Archives of Tuesday Poem

Let me tell you about the place I come from, the ragged-road Texas

where every gas station means hot breakfast tacos wrapped in foil,

and every summer means brisket cooked so slow it falls apart,

because everything worth doing is worth doing slow

unless it’s driving, or sex,

both of which we do young and fast until someone stops us,

except for me, who starts driving late and starts dating never

because the only boys who talk to me do it to get good

at talking to girls. This is how I learn to fall in love

with people who will never want me back.
Where I come from there is Spanglish at every table.

We talk about my grandma’s diabetes and my grandpa’s

Little Debbies, the Evil Eye and the ways you can get it,

my uncle’s ex-wife lighting candles in their closet

to make him love her back. It is not a place for being right;

it’s for walking together over parking lots rainbowed with oilslick,

for the good music, and palm trees, and air that is so heavy.

We grow up playing war in woods trying to strangle us,

no diplomacy allowed. The peaches on the peach trees

can’t be eaten and the open grass is littered with cutting burrs,

which is how we learn nature is a trap and crank the AC.

You are amazed that anything can bloom here.
We grow up drought-season baths in two inches of water,

battered by the metronome of parch and storm.

We grow up penance for our bodies and the things they need;

there is never moisture when we want it but always poison ivy,

a sky looming with tragedy. This is how we learn to fall in love

with things that will never love us back.
In the Texas I come from, my Nandi is smiling at me for the last time.

“Mijita, you’re getting so pretty, the boys will never leave you alone.”

Her compliments are hand-me-downs you’re embarrassed to be seen in;

you are astounded that I managed to grow here. But I am a rosebush

from drought country, breathing chicken feather and snake guts,

letting thorns teach me to love my own blood. I’ve been nourished

by the crooked prayers that came before me, lifted by the lunatic cries

of white doves and the fan-blade wings of cockroaches.

There is one place in town to get a milkshake, and the exit signs

are the only green for miles. This is how we learn to let love find us

when it’s looking, how we soak it in like bread.
Elisa Chavez is our Poet in Residence for January. Previously this month: "Revenge", "Ways of Devouring a Man", "Tips for Surviving the Saw Franchise", and "That Awkward Moment When He Says, 'You’re So Sweet,' And All I Can Think Is: 'Nah, Man. I’m a Velociraptor.'" She also sat for an interview.

Velociraptors and I have faces for the movies.

We have learned how to open doors: We scrape talons

across the knob, sneak out middle of the night

leave fading indent in the bed. He calls asking where I am.

I’m in your blind spot.

I’m watching heat radiate off you

as you stumble through the woods. I am attracted

to movement, meaning I only chase something when it runs.

Like a velociraptor, I will not text you back.
He kisses me like he doesn’t even know I have teeth,

like I don’t mouth his neck carotid and catastrophe.

He still thinks the parts of him I’ve swallowed are pieces

he’ll get to keep. When he looks into my eyes, I try to seem

like a warm-blooded girl, but I am a fucking velociraptor;

I trace my lineage back to birds.

He doesn’t understand how I can be so lizard-distant,

why I don’t want to kiss him outside the restaurant;

chalk it up to Cretaceous differences.
Squishy mammal boy, I don’t hunt in packs;

I have hooks for hands and very limited patience for bouquets.

If you wander into my woods, don’t be shocked when you call

and I don’t answer. Check your periph; don’t ignore that rustling.

You might have time for one last “clever girl” before you die.
Elisa Chavez is our Poet in Residence for January. Previously this month: "Revenge", "Ways of Devouring a Man", and "Tips for Surviving the Saw Franchise". She also sat for an interview.

The only way out is not through (bone).

When in doubt, don’t just meat or martyr.

Before cutting off your hand to spite your captor, see if you can tip the jar. 

Sometimes, shoot it; when you do, aim for the gears.

If there aren’t any scissors, start a fire. If there’s room in the well, sardine.

Not every number is an incision, and not every rule is a law.

