sleet
and Eucalyptus.
Scribbly Gum. Pause. And light is cool, close;
as in near but–
Ambush. Demonic ambu–
scade.
Local. Engbic or Araglish?
Regular. Green olives,
–she’s pregnant–
pitted. Conical fruit.
Current.
–married a global man–
Blood mouth.
I brush my hands through the Cypress-Pine,
and crush the leaves between my palms and fingertips (fragrant).
I wipe the stone clean,
and spread the leaves along his grave.
We have broken our oars and sharpened them into
paring knives. You remember the desert way the wind
sucked colour from the foothills, put a fluorescent eye
in the heart of the firmament. You
remember January cigarettes and January
porridge, your belly in the ocean,
how you made
lights in the heavens, augured beneath
the august sky a chord sequence and
wrote it on your palm with mud.
In mirrors, sunglasses, and sandcastles the
braying of a boar, a wildebeest, a
typewriter and a computer in a tavern,
licking port wine from their lips,
a January cigarette. Your belly
in the concert-hall.
Songs and dances in the pages of memory,
a guitar strung about your breast,
a pen, an amplifier stuck in your ear.
People in cars and on bicycles in the next room,
mothers, goose-farmers, toecutters, pneumoniacs.
Eating bananas, fried rice, January porridge,
your belly in a supermarket. Ears
living in trees, listening to telluric currents
and the new radio. Your belly on a
television.
You remember drinking crystals and coffee-beans,
two kangaroos and a hookah, stealing
a grape, a lanyard,
unclipping paper in a dream.
West of the waterways the wild city at night
congested with salads, cider, and prophylactics.
Your belly in the newspaper, your
voice becomes an antenna.
You are a mile and a league, a
pedestrian, a composer, a lunatic,
a thistle, a compost-heap, a ballroom,
a watchdog, a liturgy, a city-street,
a caldera, a
cup of soup when the wind and the steam
and the baritone voice of the
second generation are singing in gay harmony
and the dead are watching your belly
through a looking-glass.
We have broken our oars and sharpened them into
batons, and you are playing your heart,
playing your heart like kettle-drums,
playing out your life and
killing the clown.
You posited gremlins in the asphalt, pixies
under the counter at Nervous Dog, a plurality
of health code violations hidden beneath
your burritos decebrados. Somewhere, you
said, in the sewers under Whole Foods
it resides, and by gum, you aimed to find
it, cut it out, eat it still beating with a gremolata
poached in an orange construction barrel.
In preparation you placed stacks of Marshalls
at every manhole, pumped She Walks Crooked
at maximum volume, knew you had just
a few minutes before the Woods of Fairlawn
residents reported you for noise violations.
The last I saw of you was on the ladder
in the middle of West Market in front
of the Fairlawn Taco Bell, tools strapped
to your back, headlamp ablaze. You would
approach, you said, from outside the perimeter,
a bottle of retsina in each hand, and follow
the aborted Google Fiber cables until you found
the core of the beast. The sun rose, my
bourbon is gone, and if I eat one more
seven layer burrito things will get messy,
and still there is no sign of your return.
Hard to believe
a thread could catch
and hold them still
against my skin.
Seed-pearl, turquoise
or bud of native flower?
Glass, its glitter and blade
whittled by sea.
A tiny bi-valve
stubby as stone.
A black pebble
resolved as shadow.
An oblong
cut from a long walk
on a cloudy morning—
strands of wind gust of hair.
Thread—
fine as a wren
begins
a threnody for water
a threnody for air.
Sunday, in the ribs of a bluebonnet field, I reach for their little bells—a floral alternative for inspecting my body.
My mother and I: hands in the ice bath, flowers a kinship between our fingers. This is all there is. This, and spring aches pressed between heavy books.
Someone once told me drying flowers is like falling out of love: flattening life to a millimeter, to bland colors we call beautiful, all the veiny things on display without any mystery left in them.
Twelve and I demand my mother pull over so I can collect trumpet flowers off the highway. Pruning shears and delight. How quickly I learn to distrust this feeling, staring at the roadside memorial’s coquettish silk buds.
