Like the mooring of a boat the last
screw, a final over tightened twist
and there, the work seen first
in the airy aisles of the store museum
now cloned. Selfless, the mode
in which one must proceed:
the instructions hairy and spare,
the prolific steps, an unsettled
end. The scent of new
smooth wood from Sweden.

no chicory, please

Goddess or not,
you scratch their scabs,
wash their cloaks,
prepare their swords
for killing demons, their sons.

Vishnu births snakes,
and Shiva rides bulls.
You will wipe the sticky residues
from beneath legs, arms, hips

while the artist who carefully
incised your narratives, stares
upward, watching the universe
devour your share of amala fruit

and curried rice for breakfast.

Letters stamped from Thailand and Hong Kong spill
fog into her ashtray, hide the hard remains

of expectation and chewing gum. Freckled language
is everywhere. She wonders if there is time for lip gloss

before murmurs of war define
the last moving target. The envelopes are silver nitrate

and river. She reaches for hyacinth and jasmine,
cold pebbles pour out instead—a steady gaze

that comes because all charades conclude
with the director shouting Cut.

I don’t care who dies, or what my body does
breaks, aches, greys, recedes
grows perfectly wrinkled in sea breezes
I will never grow so old again

I was a phantom, I was shrinking but still I had a body
bones, I had time alone with the frame of the city
fists of keys, bags of bread, tins, canteens
I had provisions, I carried all of it with me

*
you remember
the dance a creature
the groom’s black back
the table rocking
the bridal brigade
her ribcage her girdle
her river bridge
tangerine face or presence

*
I could jam along and talk a lot
or shadowbox or lavender or wear leather
or make some strange something, write a bunch of
first lines, make billboards, shallow the sky with planes, cold
wet government, profitability, systemic, the new frontiers of
marketing, what homes will fall the next twenty years,
world-war pop, threat level: spectacular
I will never grow so old again
*
aneurism : cell-count :
bloodclot : stroke
fingertips, toe tips
lips and bone marrow
the animal of the tongue
performing gymnastics
chanting this guttural
this miracle

our allseeing-everseeing
orbs flashed open, irises
drawn unclenched
limbs brandished fibrous
pistols performing
ju-jitsu, cartwheels
air-traffic controlling
all of our parts, all of
a part, all fall apart

we meet, beards and breasts
we gather ahses, flowers
faces round the table
we candlelight walls
eyes and teeth tethered
shaking in our shoes
we bury our valentines
beneath plank floors
of cold dark rooms

amazed in passageways
children make sea kingdoms
bury mountains
fill spaces and
make spaces
to fill
our devices
spilled inkwells
the machines we play adults at

*
a shadow of your form captured
for an instant
a giant walking in the sun
crossing country

the catastrophe
language comes
bloodied in dust
silent

the things we’ve seen
cemetery rows glowing
galaxies
marching in boots

KR: I started with a few poems I knew I wanted to include and, as I went on, found the other poems that seemed to be drawn towards the originals like iron filings attracted to a magnet. My chapbook does not have a single narrative arc, but I hope I managed to collect poems that cohere in some way nonetheless. For me, assembling the chapbook manuscript was like creating a collage. Try pasting that green hummingbird onto this strip of newsprint! Where does the second red shoe belong? I find it exciting to see what kind of resonances can be created by having poems jostle up against each other from neighboring pages.

KY: Can you talk a little about how the manuscript ended up with Black Lawrence Press?

KR: A few months after I graduated from the MFA program at Bennington College, my husband was in Liverpool on business. Though it was the middle of the fall semester and I was teaching a couple composition classes, I joined him for a few days and wandered about the waterfront while he was at work. I was carrying a stack of ungraded student essays in my backpack, but I couldn’t bear to look at them. Something about walking unfamiliar streets, watching women cut through the October wind in their tall boots, smelling the sharp salt in the air, jarred me into action. I started mulling over the shape of the chapbook while I was abroad and after finishing the manuscript at home I submitted it to the 2008 Black River Chapbook competition. In the spring of 2009 I was delighted to learn that the chapbook was a finalist for the award and would be published in the spring of 2011.

KY: Were there any themes or formal approaches that were important to you when composing the poems? What influences helped to shape the poems?

KR: The only conscious approach I have towards a poem is a pursuit of what Federico Garcia Lorca calls “duende.” My desire, in any poem, is to capture at least a whisker or a wingtip of that “mysterious power that everyone senses and no philosopher can explain.” Poems can take many different shapes, but if they don’t have that something that “burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass,” they fall flat.

KY: Did you have any teachers or mentors that helped you wrestle with particular stumbling blocks in the material? If so, what kind of input helped you overcome those obstacles?

KR: My primary stumbling block is that I want to write a good line, and then I want to follow it with another good line, and then I want to follow that with an even impossibly better line. And, as you probably know, that is very hard to do.

In one of my favorite Rumi poems, a man gives up praying to Allah because he never receives a response. Eventually he realizes that the longing itself is “the return message.” I figure that even if a poem fails—which happens a lot no matter how badly you want it to succeed—the poem still matters. The poem, which is a kind of longing, is “the return message.” It signifies that there is something out there beyond myself.

My Bennington teachers were enormously helpful as I worked on these poems. Timothy Liu had me turn a poem upside down, literally, so that the last line became the first. Major Jackson got me using syllabics. Amy Gerstler suggested I just say what I want to say without attempting to sound unnecessarily lyrical. You never know what’s going to work with a particular poem, but I’ll do whatever it takes to lure one to the page. I’ll give up peanut butter, if I have to, or set out plates of ladyfingers every morning before the dew. Yet tough as she makes it to write a poem sometimes, I won’t give up my firstborn.

