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what child is this

with skin of dirt & honey

who climbs & clamors & clings to the cruel hole

where their parents’ bodies were just minutes ago

whose skin the color of the Rio Grande I’ve never seen but Jovane once assured me is just as

wet & wistful as the mud of the Yakima River

wow I say to no one in particular

womp womp says a white-haired

white collar ordering Mexican food

while the waiter reaches for her pen a knife a

wailing in the distance

what assholes

we all whisper at our phones

when we finally come up with anything at all to say

when words are worthless

why is a barren question so taking

wickedness at its word seems hollow so

wallow with me for a minute as

weeping nightly my son mourns the end of each day

wary that the overwhelming world will be here when he wakes

what child is this

with skin of dirt & honey

leaving my therapist’s office after a breakthrough

As soon as I unlock my phone,
out falls a tiny mother
asking her grown son to call
                                                          back when he finds the time plz,
out falls the strained voice of a debt
                  collector after several
                  attempts to reach you,
                                                                  out falls a school
                                              with a shooter & everything,
                  out falls a riot, out falls a child
texting another child how scared she is
                                                   from under her desk
        with all the curtains
drawn, out falls
                                an election,
                                a special election,
                                a compromised election,
                                & another smoked quartz riot,
out falls a pair of unconcerned liquid gold legs at a hotel pool,
out falls Tommy Le’s pen,
                   Sandra Bland’s signal light
                   a stack of Alton Sterling’s bootleg CDs, out falls
                   a powerful man awash in disgrace & another terrible man
                                                                                           & another terrible man
                                                                                           & Jesus —
                             until out falls Janelle Monaé,
        plentiful & perfect
                                               -ly formed.
At what point, exactly, does grief start?
                                                                                   This onslaught of self-
                                                                                   portraits in convex mirrors—
                                                                                   each moment more upside down
                                                                                   was to know what time it was.
                                                      pǝʇuɐʍ I llɐ ⅋
                    ˙sɐʍ ʇᴉ ǝɯᴉʇ ʇɐɥʍ ʍouʞ oʇ sɐʍ

&

Wife,

tomorrow, I’ll be
farther than ever before from your hands & feet.
Wife,
when I lay me down to sleep

I pray for us.

Wife,
I made a fuss
over time & frivolity, really.
Wife,

sometimes, I really,
really, really miss you.

Wife,
there’s a tv show I’m into
& the main character is you, pretty much.
Wife,
it’s amazing how little we touch
now compared to before when it was all the time.

Wife,
I forgot to write you into the last line,
but I swear that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten anything.
Wife,
there's an ampersand in everything
about you & me & you & me.

Timber Scribe

Between the membrane of fur
and muscle, blades fevered by appetite

dimpled the prairie with denuded bison.
The pick’s sharp interruption

of the ground’s moss and prairie grass union
uncoupled Kansas soil.

A timber scribe,
small enough to hide

in the curve of the palm;
portable instrument

of the Great Reconnaissance,
subtle gouge for the lonely mind.

Metes and Bounds

Chilled thigh under homespun,
the weaver’s aching back

and yellowed finger pads,
quotidian aches bow to the sovereignty

of metes and bounds.
The length of cotton

stretched between brass tacks
weaves its own

ledger-worthy autonomy.
Proceed from the blazed line

twenty chains to the southwest.
Dull needle through burlap.

Chilled holler of the axe’s
subtle swipe

through a scrimshaw of frost.
Under moss, an oak trunk is blazed

breast high and skin smooth
to mark the end place.

Centaur Culture

On the last day of the working week we stopped at the video rental store. It was right next to the Mar T Café; the second brightest storefront in my hometown. Movie titles bobbled inside their plastic sleeves. The pebbly brown clamshell cases imbued the store with a gently chemical tang. If you didn’t have a VCR, you had to ring a bell in the back and ask to rent one. I always carried it out to the car reverently, palms up and back straight.

In The Neverending Story, Atreyu’s horse Artax sinks. I watched that scene in tense, sweet agony on Friday nights. Atreyu cajoled his horse to fight the quicksand then turned panicky. The horse, an elegant dappled gray, peered winsomely up at Atreyu and then bellied into the mud. The movie’s pitchy black swamp was full of bleak, foliage-stripped trees; my childhood home was a decades-long construction site. Sitting on subfloor in front of the TV, the sludge of Cascadia mud licked at my nostrils from the unfinished windows. The soundtrack’s uncanny chorus of mire-murmur was so like my rural bedtime lullaby, I thought the narrative was swallowing me.

I had my first pony at three. By eight, I was breaking gentler mares and geldings to saddle. Atreyu was a warrior from the Grassy Plains. He was the figment of a German author’s infatuation with indigeneity. I went ahead and assumed he was Shawnee. For a very long time, I thought Atreyu was a girl. I thought she was Shawnee and maybe we were cousins somewhere down the line. I thought I could be them, so I imagined reaching up for that VHS tape every Friday was a ceremony.

