FUN METER

1.

Mark    today I learn his name
            is Mark         fastened to his apron
a button that says
            FUN METER   arrow turned to “high”     I like your fun
meter                  it goes up a little     each time someone says
             that    he suggests sipping this stout room
temp with my feet up by the fire     this market is a mountain
outpost    an aisle of hot sauce    and greeting cards     ah clear vision
                        Mark     here I am     my left foot     by the blue
reconcile    my life spent guarding           against                          surprise
attack                leave the gun / take the cannoli       I ratted on
            my family           a gay falcon         C. reading Duncan
saying I AM DUNCAN      and that is my sad knowing    who among
            us belongs         to a failed
mission    do not read on     read Parra   a dose of ANTI
Dunparra!
in the blood boil of high romance     where H.D. is a little bony
            but   all to the mustard   lads    they shred his flawed logic     I say
it’s like going to a holy place and seeing a reliquary of crutches   
            cheers to the poet who told me never to read another Whitman poem
“read Auden” but it turns out that old crab has more tenderness
in one wrinkle              
                             W. wonders if the classroom is an extension of the state
come to room 210
                                     research every name that comes out of my mouth


2.

                   if you
                        are still
                        reading this
                        the truth is
                        my lover
                        turned my
                        glasses into
                        dust drank
                        cords of me and
                        built our house
                        broke the bed fucking
                        I’m going to show you
                        upper limit fucking
                        what I learned when next we
                        swank for fucking
                        which will be
                        I assume
                        before dawn 

                   die fucking
                        die fucking
                        can’t tonight  

                                    rooster   goat    cat   bunny   bunny   cat

                                    whippet at the crook     rooster   train   whistle    

                                    finding her by decibel         desert red bat    


3.

I prime a crew
once upon a page
words are sacred
don’t edit
scrapit                                        another one primes a crew
                                                     devotes herself to rightly
                                                     place their every word

CHRIST


4.

somewhere in Brooklyn there is
                        a storage space     of all of my likes and dislikes
and the uncertainty of “the Boss” cock
                                                in a blue suitcase with a painting
                                    I should like better
                                                            today I could not remember      
myself in the early aughts
                        check her records    
                                    upon a golden cushion
                                                of a Danish modern chair

I am often invited to hear told     the decline
                        of the grandmothers     my prophets of conflict
                          one of them hides her own teeth 
                                    though in a moment of lucidity tries to teach
                                                Sheepshead to someone in a fugue state

alert of government issued weather report
                        from the financial capital     my closest bank
branch is in Idaho       last week when I couldn’t
            sleep   I tried to predict the market          cardinal
                                    with a fat check     we ate eggs in Tucson            

and later that night she put a litany
            in my ear     lit row after row of tapers
                        my fist was a bell   and her back a tower    I bawled
                                    Spira, spera   mingled
                                    into one angel

                               green leaves over  
                                    a heart in ruins    

                               GOTH
                                    HUGO      it is
                                    true      …   my crow Pluto

            a psychic home
            for our coffee    has clear glass windows


5.

P. dreams Ozzy Osborne is
my real father     I love you all; I love you more than life itself
                                     but you’re all fucking mad!

A. says tell her I say thank you
            for rescuing Stacy    A. has sat with all of our corpses
and said Buddhist things        buckle           let go


6.

       stirred for birds    
               +
            love   
                        prove   
                                    move      +      buckle      
                                                             high there   
                                                             no wonder of it 

the priest has a watch
tells the 12 stations of the cross
Bishop lost her mother’s watch
the priestess has no watch
E. recites Prufrock in a trance with she/her pronouns
             the Ladies of Night Prosody laugh

Cocteau Twins first US TV appearance
Liz took great liberties with her voice on “Bluebeard”
making it even more inaccessible
            and wore a monastic garment!

                                                             + we have always known you wanted us


7.   

each of my steps    boot chains to ice    echoic foot
            the walk home from prosody      we can all agree on ode
to even silly things we love
                                                            but can we make amends in dreams?

a tall glass of wool in a western town

                                                                        eastward loved imperfectly                                
            mountain
            ain’t got no

            rhymes for me
            give me your morning hand     for hand
                                                      word    for word              
                                                                                          wet for life       
                                                                                                                    tender band
                                                                                          Baroque
Buddhist
noisy nothing
                                    capitulate!     at last      no more      to do

airy
devilship
removed


8.