***
You can purchase a copy of Basil here:

http://blacklawrence.homestead.com/Rauk.html

The usual accoutrements: a miniature metronome, a pinch of sand, a broken tuning fork. Six pearl beads strung with one fleck of bone. A silk tulip dyed blue. Cork-stopped bottle furnished with golden filaments and crumpled tulle. A cutout of Le Carte Géographique de la Lune. But the centerpiece is an agate plucked from Lake Erie’s northern shore. Since its hues and half-shades are most brilliant while stunned underwater, the stone has been placed in a glass dish that collects rain from a bit of plastic tubing snipped from an aquarium filter that protrudes from the roof of the box. During dry spells, an attendant has been hired to fill its spout with dew. She keeps bouquets of thistle in her apron pockets, an iron nail tucked behind one ear. Jerry-rigged to the bony hump on her back are two wings fashioned from the tail feathers of an ancient Scarlet Macaw once trained to rasp, “Who’s there? Who’s there?”

***

Fuse

She would have an affair with a man named Ulf.
He would eat toasted cheese sandwiches.
He would have square hands.
He would keep a clock on his mantel
which he would wind every noon with a small bronze key.
His refrigerator would contain a compartment for hard-boiled eggs
which she would always keep full.
He would live on an island in the North Sea
which would be accessible by boat every two Thursdays,
so he would not get the newspaper, and she would not
have to read about the Democratic primaries
or Reem Riashi, mother-of-two, first female
suicide bomber for Hamas. She would not be bothered
by those days when the sun never set
but squat interminably on the horizon instead.
And when they would make love,
the ragged edges of the sea would be sealed from sight
by the four sides of the window frame
so she wouldn’t hear the squalling
of seabirds that scrawled along the shore
and when Ulf, who would smell faintly of chamomile,
would come, she would come too
and she would be a seabird coasting the wind, no
she would be a jewel of salt, no
she would be a herring among a thousand herrings,
a gleam among a thousand silver shifts, no
she would be the sea, not
its heaves or its hurling but
she would be a shush of foam against the sand,
the sigh of froth and spume, no
she would be the hiss
of a fuse lit and burning, she would explode
like sparks, and would never need to look back
finally, like Reem Riashi would never look back.

Originally published in Slipstream

***
An Assembly of Lit Things

My boyfriend worked the night shift. I got bored. One Thursday I reached up to change the burnt out light in the back of my classroom & a 60 watt Lumalux Double Life dropped into my palm like an overripe pear. That’s when I decided to dedicate myself to light bulb collection. I roamed the hallways of Shortridge Middle School after hours, poking into empty rooms to scavenge for Bulbrite Standbys, Slimline Satin Spunlights, & any incandescent globe. The night janitor knew what I wanted. He’d save specimens for me in his back office, slipping me fluorescent torpedoes, instant starts, & once, a whole boxful of Neptune standard screws. Why light bulbs? you might ask. When I spread them over my sheets, I see a flock of soap bubbles fleeing south. Sometimes the wispy filaments become a fleet of miniature ships all sailing to countless horizons inside the same bright bottle of glass.

***

The Ant

“It might be a bullet ant,” Jack reported at dinner. “The sting of the bullet ant rates the highest of any ant species on the Schmidt Pain Index.” Jack was well-informed about such subjects. Maude admired the glossiness of the ant’s head, the way he shivered the serrated spurs that graced the end of each one of his six legs when she tenderly stroked his scape. She imagined unsnapping his polished carapace, swinging open his two sides to find interlocking chambers intricate as clockwork, each one ticking like a newborn violin. The room took on the luster of well-worn wooden spoons. The hour of clouds had begun. Outside the window, a telephone line stretched across the backyard, a single uncut string.

AA: I began writing these poems in January 2006 as part of my creative writing undergrad thesis project at the University of Houston and then continued writing and editing the poems during my time in Bennington College’s MFA program. All told, I spent about 2 years on the manuscript.

KY: Did you have any teachers or mentors who helped you wrestle with particular stumbling blocks in the material? If so, what kind of input helped you overcome obstacles in the actual writing of the poems?

AA: At UH, I worked with some really amazing teachers: Nick Flynn, Matthea Harvey, Jericho Brown, Brian Barker, Claudia Rankine. Claudia was my thesis advisor and was a godsend. She really helped in such a gentle way to break me out of my linear way of thinking of poems. She introduced me to the possibilities of poetry and to the work of other great poets that I admire. She also helped me realize where I could go with my own work and ideas. I am so indebted to her.

I also worked with Brigit Pegeen Kelly at Bread Loaf in August 2007. I have equal amounts of gratitude for her. She was such a kind mentor and I think saw from the beginning where I wanted to take this manuscript. She sat down with me and went over what I had at that time of the manuscript and talked me through my ideas, my fears, my triumphs. Her spirit is something I go back to when I need a pick me up and she really helped me see how spiritual poetry — and this manuscript –can be, its utterances.

KY: From what I’ve read of your work, many of the poems deal with loss and suffering (often explored through the very interesting thread of religious icons—I would love if you commented on how that theme emerged in the book)—how did you find your way into that difficult content?

AA: The theme of “religion” or “spirituality” was both deliberate and an accident. I was raised Catholic and when I began writing these poems in 2006, I was a lapsed Catholic (really still am), but a stronger believer in the divine nonetheless. I had never addressed spirituality in my work before. The body, yes, but faith, what have you, no. Right before I began this project, my sister was involved in a serious car accident that left her in a coma for a good part of my thesis semester at UH. On Christmas Eve 2005, I came home from the hospital where she was staying to find the new issue of Poetry. In it was Mary Karr’s amazing essay on her conversion to Catholicism. Picture it: Christmas Eve, my sister’s in the hospital, I’m reading that essay alone in the house and crying like a baby. It was then I “knew” what I wanted to address in the manuscript.

I’m drawn to crazy things and I think the manuscript reflects that in the stories of the religious icons & female martyred saints. I also thought of my sister when I was writing those poems — how does the pain of the body respond to the spirit and vice versa? I still don’t know, but these poems show that journey, that struggle.

KY: I wonder if you would also talk about the process of the manuscript making its way to a book. I know the road can be fraught with setbacks. Would you share your experience—specifically geared toward other poets trying to compile a manuscript for a first book?