More than anything, I want to be a tulip bulb. Sell me in Amsterdam even though no one knows my color. Let me be a craving.
April heat where porcelain is the only escape. My first cycle comes and I’m still on the tile, trying to loop womanhood around me like a bandage when it’s really a wound.
My grandmother taught me to search for aphid holes in everything: sepals, the ends of question marks, a man’s eye, just wide enough to slip through when he stares too long and there’s no way out.
Let me be clear. I do not want to find my body in old metaphors. But I can’t help myself.
Yucca does not press well. Two mornings after an attempt, a quiet rot between cookbooks. Thick liquid hot and cloudy on the counter, a smell I can’t open without thinking of what little I know of sex.
Hands full of thorns. Weeding fingernails for days. A sacred vow to the earth that when I look for its offerings, I offer my own skin in return.
After the flowers all dry, I have no language left for what they used to be. But the books will never lie flat again, the imprint of all those floral bodies stuck in their pages. And I am jealous of them.
Ink on paper: David Medalla: 1967
Funny how we don’t need alcohol anymore
to get each other to open. There is a thin
em dash along our mouths where confessions
no longer shimmy, the silence becoming our own
way of telling each other: let me in. The last time
I let anyone touch me this close, I was learning
how to aim a gun. For the last few December
thirty-firsts my grandfather took my hands in his and we
shot at the bathroom wall. It was New Year’s Eve and everyone
in my neighborhood had something shaking
in their hands. How common it is to mistake our hands
for explosives. Napalm knuckles, dynamite fingers. Today my father
roars for the same rooster fight over and over, and my brother
plays Fortnite again, aims like a blind man
waist-deep in need for color, the way
koi needs water to breathe, the way I need pain
to remember. I shoot at the concrete again
and again so it remembers—a black hole in the wall
where a memory should be.
I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country.
—Joy Harjo
▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅
[Urgent]
This cannot fit into a poem.
This should be a political pamphlet.
▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅
[Scandalous]
This should be a white paper.
▅▅▅▅▅!
[Chilling]
This should be the slogan on all our streets.
▅▅▅▅ : ▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅
[Shameful]
This is apartheid. Who will boycott the boycotters?
▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Horror]
This should be an HRW-Amnesty International report.
▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ & ▅▅▅▅’▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Heartbreaking]
This should be a thoroughly researched documentary film.
▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅
[Disturbing]
This should be a long-read in The New York Times.
▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅
[Haunting]
History will never absolve us.
Their long march home is a story to be told to our future generations.
▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅
[Oppressive]
When will our political class break its silence?
▅▅ ! ▅▅ ! ▅▅▅▅ !! ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ !!!
[Depressing]
When will all the progressive forces unite against Hindutva fascists?
▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Outrageous]
Why does the state police women’s bodies with impunity?
▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Devastating]
Such sacrifice!
When will we have our revolution?
▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Warning]
The price will always be paid in blood.
What is the use of a poem in this season of hate?
The regular cliches: A desperate cry for help,
an act of witness, a scream into the void?
What is the use of a poet in a season of bloodshed?
Tell me, dear ones.
Is she the one who grieves?
Is she the one who guards the embers
of a people’s rage?
Is she the one who mirrors
your shattered heart?
Or, is she the one
who speaks to show
she is not yet dead?
I.
She crouches on the shelf, cramped, where she hid the blanket that hid her.
Spots of brown-red blood, bold on the blanket that hid her.
Her fresh skin brushstrokes against that blanket that hid her.
She charts the X’s on her left thigh, one cut for each failure
to snuff beneath the blanket that bid her live.
II.
(She is sorry her gripped words chipped into every held hand;
nothing could have rid her of that then.)
III.
In another version, not X’s
but goat-willows with fuzzy buds
like ones that grew near the field
where it happened; she loved
to brush the fur against her face
all over it felt like love.
She cut love
into her anxious thigh
so it could carry her. Now,
her forefinger traces
the vines the way a mother
traces her baby’s jawline. She lingers
on the buds,
remembering soft,
re-membering soft.
IV.
