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.