AA: Compiling a book — ordering it — is ridiculous. Anyone who has done it knows what I’m saying. I hated this part the most. It’s a headache. You want to tell a story with your poems. You want to have some sort of thread or thread running through (it doesn’t even need to be slap-you-in-the-face-obvious) and you don’t want it to appear haphazard or lazy. My husband, a non-writer, actually ordered the manuscript. He’s so orderly and thoughtful and offered to help me with it. We spread out all of the poems on his workbench (his hobby is woodworking) in the garage and went through each one, reading them, moving them around, taking some out until there was consensus. I was extremely happy with how the ordering turned out. Later, after Zone 3 Press picked it up, Rigoberto Gonzalez, who judged the prize, helped me tweak the ordering a little more.

I started sending the book out in the fall of 2007 without a lot of expectation. It ended up being a finalist for 6 different prizes, all of them tremendous and I was blown away. By the sixth one though, I was like “come on already!” You have to laugh a little. It gave be hope for the book, but was also disappointing. I sent it out like 25 times over 2 years. There was a lot of rejection, a lot of almosts. There was a certain press who wanted it and made a big deal out of it, then screwed around so much and kept pushing back the date to like 2013 or something that I pulled it. I want to say this to writers sending out their first books: you can pull it. It’s your book.

Zone 3 Press picked it up in Sept. 2010 as the winner of their First Book Award. I got the call when I was grocery shopping in Kroger and had to duck into the frozen food aisle because that was the only place where I could actually hear Blas Falconer. It was hilarious.

There was, as mentioned, drama in the process but I just kept going forward. I started teaching and working on a new manuscript as I was sending out the old one. I never went back to look at the poems after I knew the manuscript was ready. Ed Ochester at Bennington told me to not go back and try to revise when sending it out or else I’d overthink the work and end up ruining it. A lot of writers do this — they get rejected or it takes years to get a book deal and along the way they think “what’s wrong with my poems?” and over-edit. I think you need to ultimately trust your instincts and edit only when its essential. Have faith in what you put out into the world.

***
You can Purchase a copy of The Glass Crib here:

https://epay.apsu.edu/C20023_ustores/web/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=28

You wore your Baby Soft and blue dress.
You were in your car and smoking.
I was the accident month.
I was your ill-fitting jacket.
I was your craving for sugar and salt.
You sent me your half-bottle of vodka.
I was drunk and swerving.
You hid in your closet.
You hid me in your gray sweatshirt.
I watched my cells double and stick.
You said I want my body back.
I said your body is my body.
You said I’ll kill you with the stairs.
You said I’ll kill you I’ll kill you.
I said I’m still here.
You said please don’t tell—
I told with my soccer kick.
I told with my umbilical tug.

Originally published in MiPOesias

***

Jochebed

To escape the Egyptian king’s edict to kill all male Hebrew infants, Jochebed
put Moses in a waterproof basket, and set it adrift in The Nile River.

—from Exodus

Months of water and milk and ache and I am pushing
it all through the sunlight, the bulrushes
coated in pitch. The small fig of you—

fists and mouth, red pit

of your heart. Where I once shaded your face
from the white sun, the reeds will keep you cool.

From a distance, you are an unprotected nest. Dark
pebble, swaddle of papyrus, my floating
field. As you grow older,

do not imagine me—

you will never get it right. A crowd will come
and there will be women. I will not be the one

at the jar, the one pressing olives
into oil. If I pass you on the street, if I am
the woman who sells you a basket of dates,

if I am still beautiful, if you hear yourself

in my voice, if my hands
are yours, do not reach back to touch me.

I have nothing left to give you

Originally published in American Poetry Review

                “I don’t want to think about sadness;
                there’s never a lack of it.”
                Peter Everwine

The morning air
         When you
paints the sky
         tiptoe to bed

with a blue that
        late tonight,
red and green cannot mix.
        your neck

Boundless.
        smells of another
Cloudless.
        man’s cologne.

Nonetheless,
        What is it that
your body turns
        you want but I lack ?

in bed
        Big hands,
every five minutes –
        slick tricks,

as if a storm
        or a dumb
is whirling within.
        sad smile?

*

When we first met,
        This morning,
you looked like a dahlia,
        I woke up by myself,

a lotus, or an orchid,
        finding myself
a new breed, growing
        next to myself.

in a green house.
        I opened the fridge
A flower riot.
        and found our happiness

When we first met,
        had expired.
I lost my language,
        I also found

because every flower
        you cutting roses
could be a notion of you.
        in our weed yard.

*

You seated me at the table,
        Suspicious
and decorously brought
        like an owl,

me your home-baked pie. I put
        you always thought
a bit in my mouth. It tasted
        I had an inner self,

familiar. Of course, you’re
        a self lurking
eating your own heart,
        beneath the skin,

you said. Then, I found my chest
        hidden
hollow, rib cage broken,
        from daylight.

blood gushing down my
        In your pie,
legs. I looked into your eyes,
        salted and buttered,

and finished the pie,
        there was no me.
and walked
        Tonight, I proved you

away from you
        wrong, with my heart
heartlessly.
        missing and regained.

KY: Your poems seem to be evocations—written spells even. Maybe all poetry attempts this in certain abstract ways, but your work seems to function more explicitly as incantation…Do you see your work as spiritual or religious?

DL: I do not consider myself a devotional poet per se, a God-praiser, which is often how we think of spiritual/religious writers; my inclinations are more mystic, engaged by the hidden, how we seem to be cupped in the hands of something greater, over which we have no control and little firm knowledge and which may, in fact, be a gigantic mental fiction which nevertheless provides great solace and psychic organization for a great many people, myself included. God(s), dream, self, fate, soul, time, embodiment in the world―these seem to be my uneradicable concerns, percolating beneath everything I write.

KY: I’m also interested in the ways your poems seem to re-imagine the spirit versus flesh duality. The body seems to act as a spiritual vessel. How do you see the bodily functioning in your work?

DL: A vessel for spirit, yes! But one I often feel I can’t get the hang of: how to move in it, tend it, feed it, protect it: my poor animal! that is me! (but isn’t)

I really enjoy the sensations embodiment offers: pretty colors, tastes, warm skin! Then again, there’s pain, sickness, blood, breakage, leaks, malfunctions―who came up with this plan? It’s so contradictory, inconvenient! What is the purpose of embodiment? is for me a vivid conundrum, shows up in a lot of what I write, directly or indirectly.