She segments the blanket-that-bid-for-her into palm-sized pieces,
calligraphies one letter onto each piece as many times through the alphabet
until each piece has a name. Arranges the pieces into a poem
no one will ever read: a narrative poem with a speaker, unspeakable.
V.
She gently pricks her left forefinger, anoints each piece, like the Passover ritual,
how the finger dips into wine, dabs the wine onto a plate once for each plague
until her people were set free. Like the ritual over Sabbath candles, she circles
her open hands three times over the words, gathers the air above them, draws her palms
to her face, closes her eyes, and sings:
blessed are you, O Lord our God; bless this one who is still, here
With an Amen, she jumbles the shards, sews them to form
a skirt, letters facing outward. Wears it to remind herself a sparrow’s song is always
the same— and isn’t.
when animals are like humans
humans are happy
the monkey hand grabs
and the fork doesn’t fall
the dog has an attitude
when they live in small families
and mate for life
humans are happy
also when one strays
from the pack
to confirm the rule
they are happy with the one
with all the feathers and
the color the male
that’s into males
they are happy looking on
the way it either dies or finally
to its nature
succumbs
(for J.C)
Lockdown, an empty beach
pockmarked with yesterday’s footprints,
now sculpted by morning tides
coarse sand, the coldest of grain.
Driftwood lingers, and a solitary crow
eying the movement of waves,
undeterred by silence, isolation
transience, its own chill cry.
Beyond the flatness, sand hills
come and go, your artist’s gaze
freezing the moment in time.
You send me the photograph
as you trudge the length of the beach
nothing happening but walking,
just you, the crow and the sea.
Don’t worry, baby / there’s another one in ten minutes /
why don’t I read you this passage / from volume two / ?
ACT I: Marigolds
If I should drive out to the country in my most abjuring dreams
Let there be marigolds growing on the highway
Yellow and cheerful and hungry for sun
Constant and timeless and vulnerable
Let all the passenger-seat conjurings ask whether they were there the last time
Let my forgetfulness be a shoulder shrug the flavour of carefree youth
Let me become a highway metaphor a shade of openness I struggle to hold onto
Let holding on be the destination
A field of those marigolds where a cattle farm once was
The farmer’s husband buried beneath the grief she planted for him before the heartbreak killed her
Flower Angels I draw into the land of the secondary plot
Of the story that ends before I learn to carry them with me
The Naivety of permanence
The roar of engine as they germinate in my place
ACT II: Succulents
If I should make it to the dessert in the protractions of my musings
Let the succulents show me where to honour my grief
Weathered and hardened and thirsty
Determined and rebellious and resilient
Let a stew of loneliness and desert sun wonder what it is to grow in infertile ground
Let all of the small deaths within me skirt around the parts in the sands where their roots may lay
Let me lower my almost-dry corpses beside them and open my hands in offering
Let the offering be an exchange for learning
A hardened leaf beneath the hardened skin of my fingertip
The beads of sweat that roll down my forehead bid greeting to the tears on my cheeks
I wipe away at the salt on my face and vow to keep growing
In the tale that does not end with survival
The wisdom in flourishing
The crunch of sand beneath my feet as I make my own way
ACT III: Peonies
If I should appear as a b-plot in the escapisms of another
Let me be a field of peonies at the beginning of Spring
Layered and soft and blossoming
Vibrant and lush and rare
Let me be unafraid to flower so fleetingly they almost miss me
Let me be unashamed of my need for soil undoubtedly fertile to bloom like this
Let me have faith in all of the reasons I have always been worth waiting for
Let the waiting be the journey
A sea of pink-tinged petals reaching out to touch one another
The love I have learnt to give myself the only marvel worth noticing
A single moment in time when I am nothing if not the protagonist
Of this plot line in which I inevitably thrive
The sagacity of growth
The rustling of petals in the expanse of my anthesis
It blows leaves around
like letters –
forms shapes to-
gether
in highs and lows
I can’t read
I’m distracted
scatter and branch
by voices a cloud
that’s now dis-
appearing
We need clouds –
I watch kids bowl
at the nets
serious / accurate
‘line and length’ –
A small dog sniffs me –
feet to knees –
I think I pass
At the corner I dodge
a yellow tripod –
‘it’s a boundary
survey’ says the guy
levelling a theodolite
‘Aim the crosshair
in the viewing scope
at the point
to be measured’
Boundaries linger
even if fences fall –
I’ll be trespassing soon
with or without strong measure
The east wind is hot
and doesn’t care
kisses me as it passes
and yes I let it
– again and again
I will not be forgiven, I will not repent
I think they left the door open on purpose.
