ant carrying a half-burned cigarette back to her queen

*

Change the ending & the position of the tongue:

now you’ve learned a thousand new words

My night-plotline creates heat—

I’m too tired to dance, to claim what is already mine

The dawn streetsweepers will brush it away

Lip on throat the dinghy going down

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Drown in it.

Metonymy

Would wake on three-quarters of a bed.

Launder my face. Enter my dreams into evidence.

Would without perceiving or recognizing—

rumor expanding in the cold,

leaking from blood’s fraternal domain. 

Could title the ache, but won’t craft another 

totem from the rain-disordered years 

to fire in the kiln of the mouth—

won’t conjure to negate. 

Contorting, grammatical body: undress it. 

There I am, ordinarily miraculous—

I want the past to sew me into a periwinkle dress,

set me too close to the fire. The past wants 

nothing—it’s the hangnail of the self

bristling when brushed by that familiar chord.

Stand up Katy & walk—I’ve spent too long 

staring at my own corpse’s face.