For someone who feels so strange inside the body a lot of the time, perhaps my poems compensate: I always want to be located in whatever I’m reading; and thus I extend that concern to whoever might be reading my work: this often translates into an emphasis on image and narration, however fractured and complicated, a suspicion of ungrounded surrealism (though the grounded surrealism of someone like Serb poet Vasko Popa, or the hallucinatory vividness of Plath, I love love love) and cerebrality. I like to create scenes, tableaus, to place people and self in them. Maybe through writing I finally get embodied!

KY: You mentioned in an interview that you prefer to think of poems as containing “form and feeling” rather than form and content—that poetry grows out of a reaction or relationship to something else. I wonder if you might comment a little further on that idea.

DL: The familiar form/content cross seems such a clinical way to try to articulate the relationship between what one writes about and the way that writing happens on the page. We only write about because the about has moved us. Content is the object of this movement, but the movement itself is the subject of the poem: it is its because. A poem occurs at the intersection of a perceptual and/or psycho-emotional experience―the feeling―and the arising linguistic response―the form.

KY: This is such an apt description of the writing process (though I suspect it might be criticized by some contemporary poets). Many well-crafted poems lack such feeling—and it seems somehow taboo to address this concern. In a poetry workshop, for instance, the tendency is to focus primarily on craft or form, instead of raising the issue of how the poet’s depth of character or experience shows up in the poem. Does considering feeling as a key component of a poem imply that the individual must have a certain capacity for insight and truthfulness? Is this the work of the individual person? The poetry workshop? Does the art lead us there?

DL: Hmmm, a tricky question, the answer to which will belie any given poet’s aesthetic and philosophical inclinations. For instance, I was recently at a reading where a poet said his work is a product of the imagination: by which he meant, not autobiographical or personally-oriented. Another poet I know gets irritated by the idea that “products of the imagination” are seen as somehow less real, less authentic, than autobiographical or obviously-personal poetry. In this, I’d have to agree with him: how is dream, fantasy, invention any less real than confession, memoir, declaration? Are they not all, ultimately, product of Art and Mind?

At the same time: our current poetic scenes, as evidenced by publication and prize-giving, seem allergic to strong feeling, strong I’s speaking plainly from overtly personal experience. Ultimately I think this is the result of style ins and outs. We fear falling into the excesses of late 80′s Confessionalism: melodrama, histrionics, content at the expense of art, the art’s “validity” based on how violated the speaker of any given poem is. This late 80′s Confessionalism is not the Confessionalism of Plath or Berryman, who employed high amounts of artifice and did not usually confuse themselves with the mythologized speakers of their poems. This kind of Confessionalism remains vibrant art, at least for me. We’re in a “cool” period for poetry, suspicious of any “hot” feelings beyond the heat of absurdist fun provided by poets like Dean Young or John Ashbery. This is a shame. I’ve been thinking of writing an essay in praise of melodrama, emotional heat.

The questions and concerns you pose have mattered to me with varying degrees of urgency over the years. My second book, Wedding Day, is almost completely obsessed with such questions. I wrote an essay on the oppressive effect of “make it new” on younger poets during that time period (http://www.aprweb.org/article/heroics-style-part-three). The new book, Sky Burial, is not much interested in these questions: the vivid encounter with Death via the loss of my parents and sister made such concerns seem ultimately superfluous, which perhaps is my own ultimate aesthetic declaration.

KY: Death seems to have that effect: one either surrenders to a sense of overwhelming chaos or finds some provisional meaningfulness. Merwin’s idea is that poetry comes out of the vowel of grief and gives language so the grieving one can come back to the world. In Sky Burial I sense a similar impetus–a searching for a way to live after being touched by the chaos of death. When you say death has made the concerns we’ve been discussing seem superfluous and that’s your ultimate aesthetic declaration–are you pointing to this sort of fundamental need to write in order to crawl out of the chaos of grief? Do you mind talking a little more about what that means to you?

DL: Ooh, love that Merwin quote: “the vowel of grief,” language helping the grieving to come back to the world. But you know, I think poetry can do this for all readers, grieving or not, wounded or not: refresh the world, bring us back to it, again and again. I get irritated with the ins/outs of poetic fashion when they start to impinge on content and feelings: this subject matter is old hat; that feeling state is old news. Such “what’s hip” thinking can be very silencing, because who doesn’t want their art to be met with approval, enthusiasm? And yet art has a medicinal force, I do believe; and it is very hard to take the poem cure, for both writer and reader, when you sense you might be judged for admitting you’re sick. Now, there are all sorts of different cures: sometimes entering the associational circus of a Dean Young poem is just the ticket for what ails you; other times it’s the searing, bald intensity of Gluck; or the documentary collage of CD Wright; or the melodrama of Plath; or the cool filigreed thinking of Stevens. The medicine cabinet is deep and diverse. I just want all medicines available; I don’t want to be told that some are off-limits because of the dictates of fashion.

Ultimately, for me, writing poems is directly related to figuring out how to live life, endure it. The confrontation with death, as I experienced it via the deaths of my father, mother and sister over four years, really drove that home with renewed vigor. And figuring out how to live life, endure it, means there has to be a confrontation with the heart and the spirit, as well as the mind and the world around us. To engage the heart and soul, to transform their landscapes into resonant and shapely art, demands courage and perseverance. And openness to invention, because we are ultimately moving beyond therapizing; we are making art, after all.