The people who call you imprisoned are begging dilemma, so recognize

when dismantling traps requires you to think like a needle

and when you’d be better off thread.
Think outside the bear trap: Cinderella would smash her glass slipper

and birdsong a key from the shards; James Bond martini a fast car

from razor wire and the last olive. Joan of Arc would put on the wrong clothes,

take her own advice, call it God; there’s an exit for you. I promise.
Elisa Chavez is our Poet in Residence for January. Previously this month: The hugely popular "Revenge", and "Ways of Devouring a Man".

Selene and Endymion

Snooze-button darling,

I’ve been up all night:

scrubbing the pans till they star-shine,

making the mirror a gleaming lake.

When I come to you

you don’t wake.
Atalanta and Hippomenes

I have a meat-eater’s heart,

and baby, you’re the whole buffet.

You’re ribs slick with smearing sauce,

midnight ice cream

too tempting not to eat —

you sugared cheat.

You thump between my teeth.
Eos and Tithonus

What hurts most is your thick

summer song, buzzing dew into dust,

lifting its fingerprints from the leaf-blades.

No. What hurts the most is

that the song isn’t for me.

No — what hurts most

is the wasted wish of you,

how I can’t remember you supple,

fresh, under my tongue.
Elisa Chavez is our Poet in Residence for January. Previously this month: "Revenge".

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.

I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending

the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;

I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel

and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;
I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies.

With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars,

my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck

and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,
because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.

You just delayed our coronation.

We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;

we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business

because it’s still nobody’s business;

there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic

for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing,

and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it: 
we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,

the buildings here are not on your side just because

you make them spray-painted accomplices.

These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.

Even the earth found common cause with us

the way you trample us both,
oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,

and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them 

but I won’t, because they’re my family,

in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.

If you’ve never loved someone like that

you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.
I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;

I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,

I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down

and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.
But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.

We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder

the longer they spend burning us,

we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading, 

by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?

We know everything we do is so the kids after us

will be able to follow something towards safety;

what can I call us but lighthouse,
of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.

And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,

anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.

This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.

You cannot deport our minds; we won’t

hold funerals for our potential. We have always been

what makes America great.
Elisa Chavez is our Poet in Residence for January.

When the doctor runs out of words and still

I won't leave, he latches my shoulder and

steers me out doors. Where I see his blurred hand,

through the milk glass, flapping goodbye like a sail

(& me not griefstruck yet but still amazed: how

words and names — medicine's blunt instruments —

undid me. And the seconds, the half seconds

it took for him to say those words). For now,

I'll just stand in the courtyard, watching bodies
 
struggle in then out of one lean shadow

a tall fir lays across the wet flagstones.

Before the sun clears the valance of gray trees

and finds the surgical-supply shop's window

and makes the dusty bedpans glint like coins.
From Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones, Copper Canyon Press, 2016. Published with permission.

We're celebrating the life of Lucia Perillo all December. More details here. Previously: Monorail, "Dona", and "Pharaoh".

In the saltwater aquarium at the pain clinic

lives a yellow tang

who chews the minutes in its cheeks

while we await our unguents and anesthesias. 
The big gods offer us this little god

before the turning of the locks

in their Formica cabinets

in the rooms of our interrogation.
We have otherwise been offered magazines

with movie stars whose shininess

diminishes as the pages lose

their crispness as they turn. 
But the fish is undiminishing, its face

like the death mask of a pharaoh,

which remains while the mortal face

gets disassembled by the microbes of the tomb.
And because our pain is ancient,

we too will formalize our rituals with blood

leaking out around the needle

when the big gods try but fail
to find the bandit vein. It shrivels when pricked,

and they'll say I've lost it

and prick and prick until the trouble's brought

to the pale side of the other elbow
from which I turn my head away —

but Pharaoh you do not turn away.

You watch us hump past with our walkers

with the tennis balls on their hind legs,
your sideways black eye on our going

down the corridor to be caressed

by the hand with the knife and the hand with the balm

when we are called out by our names.
From On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, Copper Canyon Press, 2012. Published with permission.