Once I read that Shawnee scouts taught fur traders how to evade quicksand by staying utterly still. All that movement I assessed on the screen, Atreyu’s overt show of dismay, consigned that swift, slim horse to the mud. Hush, I remember whispering at the screen. Shut up and be still. Someone I loved best got drunk and babbled tell me about your favorite problematic movie. I would never do what you did. Look at your fingers, he said, they are actually blue. Unwrap your hands from all that before you are pulled under.

Refusal of the Return

Pale scattered
immunosuppressant ovals
chalky steroids;

dispossessed seedpods
tickle at the aural hum
of childhood sleep

when I might hear
river rush in my right ear
(Burntboot Creek, forked
from the Snoqualmie River)
susurrus of waterfall
in my left.

Austere and ascetic nomenclature:
Lindeman crossing into Buck,
North Fork Railroad Trestle,
Rattlesnake Lake,
Joseph, Judith, Seneca, Astrid.

Star women ambling
homeward without much fuss;
never begging for fast water
salt or skin or iodine,
not a meager sliver of apotheosis.

Tokul — darkest water,
utterly still.

The Skaters

The ice was always cracking
                        towards shore.
In its low thundering mist
we felt our own slick

                        treacheries accumulating. We skated ‘til dark,
dodging in and out
                        of the groaning
weather, shivering forward

like a train shuttering forever towards the horizon.

And only for a moment did we hope
for the ice below us to peel back, for
the surface to rearrange itself beneath us.

                        Then — we were falling, glamorously
into a black — splash of water.

                        We couldn’t wait to be famous,
or simply to leave,

                        to look back
upon it — our miniature landscape,

a diorama of who we’d once been,
where we’d placed our cold
red hands and
let out
                        our hot and hopeful breath.

Luck, a Birthday Poem

The birds are making a nest of me
out there, from all the hair I’ve lost
to my hairbrush and rug, bits of skin
and grey fuzz from my skirt too —
and everyone tells me
this doesn’t look good.

Am I shedding because it’s winter,
or because, as the Bad Luck Astrologer says,
Now at twenty-nine I’m finally completing
my first full twirl around the moon?
I think it must be both.

I should have known better then to test
my weight on that cold limb, should have

known better than to buy you
new shoes. All night they danced
around the house and just before dawn

tapped like a black moth
right out the door.
And all night

I brush my hair like a nearly dead plant,
letting the brown fall from its hard root
until it sings
like a sharpened knife
with its one sprout
of new life.

Waiting

Wayne would sit in front of the class
and tell us how it was to be afraid of death.
We called him the Mescaline Man
and not even behind his back. Before Wayne,
I thought mescaline was a bitter lettuce
I didn’t like. But Wayne made it seem fun
and then, not as fun. The ghosts he still saw,
the lost feeling on his left side, one leg
hanging from the stool two inches shorter than the other.
This was the way with adults then, with their slow
cautionary drums — the real dangers not yet ours to know.

Under the power lines drinking warm beers
I felt it too. At the top of the world, the pulse
of electricity at my feet, a buzz that kept the world
moving, people going where they needed to go.
And there I was, standing still, listening to the hum
of my body in the late summer grass.

Just for Tonight, Walking Home in Rain

We’ll begin at the end —
move backwards toward the flickering light
that catches our skin like a spark.
I’ll call all men sweethearts
as their slim suits speed towards me through time.

I’ll wear furs and smoke long cigarettes
and you’ll snap your thin suspenders
when you’re pleased with yourself,
swing your coat over your left shoulder
like a baseball bat.

I’ll speak from an octave lower in my throat,
sing a bluesy note from time to time,
kiss the air around your head
as if everything about you
is a soft place to land.

You’ll be tough and unwavering —
like the shadow of a stone,

but no matter the bind it puts you in,
it won’t take long for you to turn
towards my legs as if
they were long strands of rope.

Just for tonight,
we won’t care who done it,
or wonder how we’ve arrived

at the edge of the pool,
looking down at the body
floating as bodies do in old movies,
or wonder which of us did this,
or which of us is already dead.

See you Later, Grapefruit

Lately, exes have been sneaking into my dreams,
and other places of suspended thought. Like
when I’m swimming laps, my body blue
and liquid as the water holding me.
They wave. They smile. They flicker
along the blue-floor depths of the deep end.

One shows up to ask if I think he’ll look good
with dread locks. Another shows up with his dog
to ask if I still love her. And another

reminds me of the summer he made a movie
in which I played a young girl learning French,
my only lines words I already knew. And because
he was poor, or young, or in a hurry
there was only one take. And because
I was nervous, or lonely, or young
I remembered only two phrases,
which I purred,
again and again,
in my lowest,
breathiest voice,
the way I’d seen Jean Seburg whisper
to Jean-Paul Belmando in Breathless.

And even in the final scene, in which
I was supposed to have been hit by a car and killed,
I wouldn’t die,
but looked straight into the camera
propelled by my too-sudden death —
and kept humming:
à bientôt, pamplemousse, à bientôt.