Like I’m back on that Greyhound with the dirty silvery-gray bathroom without
toilet paper or paper towels and the people nodding off to headphones and the people making drug deals on cell phones and the young couple making out on the plaid seats with the broken foot rests and the exhaust smell and the bumps and the dandruff on the passenger in front of me and the cranky driver and the card players pulling down their trays for solitaire.
Fine.
Resolute.
As though I’m mourning, but I’m not sure exactly what it is I’m mourning.
Like the shortest side of a triangle.
Hopeless. Like a mother who hates her own children.
As though the crinkle between my eyebrows is turning into a permanent s.
As though I’m being sucked up through the clouds.
Ecstatic—is that wrong?
It’s a relief, to tell you the truth.
Like a young widow, like an old widow. Tender.
Wrong, wronged, wrung out.
How does that make me feel? How do you think?

yes  no comparison   to be had   between
the wings of birds   of insects   of bats
I love you       and you love me
winged similarities

like the panda’s thumb
as opposed to ours   for instance
enabling you   to grab my arm  squeeze
and the panda’s —a single padded bone
adapted for grasping   a stalk of bamboo

whales too   kept
something of their thumbs
to remember the land by
grew fins like fish       yet not

thumb  say the word   I think of my own
it’s only natural
the way love makes you think
you can enter into another
creature and speak for it

there’s a danger in me
almost persuading myself
you love me  don’t you   deep down
I know it   as certainly
as yellow-rump warblers fly back
to these very trees  year after year
or that the crows
pecking at a squirrel’s carcass  on the street
in front of the house where I live

just have another way
of loving the world

Ancestral light pushes
through the roof of air,

pinpoints we look up at,
imagining we can see

the pulsating heart
of gas and matter and fire

on its way toward us from
so long ago, such distance

that really, it’s just
an echo, an echo of the infinite,

an echo as conceived by
the finite, a mind-body

that says infinity, looking
into vast black skies,

that says eternal, says
universe unending,

that says love,
still, always, and forever,

while kissing the one
she chose to stargaze with,

and who, like you, like all of us,
though of too infinitesimal an age

to be calculated in the light years
reflected in anyone’s eyes,

will kiss again, hard, the beloved
who wears winter’s face,

who wears the face of this world,
like a child in a monstrous mask.

In the kitchen, we clanked silverware
To drown out the words
That corroded our minds like caustic magma
Our foreheads leaning together for comfort

We couldn’t drown out that image with noise
I pressed my palms over my ears to stop the sound
As our foreheads pressed together, the terror slipped out
“Meat hooks and electrical wires”

I pressed my palms over my ears so I couldn’t hear you
Begging me to tell you it wasn’t true
Meat hooks and electrical wires
Snaked into skin and sinew in that cold cell underground

But I couldn’t tell you it wasn’t true
Because you could see him
sinews hanging against the wall of that cold cell underground
His scapula scraping against the meat hooks that crucified him

You could see it, couldn’t stop seeing it, in your mind
The spasming of his ganglion, bared to the abrasive air
Crucified sacrilegiously on meat hooks, by his own scapula
Electrical wires spiked into the soft curve of his feet

The twitching of his ganglion are the shadowiest signs of life
His blood spattered against his ribcage and the walls
The electrical wires spiked into the carbuncle veins of his forearms, wedged under his nails
Perhaps his heart burst from the impulse snaking up his spine

His blood spattered against his ribcage and my skull
While I stood on the blank white tiles of my kitchen
Afraid that the toaster would send an electrical impulse snaking up my spine
Afraid I was too young to know this

I stood on those stark white tiles
And whispered to you the secret
We were too young to know
“just don’t think about it”

I whispered it to you
Without the slightest shame, just like the grownups
“Just don’t think about it”
The great American secret

If it were solid, this mud-metal sheet,
we’d be frozen, although still a perfect reflection of the concrete clouds halted ascension,
and hide beneath the surface,
respected by rocks, the gargoyles of nature,
for the things we have uncommon.
Stoic connections if only for the way it could be.

Shadowless flies a bee.
Its shadow reflected in the deep sky sheet,
released to nothing and everything uncommon.
A single tree pierces the surface, leafless it alone ascends.
Standing on the mirror doubles its size as nature
acts as a point between two infinitely retreating surfaces.

We’ll start from the center, the starting point surface.
Up or down become relativities to be,
greater than either but neither in nature.
The bee’s hive tightly coiled, white-yellow crumpled paper sheets,
heavy with honey’s upward spiral, ascending,
as two mirrors facing each other, an ending uncommon.

Stalemate, this world, and us in common.
We hide beneath the past’s glass surface.
The submergence will kill our bodies in time, descending,
sinking to the sky for there we’ll be
between the star’s sheets.
One with death, two with nature.

So now between the bee and me and you, nothing but natural
silence and buzzing commonalities.
Tracks composed and performed by rain sheets
beat rhythms on the ceiling surface,
where beneath we wait to be
evaporated or drank up by the hollow bones of birds ascending.

Finally flight achieved, ascending from the surface like steam,
shattering sheets of ice with uncommon volume,
free to be nature itself or nothing.

Kalah Na’eh va’Chasudah,
Righteous and beautiful one,

White thread parting the black sea.

Old men with graying eyes stuff dollars
Pinned to prayers into the Rebbe’s coat.

May you live to see your grandchild’s beard.

Kissing the groom’s rough cheek,
Samuel Iskowitz bites the end off a cigarette

Then hums a gentle niggun, the room
Riots. Stamping feet. The broken glass.

One thousand strong.
A ceiling fan putters from the rafters, smoked

Fish heads sweat beneath its cheap florescent.
Plates full of tomatoes, pickled-tongue and rye.

You may kiss the Rebbe’s napkin
After it graces his lips. Good luck for a year.

Children, who suck on hard candy, leaf
Through yellow-paper song books.

Wild-eyed men pull at each other’s
Shirts, slug shots of potato vodka

Then dance on the tips of chandeliers.

She is worried. My mother is left-handed—
Who will want to marry her?
At night the same dream haunts her.
An old woman dies beside a field of birds.
What will become of the world, she wonders?

She drinks black coffee in the afternoon,
hangs tea bags by the window to dry,
reads The Forward at night,
remembers being a young girl,
the sound of rain hitting a metal roof.

When I am born, she frets over the fat of my cheeks.
Feed him only water she tells my mother.
When she is old, she gets confused
about the ocean
how it moves from east to west.

In Los Angeles where she waits to die
they find her teeth in the room of another man.
The man’s children think she’s after his money.
How strange we get when we grow old.
They whisk the man away and hide him

like a blackbird hides its young.
These stories always end the same.
A bed in a hospital.
A woman refusing food.
Her childhood so far away, she cannot speak.

As a child I planned my days in reverse, so I always
ended up where I began.

It’s like the lost set of keys you find in the last place you look.
Why do you never look there first?

Similarly, when presented with a set of impossible variables,
the solution is X.

More often than not, we believe in the things we have invented
before we think of them.

