mojo
What if I told you I tasted
a country that begged me with its bowl
of backwaters?
I would always fit in rich earth,
dwell on a straw mat with men
and their sand-dry smiles
sculling down the river’s leg. Lust
cut me open in half like coconut
the ivory of wealth unthreading
from petals of a bruise now a drink
we ached together. I knew God lived here
in this moon-glared mountain
each descend held delicious secrets
sleeker than ceramic
and the quasar of this heart.
Our biography is dusk: tranquil
horizon graded with ash, the color of my mother,
flecked with streaks of violet, pale residue of my father’s burning
If my birth was an act of arson,
I will always be half heat, half woman
tired of being rekindled, culture lined with scar tissue,
a language folded in two,
burning with thirst
I am searching for a name to give to my brothers
before they vaporize, and I am left holding emptiness
in my arms
My sisters are unraveling like onion springs,
every slice a trauma our eyes are forced to witness;
mourning the chasm we call family, fair skinned
magnolia plucked mid-bloom and tossed
into the arbitrariness of night, blackened
by fire
it is impossible to contemplate the loneliness
we carry, the mistakes we carve out of ourselves
into lumps of coal that will feed a foreign flame,
my father as a young boy selecting the finest rocks,
skipping them across Oghelli like dreams. Before he
learns to harm enough without leaving marks,
before my mother becomes therapy, spreadsheet
for his pain we still will not name,
before that act of arson, before we begin to confuse
rage and affection, before we remember to forget
love is a luxury measured only in burns
My father is a young boy selecting the finest rocks,
skipping them across Oghelli like dreams. My father
says our people come from water, he omits what turned
us into chimneys. If that is true, I want to carve
my next mistake into a young boy drowning, inside him
Knowing all this, lover, if you ever find my love leaking
in places it should not, finger the holes into a trauma
of silence, send to my mother to roll under her tongue
when she carves out another decade, a stale mistake
with my father, I will fill her lungs with sooty forgiveness.
She will carry my ashes everywhere, one with the other,
one absolving the other until dawn pierces through
The hurry-up done; the wait just begun. The problem
with every revolution, by definition, is it ends
right back where it started. This roundabout nature
of, yes, the tank treads of Tiananmen. Kill the thing
in order to preserve it. I take this stick I sharpened myself,
and jam it thru my earlobe, call it a sonnet. Selectively
perfect. The word empathy thrown around these days
like it’s a football, and everyone in the game trying to play
thru some post-concussive, zombie-walk symptoms. This
winter, the winter of our winter. Late-night at the sweat
lodge, and the quality of light like an aluminum bat
to a windshield. Smokescreen. Escape. A year spent
trying to count all the rings of a redwood. Camping
at the bottom of a slot canyon so narrow total shadow even
at noon. Godhead. Goddamn. Mom says I sound like
the cokeheads in the restaurant Ladies’ Room. Give a man
a gas pedal, and he’s gonna mash on it. This diorama
of Custer’s last stand. Everyone knows he was a dick,
famous for wearing, impossible to un-see, a cape of scalps as
housecoat. The history of things pressing in on all fronts.
Can there be more than one (front, that is)? No, there cannot.
Behind that truth is only the sadness of Falstaff forced
to walk home from the party once again. Overuse of “brainstorm.”
A shadow thrown across a sunbathing goddess. Mix of sun-
screen and sweat in mouth as lips find purchase on collarbones.
Everything after. Optional 3rd row seating. Career opportunities.
—for Michaela
I’ve been paired up with the earth much too often,
my body, year after year, chummier with its peat-stink–
here, where the ferns are nefariously threaded tight
and the newts safe guard its most comical songs–
but back mattering less, festering, spring after
spring, as if I’m the smuggler’s redolent stash,
being smacked against the butt end of history.
Rocks play dumb. And trees have stopped keeping score,
having been twisted into crosses out next to the parking lot
where the car-tops are worried with crow-crap.