The farm leaked in. Sheep droppings among desks,
and snagged wool and the down of a hen.
How they must’ve walked, unsilent as they do, the mice
under rodent cabinets and the globe-eyed paperish skulls
of lesser primates. A parrot from a branch
in the caretaker’s home refused to tell,
but I watched the caretaker’s lone horse
stand against the school window for hours,
at the glass as at the surface of a book
printed especially for oneself,
horrified at its own bones.
In Caravaggio’s Seven Mercies you see them poking out,
a pair of dead men’s feet, holding place for now—
two small anchors wedging open the door of the light,
though darkness has arrived.
In ‘Quarantine,’ Eavan Boland guides you back in time, See, she says—
the famine dead, look at this woman’s cold feet cradled by her husband
against his chest before both hearts give out to hunger, too much
too little, too tired so cold, but see, this trace, this tenderness
these feet, chest, hands, that they still could (and in which darkness).
After the death of Keats, moulds are cast of his face, his hands, feet,
or at least a hand, at least a foot. The reflection of his dead face is a double,
painted by Severn, as if granting immortality, replicas of the face in plaster
stone, copper, packed in tissues, in boxes, even in present day kept,
sold, stroked, adored as if—
The foot and hand (cold, incapable of grasping) lost, form ghostly outlines,
adumbrating the solidity of absence.
The Tollund Man’s hood is removed by peat, a narrative inscribed by uncanniness—
ropes and knots, his terror all so far removed, as if the past was really a foreign place.
His perfect face, the pillowed lips, the feet, long boned and elegant.
After they find him, they preserve the head but leave the rest to melt back
into the anonymity of decay.
When you died, they wouldn’t let us see any part of you at all.
We had to imagine your face your body transformed.
I would have touched your feet, I swear.
At least a foot, a toe, I would still have loved you
before the night
before the light
crossed over
and you were gone for good.
Feet tips no more
than rosebuds, skin
as thin as membrane.
Inside this newborn
ringtail pulses bitumen
warm from summer’s hell.
Gumnut eyes blind
black ears folded
there is no mother
now as threadbare
noose of tail lets go.
What am I to do?
Give milk, cup
it dry in muslin?
Head as a thimble
bowed as a buttock
that puce bruise
on concrete would
take just one boot heel
to end a vellum paper skull.
But I don’t, blister eyes
are blind to all universes
still as a baby’s fist.
I’ll mercy those who can
see frequencies in the light.
All the earth starts
as a wrinkle, a purse
of hope holding murmurs
contracting and unravelling
the strands of the day.
At some point I should
help, the argument
for life worming right there –
but what could I ever really do?
Put its soft wild
pound in my pocket?
Place its unlacing
song on my palm?
Lately I’m more interested in how the neck and the head
don’t say anything of the feet.
The cormorant disappears.
There are times my smile has been interpreted as joy.
This morning the clouds are like arrows whose sole purpose is
not stopping.
No one admits to robbing anyone. But the forest is thinning. Already
the clouds are less than they were.
When the sun goes down I will make my way home.
I keep returning to the neck and the head.
It’s the sea every time.
The way the cormorant is so completely
gone.
Moon is flat
World is made of cheese
Would you set fire to a Wellbeing Week Pizza
just to see if it shrieks? (spoiler: it screams)
We put all our victories and defeats
in a basket attached to a hot air balloon
We wanted to note the time
from flying
to falling
from basket
to gnarled cane pile
Tried to buy a Big Couth Object yesterday
but it was was so big and so couth (hectic)
Designed a career pathway that ends
with me lobbing a cashew the size of a baby
into a basketball hoop (radical self-care?)