Like the logic of circles—you notice the shape of an iris
and imagine the wheel.

And then there’s the story of the Rabbi who proved God’s existence
by dropping an egg from a balcony.

If the egg breaks, then God exists, he told the people below him
and it did.

waking before the sun, before the water-
man carrying on, before he pedaled his
wet weight by, crying AG-UA! AG-UA! AG-UA!
Some mornings are louder than others, it’s true.

Some mornings are wider than our dreams of water.
When islands lie close to the cliffs as they dare,
it’s better to stay clear, better to stay up
and brave the wave of air, and wheeze the long way,

to some hill without a house, the path’s soft edge,
ledged above the city, above the sea.
Who there would hear me, happy stone, happy mouth?
What falls past my feet? These words swimming out.

I gird myself, I mean I pull a seam-backed nylon
over the creampuff of my head. For you.
To contain myself, my mess, hold it in tight and slim,
except it’s not needed: my flesh is weak
but my mind is a bear trap, I mean, a steel-
toed shit-kicker. I mean, I am empty of lust
as a pork loin. I am drunk with whole milk.

I am the abandoner I mean I never leave my house.
So where would we do it, slow and illicit one?
When I lie down I mean to sleep.
I failure the affair because well look
I had a girl and she ran off with my best goods.
Now I’m just the saggy bag what kept her,
now kicked to shit, a creampuff in a hold-up.

But o you crack me up, you hold me,
telling your story with its crooked ending,
its white derriere I cannot name
much less touch or see. I mean,
do you even have a body, Young Goodman Brown?
A black mass I could stroke and call my own?
Little antelope? Something I could “sleep with”?
Look, everyone sleeps with herself
inside her locked-up, knocked-up dream.
Sex is no key. Sex is off key.
Sex is a rock star I was once told I could be
but you back me up I mean I’m your guitar
I mean effects pedal: nudge me with your foot
ever so gently and I distort.

I once looked for love in an elevator every spring.
(I once got my shoelace caught in an escalator too
but I mean) I once looked deep into spring
for the cartoon sunshine arcing in the shame
of someone’s golden cheek, his or hers or his,
beautiful, adorable, oh my god
I mean I adored it, adored widely, was crushed by it.
Now I look into the backs of parked cars
for the empty infant car seats.
I count the evidence of other people’s loins,
the mess of their streaks, the mass of their hot little bodies.
This is my crush. These are my brethren,
these invisible drivers, sexless parents
ghosted and followed by their adorable children.
This is what I have in common with the world.

With you, narrator, I have nothing.
Without you, I’m everything, enormous.
I mean I’m married and you’re married but much cuter
(and smaller, and childless) and marriage is a soft, soft place,
a streaked and aching loin, a creampuff
bobbing along in the bathtub.
A creamy caramel center. The give of lead
in the sweet hot core of a bullet,
the sweet red poison on the dip of an arrow.

I mean I’m hunted, a dragon, droopy-eyed and greedy.
Dragons by definition go to bed alone,
the cold gold coins sticking to their warm white bellies.
O unreliable, I am creamy and exposed for this.
By this I guess I mean my loins.
I’m covered in so much sleepy gold—
my enormous, one-tailed, messed and streaky self—
that I cannot locate that one open place,
the single inch of surprise skin that could kill me,
that could be for you and your crooked, lying arrow.

Constrained by time, I ignore the perils, pursue
what isn’t there, what doesn’t fit,
look with instant eyes at doubtful things, listen,
though a dying language surely lies.

Garden gods, their languid thoughts
fanned by mason bees, hoverflies,
draw up milkweed for a caterpillar’s long
flight home, urge a mantid on a lemon spike
to hunt for joy, while I dig the soil’s
dark horses, mind a lazy eye.

So much happens for no reason, and me,
growing old with nothing under my skin,
only this hard little ball—why so often
I fall silent, lose my location on
the palindrome, never odd or even,
sober at parties, nights of interrupted sleep.

Only yesterday a delicate rain cemented
our steps in ash; our two forward-facing eyes,
turned away from the volcano, toward a valley,
saw the same yellow grasses, same birds
ascending scattered trees, same sun
gilding a morning sky.

Now witnesses at my gate are apt to tell me:
revelation finds us out. Whirling at the end
of a tether, circle so big its arc is nearly flat,
I feel in the ferocious torque our great potential
to fly off, aimless spirits, meaning well
but wide, far wide of heaven’s mark.

lovers who populate and disappear
the world, tell me

before I drink forgetfulness from the river,
how can a woman

who beat the silhouette of a burglar
from her curtain with a broom

succumb to a bright
shadow on an x-ray

when, on her garden wall,
in the last light birds erase

from the air, Polyphemus moths,
big as two hands, open?

We collect seashells in the desert,
flotsam bones the texture of shark skin,

read in the frayed sky what worms divine,
marriage on the edge of extinction.

Even with doors and windows open
our cinderblock apartment

held heat like a grudge, flattened us
to a species of oppositions,

like archaeopteryx, both
lizard and bird. “Neither

the sun nor death can be
looked at with a steady eye,”

but a pinhole camera, its blank
paper, and now I can’t remember

sometimes where I park the car
show me a thing or two: night of orange

blossoms, backyard pool, stars
we wake as we enter black water.

In all the front yards, the boys and girls play melodrama,
the ghosts play boys and girls

and frenzy collects the suburbs
in cloverleaf arms.

Tonight, the most precious touch comes
distant. Not April’s immediacy, when drunk was its own reward.
The end of spring craves patience: long wait at the crosswalk,
slow drive up the avenue. In the yard,

the boys and girls play staring,
the coy ghosts in their felt hats,

and in the business park, the flagstones
warmed by lamps, the pavement wills
the little red rose bush closer,

a delirium that stumbles the velvet bee
from his velvet bed, and leaves him breathless,
shaking on the walk after dark.

Go with God, brownie, the batter
I fold with a wooden spoon
until the lumps are smooth,
the bowl’s bell edges evenly covered,
and the wooden spoon tastes
as it ever did in kitchens,
at the feet, the aproned waists of all mothers.