South, there’s a thousand more like me. And North,
they can’t tell us from the voices the wind’s thrown.
Only this river’s insistent, turning out more of itself,
ceaseless and vacant-eyed, only detouring for love,
to catch up on more of the sea and its past lives.
I cock my head, gumming some remedy, growing
simpler by the minute but only when I’m half-in-it.
My mug shots droop down like moss. I’ve the skin-tint of porridge.
And have spent the last hour giving lap dances to tree-stumps.
O, you who’ve fared better, breathe deep for me–
those few who raft air, who are wafted, whisked-off,
be sure to roach-clip my remains and sample some of my plaint
when I’ve bottomed-out, un-noteworthy and furred,
finally nailing my poet-role and rough-drafting towards lore.
1 – SALUTATIONS
He’s dead. I know this long before they make me look at him. His eyes are closed, unquestioning. That, at least, is a relief.
The room is small, bare, a place of gloom, unconnected to the world outside where the sun keeps rising and children are running free.
I don’t cry when I say his name, as though I’m denying myself the right to mourn. You’re in shock, they tell me. As an explanation or an excuse? I want to kiss him one last time, share my breath, warm his skin. But he would flinch from my touch, recoil instead of reach. My hands are too cold regardless of his state.
After I’ve done my job identifying him, they cover his face with the sheet and try to usher me out. Try and fail. I need to say goodbye, I tell them. Be alone. They retreat from the room, no questions asked, and this power I have as the grieving wife feels deep and endless and wrong.
I approach the gurney, eyes burning with the sting of formaldehyde. I stare at his feet, the shape of them underneath the gray cotton. I remember his toes, the neat condition they were in before we left. The magnificent blisters that appeared halfway through our hike.
The Alps in fall time—a must-see. You should really go when you get the chance and the weather is good.
2 – SONG OF A SINNER
They apologized for not retrieving his body sooner. Two French uniforms, bashful, facing the newborn widow in the shiny lobby of a four-star hotel. We are sorry.
What they should’ve said was, We refuse to risk our lives for a man who has already lost his.
Naturally, I wanted to say. When it comes down to it, when we’re forced to choose. We’re all the same.
Before the rains, I was a different person. It shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose, that death unhinges you, its absolute weight. Nothing holds on to its meaning anymore. My world of thank-you notes and charity donations and organic eggs and separating garbage—gone. Does it matter I never meant anyone harm? In my moment of truth, my ego won and that outcome is what defines me, drawing the picture of who I am.
Strangely, there’s comfort in that. I may cower in guilt for the rest of my life, but I no longer walk in ignorance.
3 – GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
I didn’t get lost on my way back to civilization. I returned in one piece from the mountain and reported the events to the local police straight away. I told them everything, for the record, not holding back, despite my throat being so narrow. When I used the word “choice”, they reached for the tissues and sympathetically shook their heads, contradicting me, handing out words like “emergency” and “impulse.”
They gave me onion soup and treated my cuts and scrapes, the scent of disinfectant overpowering the smell of melted cheese, my stomach revolting.
It wasn’t until I broke down and drowned my words, that I wondered, Did I tell them everything so I could be punished or absolved?
4 – PROPHETESS
Here in the morgue, I don’t talk to his corpse. Forgiveness is not what I’m after. I’d rather talk to the living, warn you about who I am, about who you are, in all probability, when it comes down to it, about how we do not know ourselves until.
There are so many ways in which we are broken.
5 – VANISHING ACT
The story begins in all innocence with a married couple on a fancy holiday in France. They love the outdoors, especially the mountains, which are hard to come by in the flat polders of Holland. Fit and ambitious, they climb quickly, well-stuffed packs on their backs. They think they’re prepared for their first day on the slopes: hiking boots, Swiss water-filter bottles, trail mix.
At a junction, they pause, challenging each other—further up or back down? The pressure of being young. The summit luring.