Bed Bugs

The boat, full hold,
runs in deep cold.
In dusk’s fo’c’sle
we crewmen wear

sheer sleep and hear
snores. Dream of beer,
the slightest fear
of dawn, the work

day brings, its jerk
hard. This murky
night, Skipper skirts
Olalla Point,

rubs swollen joints
and lucky coins,
wants to anoint
the autumn’s plum-

dark with light rum,
chooses milk, hums,
broods as it un-
ravels white threads

in coffee. In bed
we sleep, bugs feed,
skitter on heads,
hands, hearts, and sink

torch tongues in skin
glass smooth and thin.
Little beasts, pin
puncture mouths. Ache.

See how we wake
naked, how we find
the smallest butcher
making of us meat.

Intent to Vacate

To the feminist karate union and the screeching
motorcycles on 1st Ave, burnouts a block long.
To the skater punk snapping selfies in the sun,
wearing a scruffed up t-shirt the same shitty
black as oblivion, not smiling, not even the eyes.
And also to the tangueras who drown oblivion
with their bodies, a terrible drone of beauty.
To the morning yogis I love to hate in their spandex
and grace making asanas before light. To impossible,
delicate hijabs framing the face of six-year olds
who skip in to an old brick school. To the kids,
the mother buying frijoles y tortillas for dinner again,
invisible men building and feeding and cleaning
the city to send dollars into walls of casas
they’ll never know. To the inherited, lucky wrench
in the mechanic’s hand, to the boozy cherry
on a toothpick, to the fruit trees no one picks clean,
the cherries and plums and apples. The blackberries
rotting on city brambles. To the spoiled kids, the quiet
kids and the angry kids and the yes kids and the no
kids, to all the kids who haven’t yet met oblivion
but are learning the ways to shape themselves
around it. To the techies who never really know
what to do with their money. And the few who do.

To the bus drivers. To the crackheads, the fishermen
weaving their nets and blackstacking North.
To the woman and her cart on the canal not leaving,
staying, how many days, under a broken umbrella?
To sail boats, to craft ales on sale, to jackhammers,
to cranes. To Seattle, you ache too hard, vibrate
at the seams. Like flint. Like caught breath.
Like NW’s finest weed burning a hole in the throat.
Once the moon was the minute hand, the seasons
the hour. What I miss most is stillness.

Working Too Hard

For five nights a fat banana slug has come to visit me,
chugging up the window, stopping just at eye level.

In front of the chair where I sit to write most mornings,
he sleeps for the night. Or does whatever it is slugs do.

By sun up, he’s gone, leaving in his place a tiny pile of shit.
It’s hard to look past this. Drinking my tea and writing,

imagining this shiny, slimy creature I’ve come to call friend
exposed on a field of glass, making his morning constitutional.

With no real predators—not even the bears or skunks
will partake of him—he appears entirely unworried.

His simple body, tentacles, mantle, anus, upsets me.
How easily it does exactly what it’s supposed to!

30th Birthday Poem

Warm dusks too hot to sip anything
but rum and look north & north & north

like cold nights when the aurora glows.

Meatballs, size of a small river stone
hand curved, roasted & frozen

saved like speckled marbles in a jar.

Cattails bent over their pond
as if signing a mortgage.

Driftwood waving her wild bone
arms at the end of the sea

as if she untangled from nowhere, with
everywhere sprouting from her fingertips.

Boy perched on the rock above the cliffs above the river,
the second his pointed toes depart the rock.

The dive & the cold.
His wet head above the eddies.

The now & the now & the now
like the filly, top lip stretched so far above the brambles,

stomping to ram her fragile adolescent
chest against the fence

as if she could close the last hovering inches
between the taste of blackberries

& empty air.

Light engulfs me now

a bewilderment          I who was merely an afterthought

an obscure thing barely noticed among the giants

naked now to your scrutiny          I who lived surrounded

cloaked in others’ luxury          indistinct and anonymous

did not ask to be seen


what drifted down through their branches

what seeped into my roots

was enough


what seems to you like amputation          disfigurement

was for me my only body


one by one the others taken

their branches tumbling          the forest

disassembled by human hands

[                                        ]

what was left to admire
something
                    meaningless as jangled

keys          a muscle twitching
aimless                              but alive

nothing recognizable except the blood

none of us wanted to say we were “with” him
when the news          trickled          in
local in the first days
                                                            then the smell of it

everywhere

how the hand                    on the revolver
was his          and hungry
and the shots

would not be undone

The Citizen

apologies to Wallace Stevens

one must have a mind of silly putty
acquiesce not
interrupt          combust at 35      one leaps
the other lies        deciding’s not for us
one must have a mind
of anecdote not data point        must
never mind the grope
one must have a mind of
antelope        one must have a mind
of wind        of pantyhose        one mustn’t
mind the mess or make a fuss
must mine the hive        believe the lies
one must have a mind      at least one
must

Shall Not Be Infringed

We dove under a table, my bag
clutched in one hand, your hand in the other.
House rules: no politics. Who had slipped,
stepped aside, maybe only moments? Left
the door unbounced this summer
night? He fired, pointing first
at the other end of the room, shed
one weapon for another. Is that
how we had time to dive? We threw
our bodies down like castoff shoes,
like trash. He walked out. This happened, it
happens, it will happen again, maybe to me,
maybe to you, waking. Down he went
through each room in my house of sleep, from
attic to basement shooting out the lamps
making permanent the dark.