Little army of muffins, my bread loaves,
my victories, Go with God
in the heated dark, where you rise or you fall,
but for faith. I am still
in the kitchen, these Schrödinger moments,
when all things are possible
until the timer reminds us – a burn,
a delight, something to devour.

“Before you point to the lamp in the corner, point to the child kicking the ball, but only after pointing to the clock. Only do this if there are two cats and two dogs in the picture. If there are not, then point to the picture on the wall on the right side of the room. Go.”
______________________________________

Today was day four of “aptitude” testing. I am now over-critically conscious of the way I perceive and organize information, the way I count hours, the way I say things. This is my second year of college, and I have agreed to enroll in ACCESS to see if I have a learning disability or “processing problem.” Algebra and I don’t get along, regardless of my work ethic (that’s not just what I told my teacher). Incidentally, I’ve spent four days pointing at things I’m asked to, completing patterns, and defining words like breakfast aloud. Which I did incorrectly, by the way, despite my best efforts to eat it daily:

Counselor: “I want you to read the words in front of you aloud and then tell me what they are, begin.”

BREAKFAST

Myself: “Breakfast. The most important meal of the day.”
It was at this time the counselor had to pause. I could see her squinting intently at pages of a blue book, pages I cannot see, pages that tell her who I am. Pages with the cure for the common cold. Pages with the meaning of life itself. And guess what she says next:

Counselor: “Okay…can you tell me more about Breakfast?” Fucking hell.

In the picture mentioned above, I can still hours later itemize the contents of the room with 98% certainty. I’m a pro at remembering useless shit, basically. Among these things was a little blonde girl with a ponytail sitting on an amber rug in the center of the room, doing a puzzle. I don’t think the puzzle had a box. You can’t do a puzzle without the box and the picture on it, right? Please tell me there was a box in the picture and I just didn’t notice.

And I don’t know what breakfast is.

“I’m sorry. Breakfast. The first meal of the day, in the morning.” Perhaps a few glasses of wine. Or, perhaps, all of your waking realizations about your life thus far have sufficient nutritional value.

Does a shoe go on your ear? Y/N

This is what I must do to cooperate and feign interest in my education here at Moorpark Academy of High Achievers. I shouldn’t complain much, it could be worse, but like everyone else I just want out. Any monkey with his thumb up his ass can point at a picture and hazard a guess at what balloons are. Speculation as to whether or not I could have done more to help my education is at this point, fairly painful and counter-productive. The Academy has a way of slurping your soul up through a piss flavored crazy straw. Does pot cure cynicism? Y/N. No. Placates it, possibly.

I told my boss at the auto shop, Jim, about this testing process. His response was something along the lines of them being “fucking over-liberalized geniuses” if they suspect a learning disability NOW, after over 12 years of public education. I love him, not exclusively because he pays me. We are the hot blood of the country, the “honest” work force; we have Doctorates in physical labor, dirty hands, we say “fuck” every other word. I’m trying to balance throwing on a suit too, but incidentally one size does not fit all.

Breakfast. The most important meal of the day, the first meal of the day, the one in the morning. It, like a shoe, does not go on my ear. Unless you want to get technical and philosophical.

I feel like I heard somewhere once there are people in the world who get off on dumping food on each other. Mud wrestling? No sweet heart, I was thinking of just getting a giant tarp and pouring pea soup, spaghetti, and cake on it and then rolling around in it with you. Isn’t that sexy?

Are pea soup, spaghetti, and cake breakfast foods?

Do flowers grow in the sky? Y/N

Pancakes are breakfast food, for some people. I don’t like pancakes. Don’t hold me to that though, there is a waiter at the Thousand Oaks Denny’s with a graveyard shift who will tell you I always used to order pancakes. I told him once that pancakes at 2 a.m. unconditionally is a very serious tenet of mine. Please tell me the girl doing the puzzle had a box to look at, and I just didn’t notice.

One week from today I have my last day of testing (for what?). Exactly one week following that, I will know the results (of what?). But I am not interested in these things, really. Where I measure, on paper, statistically, point wise, these things are not paramount to my personal philosophies. I value intuit senses, vibes, endless reasoning. “Yes” and “No” are answers for the limited and unimaginative people. And probably, the truly happy people.

I’m sitting in my Humanities class now, rushing to say something profound. The girls next to me, who are currently rushing to complete the take home quiz due in one minute, just asked each other who Plato was, who St. Augustine was. Who are you? I wish I could be you, sometimes.

Is green a flavor? Y/N
Do pigs fly? Y/N. If you catapult them, yes.

(Socrates: Yes Glaucon, but observe further: What truly is a pig? What does it mean to fly?)

I’m 19. I have erased the paragraph that summarizes me in clever short sentences six times, I just realized I don’t care about it. I’m too busy being irritated that I learned what feudalism was in elementary school, and my humanities teacher is going over it for the fourth or fifth time. If you want something interesting, try deconstructing the mind of the classmates who surround you based off their mannerisms and speech. I can’t give you intimacy, but you can sit in your car in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain, and just listen–there’s nothing like it.

We are our first words. Next, the pledge of allegiance. We are then our golden stars. We are our report cards. We get vaccinated, just like animals, so we can be in school. We are the Career Aptitude Test. The Meyers-Briggs personality type. Christmas bonus, John in Accounting, My Kid is an Honor Student at Franklin Elementary, he was a loving Bother, Husband, and Father. Inheritance.

That’s all good and fine I suppose. Really, though, to hell with aptitude and processing and averages and answers. I can’t wait to go work tomorrow and help Jim Itemize his taxes while inventing new sexist jokes and downing Red-Bull. I can’t wait to cruise PCH just to think about everything. I’ve got a baby sister who calls me “the blue ballerina” and really loves cup cakes. This is over, anyways.

Do butterflies have ten wings? Y/N Sure, why not.
______________________________________________
“The voice on the audio tape will tell you a story. One beep will sound to let you know it has started. Two beeps will sound when it is over. When it is over, repeat the story back to me.”

“Mary likes to catch butterflies.”
Good for you Mary, good for you.

the section hardest hit was the Republican part of Florida. “At least

it’s warm here,” is something my ex would say when she was

afraid I would leave her.

