Category: poetry

Marooned

At another shore

At the impasse
beside this night,
bodies arrive
to be washed
and the hour returns
to botched rites:
incomplete burials,
baptismal fonts gone dry,
the hands and their memory
opening to waters opened
by a perfect vessel
at the peak of its wake
having only ever wanted
to be released, explained.

Now a scorched earth
flames a storm
to absolve the eyes
for turning away
and now what
to do with this
wreck but watch
for the strange fish
to find it, for the
coral to collect
to begin again
that cycle of
looking to be
fed.

Prize

Beyond imagination

You think a foothold is what you want, but maybe not.
Who needs to hold when you can flash away, a fish?
Swimming off now. When I awaken, I will remember
but not flinch, still tired but able to follow but not as
solid, to do the next part in dream and here is one
where the pearl of a long illness rolls itself
into light.

Skull Talk

And hearing range.

I know, love. The anxieties are legion.
But for now, I would like if you could
return to me the absence of my face
from where you’ve been hanging
these ghosts on its edges like
draperies to keep out the draft.

I rather like the velocity of that chill.
I have other uses for these bones.
I want to feel the air run through them.

It is something else, the air.
But that word is the custom
in this place.

I try using terms you know
––air, face, bones––
because the rest will not

translate.

Impermanence

Time, space, heat, weather.

And I said, no, dear. Without any claims on infinity, I am only
here, threaded by vessels to this time where they river thick
until I don’t know when and many are broken but enough
keep on, motley constellation of us around aorta’s arch.
Much of what passes for memory whispers in that hush
with dawn’s birdsong of some impending rush––out, out!
It will run when that geography comes to catch in dust
or metal, the rust of us howling ––you can’t, you can’t!
we shrieked, catch me! and fast and faster than you
thought we were racing from that place but into it too
we were content to move in circles and knew nothing
of direction and content with little else but the chance
to spill the contents of ourselves those shrieks those
cries that liquid laughter out and out, nearer.

Living Here

Notes on form

You managed to learn instead of what they meant to teach you, the salvific possibility of carceral silence, to balance the weight of bird death and tree life, to sing love poems while exiled to the latrines. In this way, you taught the human form as a thing to be created, even and especially now.

Inspired by the lifework of Nazim Hikmet.

The Body of Us

In time.

Until the broken tongue in the bent form
of history’s would-be redemption unbows
from beneath the shadow of the sniper,
the nightstick, the circling drone, to find
home in a strange land and its decorated
self the stranger––

to bow again, this time before the feet
of an unwashed other, possibly unclean,
to cleanse and oil the cracked skin, to tend
and wrap the open wounds, to fester––

with anger at the noble cult that glorified
the ends that fed on broken limbs and
shattered skulls, on cages and contract
killings and called them means––

to find at the pause between tending
one and moving to the next, no fix
but flesh in its rank, ripe, hungry

wailing

needy mess, how it shakes in the
howl of a louder wind––

it will not turn,
though the turning
force insists––

the full weight
of its widening arc––

coming.