We're celebrating the life of Lucia Perillo all December. More details here. Previously: Monorail, and "Dona".

Many of the Girl Scout songs

extorted a smile, our servile mugging —

but this one we loved best.

Starring a calf being hauled in a minor key,

its refrain two mournful syllables: dona.

First came the long o — in induction/seduction

to join the animal's cargo cult, then came

the short a, when the calf turned to beef

with no last meal and no reprieve.

The gist of the lyric: that we could choose

to be the calf in the cart or the bird in the sky;

the idea was simple, but also a lie: dona.

Bird is small and can fly where it wants

but it'll never be Miss Teen USA,

whereas the word abattoir was a chic French Kiss

our tongues would enter willingly.

Let that bird flitter off

like a dry dead leaf: this was a hymn

that we sang on our knees

on the dais by the flag, dressed in our sashes

and green berets like irregulars planning

a suicide mission: there was glory ahead

when we signed on, clambered into the wagon,

and let the future hitch up its horse.
From Inseminating the Elephant, Copper Canyon Press, 2009. Published with permission.

We're celebrating the life of Lucia Perillo all December. More details here. Previously: Monorail.
    

Seattle, at the old World's Fair
He stands by the helm, his face full of blue

from the buildings at twilight, his hand

knuckled around a metal pole that keeps him

from falling, as he flies past the vaults

of startled mannequins, the red ohs of their lips.

Christmas lights are also falling

through the windshield, onto his chest:

right side green, left side red —

dark then back again. 
Wait…my father is not moving yet:

no one has claimed the worn leather throne. 

But his thoughts are moving, wondering

whether movement is the same as growing old

in the province of space, not time. Inside his shoes,

his toes are as blue as the city streets,

and the drum in his chest, his red-lit chest,

is growing dim. He knows the train he's about to ride

has one rail: no steering, no turns.

And the only skill is in the brake. 
The brake. His lips roll over the words:

the dead man's brake. And a small boy

— come to ride up front — hears him,

tugs my father's coat and asks:

Hey mister, are you the driver of this train?
From Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2016. Published with permission.

We're celebrating the life of Lucia Perillo all December. More details here.
    

— after Alison Prine
I was here before the house came down.


I ran up its carpeted stairs,

my feet bare; I stood dripping

in a towel just outside the bedroom door;

I daydreamt of making a mural

of the hallway wall,

my hands full of tacks and yarn.
I came along the backcountry road,

its tar hot and melting in the August sun.

I passed a boy playing crow

in a cornfield, daring a rifle to shoot.
I was here before the house came down.

My feet wore holes in the carpeted stairs.

I wanted this place to remember me,

though I didn’t know I’d leave it —
or rather, it left me.

I was the one calling out its name.

If a tree falls in the woods

And no one is there to hear it

Does it even make a sound?
Alternative version:
If a police officer shoots a black kid

and no one saw the bullet

Is the black kid really dead?
If a white man goes on a killing spree is he a terrorist?

Or mentally ill?

Or a wolf in white skin?
If the black kid does not get a hashtag

were they really killed?

Are they worthy of mourning?
If no one knew the black kids name

were they even a person

or just a target?
If no one comes to the black kids funeral

Is their mother still crying?
If the black kid does not make the evening news

did they even

exist?

A Filipino restaurant is bone marrow

and vinegar boiling

perfectly over the sound

of the most dramatic Tagalog
 
soap opera you’ve ever been forced to watch. 
I come here, when I can afford it,

when my homesick can only be cured

by my mother’s hands
The server is a young woman,

possibly in her 20’s with a posture

that’s been carrying the weight of her father’s expectations. 
She calls me, “Ate” every time I come in.

It means older sister in Tagalog.  
I can tell by the way she responds

to her mother that she still lives at home,

because Filipino women without husbands

have no business being out on their own,

she wears a crucifix on her necklace

to remind her a man died for her once,

her priest, her mother,

her father, and her aunties

won’t ever let her forget it.  
And she doesn’t know.