Up they go, away from the beaten paths. Do they not feel the wind shifting? Neither he nor she lifts an eye at the sky, darkening.
It begins to rain when they’re alone in the wild. They pull up their hoodies and keep going like the good sports they are. When the earth turns to mud, they seek refuge under a canopy of trees, afraid to lose their footing. It will blow over, they tell each other, smiling.
An hour later, the rain is pouring down, torrentially, more furious than before. Husband and wife are drenched and miserable, cold wind hitting their faces. Predictably, the bickering begins. You always want too much. You never speak up in time. As if blame would make their situation any less precarious.
A river forms, sweeping past them, growing fast. Debris flushes down with the water, rocks, branches, clumps of earth. Below them, the dark flow plunges off a cliff into the alpine valley.
The wife assesses. Flips off her backpack. Zips it open. Takes out a coil of rope. With it, she plans to tie them to a tree. But before she can execute her master plan, the river of mud broadens, rushes in, and swallows them both.
There’s sliding and falling and screaming and reaching for branches left and right. The wife seizes a root, and in a flash, the husband grabs a strap of her backpack. The pack is almost jerked out of her hand, but seeing her husband in need, she squeezes her end tightly.
So they hang, suspended against the odds. With one arm she bears the weight of two people while a dense stream of mud pushes past. The husband begs for her to hold on, and she does, hold on, tries to at least, crying, straining, and then not. Not anymore. Something happens and both her hands are above her head now, merging with the root. She closes her eyes and waits for the echo of a body tumbling down into the abyss.
6 – A RIDDLE OFFERING NO ANSWERS
Did it all happen this way?
Of course not. I don’t really know what happens when the earth crumbles and the life you’ve built for yourself is flooded out from under you; when darkness breaks into your mind, a darkness you intend to fight and against which you’re helpless nonetheless; when you struggle for every breath and your heart is bursting and the dreadful anticipation of pain is somehow the only light in all that darkness; when in spite of your efforts, the darkness wins and you admit to yourself that the man with whom you are bonded, in sickness and in health, by the strap of your backpack, is actually dragging you down, is hanging between you and life, is killing you unless you intervene.
There’s only an approximation of events. This is, sort of, what happened.
7 – LESS IS MORE
I leave the morgue with a few of his belongings in a plastic bag. A water-logged Swiss watch. His hiking boots.
We shouldn’t get attached to things in this world, the Buddhists say. All things are temporary and will soon be gone.
The moment I let go of my backpack, willingly, consciously, I learned everything there was to know about myself.
Put to the test, I’d failed the one I loved the most.
I’ll never forget his eyes in the seconds before I sentenced him to die. Panic, accusation, incomprehension. My face must have shown him what I was about to do.
8 – EXODUS
I dine alone in the bustling hotel, sleep alone, wake up alone. I pack our bags and rebook the train. Before I leave, there is one last scene in the deserted mountains. Deserted paths, deserted flowers, deserted rocks.
The Alps in fall time are beautiful—a must-see. They look like they can kill you, but only as a faraway possibility that isn’t relevant to you. The wind in the trees blows as a reminder of hazards to which you pay no heed. The air above the peaks is crisp and clear.
I sit down on a boulder we passed the other day, suspended between beauty and death, between meaning and its disappearance, the bitter taste of absurdity in my mouth.
The ego is a twisted thing. You may train it to lay low and talk softly. You may not even realize it’s there. But threaten your ego with destruction and it will rise to possess you. The sinking, the crush of culpability, the desire to erase yourself—these only come afterward, when nothing remains to be done.
I peer over the mountain ridge into the abyss, dizzying myself, contemplating. What has happened in these mountains surrounds me as a threat, as something that is yet to come, and I gladly accept this reversed chronology. Between terror and regret, I will choose terror.
When I finally get up, a flock of starlings rises. They circle over my head and disappear into the void.
How human that we end up hating the selves our egos fight to protect.