January 2024

The Skins of Words

And the reach.

What desperate ecology makes possible what will to be done between humans unto and for each imagined soul. The massive width of this creature, what is it? That would eat its own. Fight long enough and some bond is forged. Of what? What god is defeated here only to find another solitary rebirth, untended in the wilds of a bombed-out house of worship? The ancient scream begins again, as though to tire the mind of its presumptions of fire, its thick overgrowth ever ready to ignite. The distance between in and out of this place as thin as skin. How dare anyone still contained think to speak for a trembling fragility so infinitely fused to these light dappled nerves, the terrible brilliance of insistent renewal. Poses the one at the page naked but for words and yet reaching.

Waltz

With crouching figure.

Skin trembles with the muscle that sheathes the innermost reaches of the lush garden behind a poem that is tended to nurture and feed the disarmed and disappeared, which never asserts except to underscore an endless stretch of unseen elements, each moved only to dissolve the ends of their reach to attach at the points of dissolution, into some more and ever unknown, whole.

On Expected Answers

To questions of when and what next.

The language of the given form needs no translation when dancing. But this limping, dogged continuance is harder to explain. The strange grammar of this body’s history belies her best attempts to assimilate into a now where acknowledgement of injury is cast as frivolous grievance, in the land of perpetual make-believe where the static expectation is always a willingness to play, to forge ahead, and plan for the next big thing, as though this could not possibly a cessation of all things for a period of perfect grief.

Open Throat

And knotted now.

Only when quiet will it start, where the song finds a fingerhold. Else its knotted mass of conflicting notions, freeway traffic, madness tracking madness, keeping time where messages rain, but who calls? Where is her clarifying voice? Hiss of traffic lulls us sleeping, onward. Again. The next drip of text not to be missed, but somewhere a river shines still (does it, still?) and the birds know it (where and if it is). They call a swelling at the chest, it moves behind the cracked lips, parting now, to–––

To until. Again. An abrupt gravity tugs back at the throat. This sound is not what was there before, rising. Now it’s a swarm of speckled amnesias, screeching.

Discordant Note

One possibility.

The challenge of enduring through ordinary objects amid this constant awareness of something screaming and you think what you want is a beginning you can call after the screaming stopped but naming it reveals the error. No, that is not what you want, that sudden silence. Only the still living can scream. What you want is a beginning you can call when the voice found some rest in the endurance of other voices to sound its siren, when the sound of this was all, and we lived inside it, becoming so unlike ourselves that music would recognize what we were, and play us again.

That All May Hear

Words of the unseen world of an unrecognized people.

This morning, I am careful in the hours before I am ready to be awake, when I am still in the first sips of coffee, and still with a full week ahead, where I let my eyes rest when I click open the morning paper. As one learns to be, depending on the day, calculating the risk of sliding into an abyss. Head at an angle, I slid my eyes quickly to the fringes like someone sneaking into a room, and down the right column, to rest on the image of a living face. He smiles, but not in the way people smile when they learn to leverage the image for gain. He smiles with puzzled amusement, like he is looking for the face behind the lens. His face, deeply contoured above the caverns at his neck, is a landscape unto itself, framed by an old man’s large ears.

His name is his language means dog without an owner. Dog in his language means something other than an insult. He is in his late eighties when he writes it at the table with his daughter, as his mother taught him. His mother was a memory keeper.

The language his mother taught him was the language of her grandparents and it was long considered extinct. It is the language of a people who had lost the land they lived on but not the words by which they had loved her.

We had learned over time, Jaime explains, not to speak to those who could not hear. But I exist, he says. I am here.

***

Inspired by Natalie Alcoba’s New York Times article about Blas Omar Jaime of Paraná, Argentina, who recently decided to speak Chaná, the language his mother had taught him, which had long been considered lost.

Prayer in Wartime on the Birthday of Another Murdered Liberator

For the dispossessed, displaced, and endangered.

Shelter the children. And the creatures that keep them: the furred, webbed, winged, gilled. And the eyes that still see them, even when they have been cast in the role of immature versions of the enemy monster by the monster who does not see himself.

Shelter the unburied, and the spirits of the dead, and the mirrors. That all who kill may recognize the killers and allow into the long night of their making the light of the despised and dispossessed, and meet them, weeping, to eat together, and by this light and the flame of their shared meal, to burn the rot of empire from its host, the living body of the river of bodies into one beginning, away from this collective end.

Shelter God and the name of God and the children of unrecognized gods and the children of men and winged creatures everywhere, the webbed and gilled, furred, and waiting, and all who hold a single question: if I live, how will I? Who hold this up, round and luminous, the reflective whole of its trembling body against every imperative to kill, against every impulse to look away.

Flight Paths

Against light pollution.

These eyes trained on sky still guide wild flights by stars, set courses for migration at midnight––

But what can they find in the glow bleeding from the empire’s cities?

Still singing hallelujahs of nobody knows, forever-present notes that know what no hand grants, no thief can steal.

Reaching back to the original promise in the first split of atom from an original rib to give birth to the genesis of song––

In the space of a womb, a surrogate tomb for the still unburied,
long dead still––

singing unnamed solids behind these gates
the liquid river sings us––

still
singing
our home.

Hot Mess

Heart on display.

How much I aspire to be cool and collected, contained. But this skin is too thin. She barely holds me in. Sometimes I wonder if she even tries. I think she’s up to something else sometimes, conspiring with my aching knee and the way I bleed. And bleed. And with this shaking hand. To this tentative form I might complain, why do you betray me? But while I am mostly dumb, even I can recognize the wrong in that note. Of all her acts, betrayal of my life has never been one. She’s like an excited child with something just made and far from ready to be displayed to any standards of the moment, but she doesn’t know this like she doesn’t know sleek or cool or style or mood she is tone deaf to the codes of any given art and she only wants to give me––

to give me away

like the child with construction-paper hearts, fresh cut in love and decorated with such glee that the glue hasn’t even dried yet and the glitter is falling all over the carpet, and she wants to to pair these with flowers she found on the side of the neighbor’s apartment, the ones she doesn’t know enough to call weeds––and she is so eager to give them away––

like she is eager to give me away

to anyone who is
near, like Here!
Like, Take this! It’s for you!

And I sit here, cool only when I keep her from the assembly she wants to give me to, in love––the hot, messy, extra, weedy, bleeding abundance of this embarrassing form–– knowing that as soon as we go out there she is going to try it again.

And I hear.

The Skins of Oranges

Prayer for hands in wartime.

After every blast, the sky was obscured by dust. But look, you said to me, touching. There is an old man selling oranges. Dust in his beard, his hair, all over his coat. Look closer. See the shine of the oranges. You don’t get that, after a barrel bomb, unless you take a wet rag and polish each, one at a time.

O watching stars / O birdcall
O hands over faces/ O names

Come back. Come ever.

Come now.