But I’ve been there.

Wanted to believe that

I could behave and sit still.

Find a nice boy to marry

to shut my mom up and wear tradition

and religion on my wedding day, 
but I needed to be free.  
And I wonder what young women

like this know about freedom.

What it’s like to not have a predetermined destiny.

To not always have to say the right thing,

and dress the right way

and be the dream

that someone else dreamed for you. 
But this glass house
 
contains a boy

with too many stones

and not enough heart 
to tell his mother he’s trans.

Because I swore I would never tell my mother.

Because she wouldn’t understand. 
Because this is will make the pot boil over.

And this young woman could’ve been my mother in past life 
The woman behind the counter says,

“Hi Ate.  how are you today?”
I smile.

Hold back my painful desire

to tell her I’m different now.
 
I went and got free.

I am not your sister,

but I’m still part of the family.

But the smell of this adobo

is whispering my mother’s name

and I can’t unclench.  
My mother grips tradition

and Catholicism so tightly

she has no more knuckles for this. 
I do not correct her.

Continue this transaction like we normally would.
Do not try to axe at the root

of this family tree we swing under

I decide to never tell my mother

I can’t be her daughter

Do not throw these stones from your glass house, boy

the only chain you have left

Don’t anger your ancestors

Don’t shame this family anymore

Do not come out again

Don’t do this to us
So, I do not correct her.
Instead I settle into this excuse

rather not uproot this tree from the ground
Rather not show her that she might be the one who is free
and 
not me
We complete our business and she says, “Thanks Ate”

But I’ve been used to being free for too long.

My jaw shakes loose of the weight it’s been holding

dislocates from my mouth

and drops into the young woman’s hands
“Kuya” I say.

which is a respectful title for

“older brother”.
I do not expect her to catch me.

My muscle memory braces itself for the shatter

for the shards of stained glass

church windows I’ve just smashed.
She says, “Have I been saying it wrong this whole time?”
And this is where I have to come out again.

A decision to make to erase the history we’ve created together in our connection

to erase my own history

or to be loyal to who I’ve been 
I choose to be loyal.
I say, “no.”

Wait for the confusion, the hate, the back turned that I know so well
She says, “Oh, Sige—Kuya”
I smile.
And wonder how I will tell my mother that I am still her child.

She was perfect pitcher,

Cooled glass and ice center,

Crystal all her own bounty:
Solid hammer, extended bat broken

Cam, when is delicate fist

Worth more than peacock tailed

Beauty fanned against face?
She is not safe.

No one is safe

From the break.
Her grandmother was a witchdoctor

seafoam green eyes and muddy skin

the earth shook when she spoke
islands out of the sea, a place called home.
She is not safe.

No one is safe

From the break.
The sun perched between her thighs

A gown of silk and spit sways against

The winds exhale, she asks the sky
To return her purple labia in exchange

For the low hum she remembers rattled

At moon once the sun burned out, but now
All she can hear is the whir and click of

Her unhinged ribs stringing themselves back 

Together in the shape of an open mouth: 
she will devour each star until rendered black.
She is not safe.

No one is safe 

From the break.
Her daughter wears a crown around her neck

one lone dove in the palm of her hand

she names it after her father's fallen eyelash.
A bundle of sage burns at her feet

smoke twists towards her gathered ten,

she stops listening to her mother chewing heat
long enough to catch the birds last breath.

A copper leash patterned after still

heart of her grandmother’s dust swings 
in mimic of smoke, proven ancestry.
She is still not safe.

We are still not safe

From the ache.                          
We form ourselves indigo diamonds

Anyway.

On Mars, water once flowed. Where

did it go? Some froze, but scientists
suspect a cosmic cue ball — a comet

etc. — knocked Mars so hard
the planet escaped

its own atmosphere, just
left it there, jumped its own skin

like an anime cat
leaving his pajamas spread-eagle

in space. And now, goddammit,
David Bowie is dead.

