My Care Is Like My Shadow in the Sun 

—Elizabeth I, c.1582

If your legitimacy in this world descends through your father, and your father declares it illegal to speak of your mother (he had her beheaded), it’s possible you won’t shake the habit after he’s long gone. Instead, you never marry. You delay, prevaricate. You take to keeping a small sword under your pillow. Because you were two years and eight months when your mother died, you have never spoken her name. But you listened carefully to her old chaplain, who broke the news when you were six, telling you what really happened. After that for a long time, you thought you might die. Later, you relented, letting poets write of summer and roses, but refused to talk about God. Now, you find great joy elsewhere: the salt-soaked shorelines, where your fleet breaks the Armada again and again. After all, you’re only a woman, mistress of half an island. You put on the ring with your mother’s portrait in its secret locket. You never take it off.

Near Miss

If survive means “to outlive,” 
Katherine Parr met the criteria—she lived 
another year after Henry. 

But, having come to fame 
in this manner, her death naturally 
became unimportant. For instance, 

tourists poking around the eighteenth-century 
ruins of Sudley Castle discovered 
her tomb, and thereafter she was accorded 

no rest. The sixth time they exhumed her, 
the tenant who occupied the land 
held a party. They took out her body 

and danced with it. They tugged off her head. 
Her arms. I daresay in time she must have
gotten used to it—watching golden

bars of light gliding obliquely
across broken masonry, listening to voices
never her own. Or the farmer’s rabbits 

scratching in corners, as if foretelling
a time when ancient rivers change course, 
and all memory slips into sweet undertow.

I Like Her Not

—Henry VIII, on meeting Anne of Cleves in 1540

The ladies like gossiping 
in the mornings, as they pull my stays
tight, teaching me the English words they believe
a queen ought to know. Today’s phrase 
is shit list, as in Cromwell’s on the shit list. 
I don’t ask how bad; they do things 
differently here. So I practice pronouncing 
shit and list, which together sound a bit
like inconvenient in German. The women have
moved on; yesterday, the royal master 
of horse put down three new stallions 
that arrived lame. Someone’s going to be
in trouble. I think about those big equine
bodies, how they must’ve disposed 
of the flesh. Every sunrise, my husband 
still says, Farewell, my darling. I pretend 
I don’t understand the whispers 
that he’s complaining. My breasts. 
My thighs. Evil 
smells. When a king demands everything
to perfection, who will first suggest looking 
at the possibilities in a shining blade? Or, 
to put it another way, what is least
inconvenient, when you turn
an animal into its opposite?

Ghazal No. 4

Sunk into our planet’s center, a lead weight spins into nowhere.
Human minds simmer like diesel, ready to explode out of nowhere.

I love breathing heat from open flames. I can’t take being shut 
up or forced underground, as if vultures didn’t swarm everywhere.

Also, it was a lie: Anaximander thinking the sun was a wheel of fire.
His math actually showed the sun’s the patron saint of nowhere.

In Rome, wasps shone under cornices like jewels—Cleopatra’s stung, 
but never died. Imagine her as the Emperor of anywhere.

Sometimes, at night, I wake, as if hearing smashed fountains 
brim over in Al-Andalus. Where are those gardens now, if not nowhere?

Who, as a matter of fact, is allowed to return to the forests, to their
ancient homelands? Even trees are absent in the middle-of-nowhere.

As usual, my protests rise past ozone to the clutter of low orbit.
Meltwater always runs bright, stings, then disappears nowhere.

Lady Godiva Device

Yes, Lysenko declared Siberia transformed into a land of orchards and gardens, but we physicists were left to continue our fissile calculus. Remember that time we raised our glasses at the confluence of two imagined rivers, their throats pouring into one another? Pretended we were standing among ruined temples and gates? Los Alamos is a hanging garden, we said, whispering behind our hands. Having survived, I now keep my face half-turned. Not because Eden first belonged to creatures with wings and swords—maybe that’s a part of it—but someone told us a lie, when everything looked fine, and fallout felt like snow. How we believed we loved the atom so much we could learn to live with the bomb. In the hospital ward’s locked room, there was a faded print of a woman on horseback traveling through emptied streets. The cheap brass frame rattled on the wall each time our doctors unlocked the door. By then, our skin, too, was melting—the sheets blotted red and the pale-faced nurse consoling, You did it to save others from worse.