pulled a long shot
like an Americano 
            Prince Bestie and I
            relieved to exchange
            a platitude over the phone         me and my Bialetti      snowing sideways
                                   never walk and drink the dirt        at the same time
I’m fine
                        mother is still    my mother      description of a gruesome
murder of a half-Italian          as I steeped with my lover’s soap       
  ask   who gave me the note?    they don’t wonder
               whose heart was lost     for me to take heart     
                                                  everyone who decided against their heart

You will often tell the story. If you do that you/will be able to marry those you love…

            you are going to have so much fun…  YES   it goes up a little
each time you say…    in NYC the tundra the desert …    we perceive a form   
a householder
            of actual meaning                       no they don’t wonder   who fastened it there
                                                                    at the same time
                                                                    in the inference of their care
                                                                    a sweet burn         

                               we learn slowly   (gnostic) 
                                    less stoic bed rolls
            record a word     for a word     a regional Baltimore                                 
                 clean ears for Alidio   
                        stirred in the lower belly
                                                                           I rest my butch head    

A One Won

             In it I found that the political discourse would love its ethical moon. 

A wonderment. A one sum. 

Bewitching affinities built upon antinomies.
                        Abstract, an expression, a wool cap 
of ornament for the sake of weather.  

Loving him helpless anew helped. Loving her helplessly anew helped.  

Leaving it all behind helplessly helped.  

Building around the moribund became a kind of blessing. 

                                        I left constituents around the number one, and I won,  
                           and I felt simple or glad,  

or finally, incandescent, and comfortably large in my honesty, a kind of hanging of the rituals,
the clothes, the sense of living in them upright. 

                              I felt trouble pinging from my thumb muscles but I ignored the throb. 

I looked out and out into a dense and driven fog and said goodbye to its flavor.  

I said goodbye to more than ten years of saying Will you please love me? 

I wanted to birth a kind of abstract expressionism of the merely objective  
and the racialized lover of things.  

Onement or ornament or I won an ornament or I loved an ornament
and the onement of myself resolved. I resolved and thus I became into myself a one 

that I thought would never be allowed.  

And I moved outside of the fog into a place that signified art.   

Friendship and Racial Furniture: An Address

"It’s not an accident that at any given institution, the “diversity advocates” are often those white liberals who enjoy a certain missionary or white-savior relationship to minorities …The fundamental power structures and relations remain the same: the subordination of the faculty or staff person or student of color to their white colleagues is kept firmly in place." — Dorothy Wang

1.
There had been no intimacy left between us
and I have felt freer to say what I couldn’t say before.
You would like it if I constructed a mirror of conformity
that gazed only back at you with a crony admiration.
I don’t miss redolent flowers that stink with a vainglorious scarcity. 
I don’t miss anyone who wants this scarcity as their life.
Dotted eyes blink in an ivory tower vase.
Your white fragility made me a handmaid to your
every whim, even as you witnessed the racism I endured.
In your white world you disparaged me,
crossing the boundaries I thought were sacred:
gossiping about my dead husband’s fidelity,
bemoaning all over town your imagined losses,
regretting that you were a witness to discriminations
against me when you thought you lost power.
You revealed a specious self and pelted this quality at me.
I decided not to look away. I decided to see you clearly
and allow didactic language to make a case for itself in poetry,
to write about the personal, to tease out the articulation
of power systems, of what this room displays or disposes.  

2.
At first I thought you were nice. Nice is benign,
a marker, a thing: a decorative blue leather of sense-making. 
You had me fooled: I bought the chair 
but not the comfort. I am now seeking comfort. 
I will behold truth but not congeniality. 
You didn’t appreciate my sometimes lack of conformity 
nor what informed it, my racial upbringing because
maybe I didn’t look refined. But I might have looked
refined in my own culture, with my own. 
I struggled as a child to conform to my white
friends’ standards, and even as I child I knew this.
As an adult I fretted in the valence of this,
and thought about this compromise every time
I experienced shame in your presence. And how
this shame multiples in the presence of people like you,
of which there are just so many. So many in high positions:
cabinets, chairs, selections and boards. 
I ache in my reclining chair with the hard-won consolation
I now possess from effort to hope in the goodness of others.
But not in those who are “self-otherseeing.”
People in Bloom’s world. Literature in high-up spaces.
You spoke in your truth about me—not sharply or astutely—
and I experienced every single intonation of its racism.
How excoriating is your specialty and you churn it like butter.
How it mines good intentions, slanders, then you slather it on.