Anyway, at the end of the staff meeting
the executive called us “Wellbeing Week arsonists” (sad)
We called it “keeping warm” (lol)
My daughter’s hair clips
pastel the carpet. Plastic flowers
I try not to step on.
Even chaos is relative—a mess made
by my longing for order.
As a child, we lived in a trailer,
then a shelter, then a van.
My first memory: my sister eating lunch
from a cupholder. Our lives
so invisible, they felt forbidden.
This morning, in my apartment, it hurts
to be human. Einstein says gravity
can push things apart, but on Earth
it only holds us together. Distance
marked by our having once
been whole. Is this still life,
with no one here to see it?
Strange to think they live within,
mimicking our every mundane move.
There are those who believe
they would cease to exist
without us: with no flesh to hold up,
organs to cradle, unsheathed
of all practical purpose.
But perhaps it is they who set loose
our dreams at night—
in order to climb out while we sleep,
wash unattended in moonlight,
try on various shadows.
They love the music of a still house.
Pale bric-a-brac. Quiet unnecessary things.
Instead of speaking, they rock
slowly in each room, fingering the dust.
Now and then, they reach for one another
and tap their blueish bones.
How like a flotilla of stalled parachutes is the canopy
of this lone eucalypt, caught and agitated by a morning squall.
Laden cumulus barge across the window,
a flow field breaking brightly open, only to close again.
Looks like the weather’s heading south, might reach you
as you’re moving out, extracting yours from ours. On your knees,
taping dusty boxes. That ripping sound, the ragged final tear.
You’ll seal the cracks, only to open them again.
I know the contour of your back, the way you bite the tape,
the small and careful hands that smooth it down,
the way you’ll squat to take the weight of things
you valued once, your merciless, thinning hair.
When I look up, the squall has passed, the tree returned to itself.
The canopy is nothing but a living mass of leaves; shroud lines
simply branches. Only the idea of the parachute remains: the terrifying
leap, the jolt that breaks the fall, the slow, exhilarating descent.
many years ago, my mother would send me down the steps of our house to snip away
lemon verbena or clambering rosemary – or show me the restrained way to cut the fatter and older
spring onions so they’d grow again, hollowed and dewy and cold because our home is always cold. I’d
bring them over to her chopping board, under the hanging lavender
under the crockery dotted with tiny flowers, window facing the Leith Valley
I remember the violence of life uprooted without secateurs. the nail or the pull …
to limp on by extended simile, displacement and its elaborations can be unpredictable:
refugee camps were set up at the border crossing for hugely over-projected numbers of
Syrian and Iraqi refugees in 2003. post-invasion, Anglo-American strategists assumed uproots
without offshoots: Iraqi and Syrian peoples would flee, then return when security was
reimposed.
but staying could mean guarding. leaving could mean never returning, like Palestinian
Arabs 50 years earlier. neighbouring countries could provide refuge over refugee
status
my mother spent two months after my father emigrated to sort out visas and
to bring a short-haired, two-year-old girl out of No Longer Home. she uncoupled
the defining of person to place. she is braver than me: at school, I wrote
a fairy-tale about a princess moving castle. it has taken me weeks to
take down flat hangings, to admit I can’t take paints on moving day
even in 1860, refugees were not collected in internment camps. the Ottoman state integrated
refugees, exiles, and migrants by way of self-settlement1. there were provisions to articulate
themselves: seeds, draft animals, a stretch of 17 acres where they would build their own
house, land holdings held for 15 years to protect against local investors
there is a lot to spin out from ‘camps’ of temporariness: the earth
as tent of mortality swallowed up by life. how saving something
according to Heidegger doesn’t mean snatching it from danger, but setting it
free into its own being.2 guest, stranger, person in need – the huge need
beyond shelter: for education, for sustainable livelihood …
perhaps I have been host and migrant. perhaps my mother dwells in
-longing, even after 20+ years of belonging. if local hospitality fits uneasy into
international protection, how can I meet a people not as passive, pliable – easily
managed – how can I be reshaped by them?