I worshipped him like a flower
twists its dewy face to the brightest,

prettiest star. He asked us,
decades down, “Is there life on Mars?”

Once, perhaps. There once was life
in Bowie too. Stars glitter,

planets don’t —
an atmospheric parlor trick,

but neither titan ceases
to exist just because

a little air escaped.

(for Abbey, Belle, Circa, Fiddleback, Fritz, Oscar, Sideway, Toast, and Zan)
The Vixen pinks his way through whiskers,

strikes a nice plié,

then knocks a shot of Jäger back,

and drops some Fourier.
The shaven Lion shyly strides

beside his own conceit:

a guileless wilding

twice defiled, but innocent and sweet.
Mama Panda and her Pup

(wily as Montaigne)

splay their limbs in slick abandon,

rolling through the rain. 
She's a powder-hounded faun

with talcum in her eyes —

he's Dauphin of Malcontrites:

: the locus of surprise.
The Kangaroo who used to wear

a Fox's gold lapel

casts himself on infant seas

and rides each roll and swell
Rainbow Rat, the dayglo champ

of pan-harmonium

wriggles in a bedsty tizzy,

nursing at his thumb.
The Folf-cum-Husky's snugly tucked

and tangled up in blue

and white and glows so bright

he turns the old moon new.
Even Wolves, who play at stern

and sober countenance,

lose themcells in padded selves

and capillary dance:
though shadows blaze through every day

and coruscate the night,

we learn to see beyond the darkness

by each other's light.

Polygon tufts

kitely incurved

hood the fir cones from

rainfall. They respond

by closing tight

like the armadillo married the ent

and gave birth to

convex reflections of skylight

bursting chrome.

No slither for the deluge

the fir cones may now ripen

a living piece of architecture.

And when the branches shed,

the needles burn in captivity,

in ceremony,

to bless and protect

continuum.

Vancouver has an

approved fireworks

competition.
But here the

only permitted explosions

are gas leaks.
Through Greenwood’s

skeleton

(this neighborhood

always burning down) 
with my sister, the arted-up

boarding for windows of still open

businesses.
Block long fenced off gravel

pit where I once ate gyros
with my nephew. (this neighborhood

is always coming up) The

Cyclery, the reading center are Causes,

rally points, easily raised funds to move
ahead. The family

owned coffee shop

not so much, just another, 
plus,
they live a few miles south and

their house is being destroyed

to make way for an oncoming train

station.

I did not see her in flight or morning.

I did not stand her harps or trumpets.

or anything in my getting up day.

I traded the dreams we made on the ground

for my dream to be a god in the sky

(It was a guilded Gethsemane).

Hell is immortality without a net.

Immortality is a moon that never sets

after a million Sunday suns.  
What was more important in the clouds

to my zest for joy unseen?

What unseen lord lineated my wings

and made them more important than our broom?

What made them more important than our leaps

Through earth bound walls and beams?

What — in the light — was far more desirable

than the beads of sweat in our dreams?
Once we salved our scars on the ground.

Fields bent around the space we tided

and stole away from lashes and bounders.

Once we stilled the weevil in stole away hours

and made nothing more important than our clay.

Once we spun and made a world

                    and then I flew away. 
Why, boy, why should she have not kept moving?

My funeral band should have been dusted.

My procession was better off bare and emptied

in a taxonomy of heartbreak and loss;

a mourners’ row of upturned plots

for living graves of swords and shields.

Hope brought her no feathers in ruby red fields

and memory gave her no balms.

Why should she mourn me in the memory of flight

when my rails meant more than her arms?

Art saves nothing

and this is not art

just words running

in lines, hoping to reach

redemption. Meanwhile

time is running                out
for bat and bee,

hippo and elephant.

Coral reefs are dying. Salmon,

once wild, breed in tubs.

Don't put your hope in poems
that plot the putrid doings

of bankers, that bank

on Franz Marc's red horses

gamboling and grazing,

as if we'd never learned

to fabricate glue from hooves.