3.
What of bullying? What many of us went through in childhood, chockfull—
a meanness I have seen among girls, and now women who don’t like women.
A misogyny that builds its discourse on elitism requiring distinctions 
and arcane order plus a facile beauty to cajole.
I saw you first as a guiding, obsequious charm, the kind in a bewitching chandelier,
that which is white-washed around its candle-edges quietly scribbling names
on a neoliberal clipboard, a twinkling of lit-armor above the coffee table.
These are my direct statements of which I have evaded until now.
I am building words now with their own architectural highlights:
of the pallor of the windowpane, the dismal portrait, and in particular,
what I think about demolished friendships that have been painstakingly nurtured,
and who in them has the privilege and who does not.
I thought to mark their endedness with the boundaries they crossed.
To say: you are not me.

4.
You have not experienced any discrimination that changed
your pointed machine—white as the daylight lily gun.
How sharp a clean boundary is. One person is a grandiosity mashed-up in acres
of domestic fabric whose life never gives in to equity,
believes they need not be driven to compassion
or understanding or equanimity or concession.
I thought of the obsolescence in mismatched ambition
and how it’s pleasant to skirt around these systems of takeover,
staying far away and aching for a surrealist touch.
I’d rather be a useless nightlight to a peacock than to be the peacock,
at least my light will brighten a dreamlike shadow.
Why do you think you deserve everything there is for a body
or a mind to seize from desire? Are desires the opposite of impasse?
And that if we experience loss as it opens us wide open to life giving us up?
Living does run in and out of the fleeting like a wind dead 
to a wooden door but forever moving its course of action.
Nothing is unchecked by vanity or a limp charity and when you grace me
with such unbecoming intention so underhandedly mounted in unkindness. 

5.
I see it squarely as I have seen brows furrow at my offending existence. 
It’s easy to see through it when you aren’t white and have felt sodden eyes
of disdain in a forever mode. Happening when you want only acceptance (not even currency!)
in a room with your own innocence nobody has liked for many years. 
I was loyal to your ever-needing wishes, like my parents to employers,
like I was to employers. This is the sense of race relations 
and their crossing over to power with white women
who always meant to misguide you to their boot. 
Beliefs can collapse race into gender and feminism
is friendship with ethics. I wrote this to freedom.
I wrote this to unburden myself from niceties toward those, like you, 
for whom people are disposable, are handmaids, stuffed chairs,
mouths stuffed just the way you like it.

I Hope to Be an Unsettler

No land has ever claimed me,
no person, no people, no place.
I am always standing between burials
and the nearest tree
holds all I can know.
At the spring words bubble up
and trickle down in banderoles.
At first I had to read them
till the grass smelled sweet
and the bugs bit home.
Getting old means reading them
while the hill of my choices
grows. At the end of the field
a deer measures the meadow.
She is so small today.
What words can you possibly wear.
What can I bring you, I
so without kin
I have no hands,
no apparatus,
thus offer my persona
as medium,
a wager: assuming
there’s something past myself
or perhaps a way the particular dead
with whom I’ve walked
have shaped me in some unlit land.
What land. I cannot even say it lies
beneath the creek
because the creek can never be mine.
No creek can ever be mine.
I take what I should carry.
There is a clicking sound when I stay still
like a gas stove failing.
I defined by misfire.
I defined by naked love,
love without relation, I
have piled miswords
on your desire. Now
I’m asking for forgiveness. Not
the ordinary kind,
puckered with regret.
I am asking for a kind
of eternal endurance,
like a child who jumps across a chasm
and does not want to jump back.
Keep me clicking, please.
Skimming while the bubbles break my feet.
In the field the deer finds grass
at just her height.
But not because she wants to disappear.
Something’s breathing to make those holes
while the woodpecker strikes a pose.
I have to believe the right world follows.
I shout each time it comes
like the sun shouts a highway
over open water,
hoarse and bright and wrong.

Let's Mean the Universe

what do the stars write all day while the sun
keeps us from reciprocating
I imagine

let’s imagine
they’re sirens
of an emergency that’s time

and though they have taken the solemn
aspect of mute
facts interrupted
at best by dust

it is possible to shift into a faith
that they are blaring
that there is something to be said

intermittently as best
to fuck with mandatory forward
and be ourselves
and by us let’s mean the universe

If So, Winter

one night vortex cold
a tree under streetlight
turned to brass tips
like stars
pointed out on an astrolabe

o Aristotle
or my love
the pain is a crown

can’t you feel
every resemblance on earth as intended
and therefore vagabond?