I left my ex and moved into the Lucky Boy Motel.

I rented two units—7 & 8—with 2 tiny kitchens & 2 tiny baths.

My appliances were replicas of themselves, like our 2 party system,

Rita & Katrina, loss and the love that spawned it.

When the nights became filled with flying
insects, humidity, June rain, you looked
for an empty house where you could sleep,

safe from muddied grass, the car-churned wake
on curbsides, underpasses. On Rusk Street,

you watched a family pack suitcases and drive away
in a van filled with dogs, life vests. All morning you waited

and when you were finished with waiting, with breathing

in your own sour smell, your Clove cigarettes, the sweet
reek of sweat, you pushed your small body through

the pet door of their house. For two days,
you slept in the laundry room, wore what you found
on the dryer (a man’s denim shirt, a woman’s tan trousers),

pressed your face into folded towels, held the scent

of detergent against you. You marked everything—
an apple, a block of cheese, urinated in vases, trashcans
as though all of this was yours: television and washing

machine, wax bowl of fruit, a bottle of beer. You left
before the family returned with sunburns, photographs,

jars of shells. When the police found you asleep
in the yard, you said your identity was stolen,

your house. The fitted sheets, dog bowls, jugs of milk,

you said that all of it was yours, the things
you should come home to—fabric softener, chew toys,
a lamp to turn on—instead of lawn clippings, concrete,

a bicycle that moves you past porches, bright windows.

Pretend the storm is breaking
through pines, the stone bird-

bath, or that the angry woman
touching your hand to the stove

to warn you—hot—is hail stones,
uprooted mimosa, the tin lid

of a garbage can smashed
into the back door. Let’s push

two chairs together, drape the bedsheet,
make one small room

for us both. Take your favorite blanket,
make tarps of yellow rosebuds, gather

crackers, yarn-mouthed dolls,
pop-up books. Call the fist-sized hole

in the wall hurricane, tornado, natural
distater. Pretent the forecaster

on your purple radio says to take
cover, and we’ll listen to the storm

tear out dishes from cupboards,
crash them to the floor. Do not

be afraid when this house becomes
unhinged; I will hide you

inside my hair. Understand
a woman’s crying is only wind,

a collapsed roof, a splintered board
floating in dark floodwater.

bodies, coffee husks, trees humming
with your sweet sap song, I leave you

on the front porch, a warning

to other dusk fliers, the humpbacks,
sticky legs. Do not come

with your paper wings spread, do not
climb my window, tap your legs

on the glass. Poison-slick,

you dizzy in the geraniums, the terracotta
pot. You circle the doormat

on your back, a death dance,

and I think of how many times
I’ve been dive-bombed, crawled upon,

found legs in coffee cups, beer bottles,

orange juice. Look at you—still alive
and twirling near my feet, frantic

for air, for just one more breath.

You beat the damp dark, the sky
full of rain. Your body shriveled

fruit, rough pit, soon rotten. Soon
carried off in the mouths of ants.

II.
Noise is noise here.
A rush of life moments to life moments.
Memory blurs to a smudge of chaos and happenings.
You forget to breathe. You forget to cry.
You forget that your heart has a solid thump under your muscle.
Between two a.m. and four a.m. the city quiets.
If you are awake, put your right palm on your left breast. Hear the blood in you.

She grew up in the Saddleback shadow. She lived off new El Toro road.
The part of the road that is lined with coffee shops,
fast-food chains, and movie theatres.
The part of the road that has three lanes on each side.

At the edge of the canyon system the biker-bar with the rows of chromed Harleys
still serves burgers and Bud.
On Sunday afternoons Mother and Father would take Jake and me
to get malts at the bar.
Father would talk with the bikers.
He sold his Harleys to buy a little box with windows.

I drove down the west coast to be with my mother.
The old nurse reminded me that I was born in this hospital.
The smells of hospital are different on each floor.
I slept in a cot next to her bed each night.
Each day I waited for the lullaby
to trickle out of the hospital intercom.
Another first breath.
I asked the nurse why there is no song for death.

The death song might sound like the wind rustling through the scrub oaks.
I drove the 1500 miles home,
drove down old El Toro road,
through my chaparral ocean,
to new El Toro road,
stopping at the sea.

A bird does not think hard on her migration.
She flies until there is something familiar in the air.

No visible evening falls. Sweetness occurs from the first breath, immediate and familiar. Snow west of the waterfront. I am elsewhere. Capable of missing the deer among the fir trees. They roam aglow. Wandering the imaginary body. O bright, bright elsewhere, how will you remember the missing? I write toward the sand sifting clear into the mouth as the cactus wren in the town garden cull scorched thorns for seed, and thieves gather hair-dried nests. The mind at this level can be poked. Pride capitulates to beauty. My pleas obverse. Wild rose, I will go on all night beating sapphire into the sea.

Under the leaves, under the topmost limbs
of the scrub oak the blue mare
lips the spittle of white apple blossoms.

Between her and the blossoms
rises the antique smell of lovers. Blood
passes through the rooms of her gray lineage.
There is no one here to separate him
from this observance. He remembers

the young nurse who watched him die. She knelt,
not knowing how to read his face, until
the flushed script of his secret burst
over her like a bonfire lit upon a flat winter lake—
a red flare toppling thaw. He would like to explain

to you the point at which the untouched stones
might hiss under the weight of the current; water
guiding him deeper toward the voices
of those who have gone before him, fortification
of pebbles into sand, like teeth clacking
against the syllabic dark,

but there was a rushing sound the sucking of wind
through cedar. Later

the clerk with the wide lips and sea-blue skirt
handed you his wallet; that small bulk of leather, still
filled with his heat, warmed your palm. As if
he’d simply stepped out of the room. Belladonna,

burning long bright sentences, insulates the orchard; plush
afternoon figures held billowing
arrange with restraint the tiny flames
of your trim dress. Now, sparrows

flit through his ribs. He looks out
over the cut grass beyond the dirt road.

He is nowhere near these trees
nor your faint reflection, continuance
or sunlight. You are not
enough. His voice streams in the boundaries
of waking which cannot be dreamed

                   Your clavicle uncovered like a wound floating on the sea. I have the same bone.