Hercules Furentes

It was actually before
Hercules went mad that he
needed to get past Atlas
Mountain to get the Geryon
cattle (of the sun) so he
tore Atlas apart so the
water burst from Ocean
and became the inland sea
aka Mediterranean

            that was
all procedural
When I look down on the Chicago River
or the quarries beside it
toward O’Hare
it’s easier to see a monster tear
the land and water down
than think of decisions
and wages (garbage)

              just as
if on a nondestroyed Earth the future
entities are astronauts they’ll
imagine myth on a mono/cosmic scale
unless it flips and a swarm
of lights appears and children think
the stars are workers every
light a thousand
workers each
swirl a common concert

          I
blame Hercules the entity
the literal historical Hercules
We are crazy • we are dangerous

Isolation Song XVII

(for Marie-Lydie Cabanis Bonfils)

Sheet glass backed by mercury and tin, Murano mirrors
Calibrate the weather accelerating altostratus until cloud-
Free, pollution-free I pause languid in solarium among
Potted palms.  Afternoons glamoured by dash of gold
Dash of bronze.  Cut fabric to pattern: mouth 1 and 2
Cheek 1 and 2, face 1 and 2, masked and following sister
To Sidon where she'll save from burning the sacrificial
Bull.  I pose on Al Qualaa hotel's terrace kohl-eyed, lilies
Braided in my hair.  Stolen from over-growing at the pond
They witness the hydra budding and biologically immune.

Isolation Song XVIII

(for Emmy Noether)

Proof of tree's limit: blossoms undergo prior to fragrance
Senescence and abstracted to the lab without shell and nest
Sparrow embryos appear indistinguishable from geckos.
I cannot be reached regardless of names etched on ceramic
Shards, my afternoons devoted to the intricately woven
Xiuyan jade mask, perfect square beads drowning out the
Dead. If the mathematician's world at each instant dies
And is reborn why can't I rebirth the blue and wind-blue
Sprawl of solar plexus radiating out to posture? Pressure
Applied to forehead releases kings traversed by nudes.

Isolation Song XX

(for Ravanalona III)

Sun-struck by the Mad Prince I pace in white from port
To citadel, citadel to port my body made of machine-
Tumbled amber strung on fishing line.  Glistening among
Oil tankers nobody knows I've ingested factory formulated
Bridal dye rendering me defenseless against string quartet
And bouquet toss.  Antlers wrapped with roses I quarantine
With Ranavalona III's tender cuttings of Madagascar vanilla
Struck dormant by Strait of Gibraltar and Northern sun.
Greenhouse containers confine Bismarck Palm and Octopus
Tree as you place scissors in my hand, suggesting release.

Rocks

There used to be rocks
big and wild
along the path
to the mountain
the rocks are so hard
they don’t need skin
although water leaves its mark
a soft skin
and the wind
a kind of chicken skin
in the shade they’re cold
and they’re warm in the sun
there’s one the shape of a shoe
or a dog’s head
and another the shape of a frog
which is one of the most common shapes
among the rocks
a tree grew over a rock
it attached itself to her
and took her exact form
the root couldn’t enter
like it could the earth
a tree that lived off the rain
or the air
or love for its rock.

          Translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida

Clouds

The scene:
a field
between two mountains
in which you see:
just that
and the sky
a perfect blue
and voluptuous
clouds
well-formed
they make you want to jump
and roll around inside them
but you can’t
because they’re made of smoke
a body passes through them
now they go in clumps
and hide
behind the mountain
where they get dressed up
fluff their feathers
one appears
as the protagonist
lilting
lyrical
full of herself 
behind the others
like a group of young dancers
in love with making the rounds
a gathering of clouds
begin to appear
the wind pushes an enormous one
that from the side enters the scene
it’s a love story
lovers approaching each other
ominously
lovingly
they perch themselves
one on top of the next
just like I dreamed
a gathering of clouds approaching each other
at full speed.

          Translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida

The Hairdo

I thought it was a butterfly
but it was actually
a small blue bat
it came out at night
while I was sleeping
so as not to disturb me
with it’s flapping wings
I trapped it
put it under my pillow
and kept sleeping
and when I got up
Flor, who had been dressing me said
don’t be scared
but there’s a little blue bat
in your hair
it was what I feared
what I most wanted to avoid
but there it was
gripping my hair
like a glowing clip

          Translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida

We answered their questions every day for sixteen months

Most days, we did not have a fever. We had not observed
a man wearing an old-fashioned ski-mask carrying
in his bare arms what appeared to be scorched blankets
swaddling thawed meat. We had not seen him walking
slowly down the sidewalk, but nonetheless refusing to pause
at intersections for traffic. We did have headaches,
but the headaches were normal for us. Or the headaches
were, now, normal for us. We had not encountered 
any variety of wasp. Or, so we thought, until imagining it 
a fine pendant slipped from the chain, we unthinkingly 
plucked it up and felt, a second later heard, the crackle
of whatever remained inside. Its antennae curled as finely 
as any two iron gateposts. And though we wished we were
no longer holding the wasp we had mistaken for a pendant, 
it was wrong to throw it away, or even to burn it, so we put it 
in the box with two coyote teeth, a dried aster, a pheasant’s foot, 
and a nineteenth century syringe. We rarely had a sore throat. 
We knew absolutely no one who’d rented a moving van 
for the sole purpose of transporting supermarket refuse 
to dump on the lawns of the city council members who voted no. 
Our dreams had not been more intense than usual, actually. We always
had intense dreams, and could quote from them the long conversations 
we’d conducted with ourselves therein, though sometimes we simply dreamed 
we were shouting fuck you to death or spooning enormous quantities 
of granulated sugar from a laundry basket into our mouths, then into 
the mouth of a boy named spat’, which we could recall was the Russian verb 
to sleep, and that when spiders appeared in the sugar basket, we said nothing. 
We had water enough for four people to last one week. We had seen 
apricot trees, bracken, blackberries, branches, and all the lovely things 
from later in the alphabet, and that was why we were reading their names
so regularly, testing to see if they appeared as we called them.
We had no interest in paying off the interest.

City Language

after Wiji Thukul

I
City language is this-that language.1

II
City language is a toneless phone.2

III
City language is if/or language masked with if/and language.3

IV
City language is the erotics of target market analyses.4

V
City language is piffle-paffle.5

VI
City language is the language of need translated to love translated to fabrication.6

VII
City language is bereft of twilight.7

VIII
City language is very well then language.8

IX
City language is refuse language.9

X
City language is commuted destiny.10

XI
City language is drunk on holodecks.11

XII
City language holds us at embrace.12

XIII
City language severs its speakers and compensates them with itself as severance.13

XIV
City language is tired.14

XV
City language hems and hews.15

---

1	Forfeiture, magnification, magisterial snow globe, floor show, tit for tat tête-à-tête multiplied.
2	Homebred across a boothless phone. Bordered bones cross the picket line of the cell wall.
3	Or, if the masks are mistaken / And, if the masks are mistaken.
4	Bears the drive to sleep naked all day in a honey-tongued nest of human bodies, only some of whom resemble yours. A languorous playdate, rest and whole. Yet this drive is kept, hidden behind walls of plastic fate produced in ubiquitous dens of bonded behavioralism, cemented into place with basic enfaced structural violence. Yet, and yet (& yet).
5	Ticky-tacky, razzle-dazzle, wacky taffy, raggedy anodyne, slagheap protocol, proof-of-payment, anonymous racket, witness-protected pain believer, pain agnostic, painableist, paintheist, angels and demons.
6	And weed. And hate.
7	Or, it turns out, merely immune to twilight. When administered orally with 25mg of waning day derivatives, a majority of respondents reported very little to no change, while nearly all of the remaining respondents reported very slight to very little change. However, at higher doses studies suggest it can cause the illusion of earworms in cats, untenable identification across difference, spume tongue, and, in rare cases, static dissolution, before again waxing into bereavement.
8	The same jokes over and over again with different results. Ax reinvented. Stoop. Gate. Scopes, scapes, sights, scraps, hoops, hopes, heaps. Waiting on the bus or the messiah in the same breath. By the same token.
9	E.g., stolen cars, swollen arse. Ars summa legitimalated. Usufruct language. Suffer language.
10	Plain sight genocide, broken life, open air clearance fight, strangers sold back as proof positive.
11	Horatio Alger, Pizzagate, Empire State of Mind, Star Wars Trilogy trilogy, dreams had, the grounds of commensurability, the silence in which what we’re taught to stay silent about speaks in tongues.
12	Craning arm’s length, breath and bosom.
13	Stereophonic resound system to be much talked of, selves-sung. To be verb and possibly prophecy.
14	Us-them language. Pus-phlegm language. Not a day off.
15	Lonely as a timeline I wander, no. Timelines wander lonely as a no. No wander. I as a no. Lonely, line time. As I, a timeline. Lowanderly, no. No, no. On a random eyelite, will as ion. An endemic iron aleatorily swoll. On no.

"Green shivers and chrysanthemum bloom"

Green shivers and chrysanthemum bloom
Bought or buoyed

Intention will flatten the affection
At the root of the unease

At root uneasy
Brought forth from the distance

It’s just money after all, the dead will say
The dead who say so many things

A pink starburst potted among a green grass
Flowering until so late in the season

Leaving is what you make it, I was told as a child
A spectacle of remorse or guilt

A hidden map of personal burials
The goodbyes you didn’t know you were making