To Texas

Every morning
for the past week I've
spooned yogurt into the blender,
thrown in some frozen
raspberries or blackberries or
whatever--an attempt at
eating healthy for once--and I
remember the way your nose wrinkled each
time you saw a banana split, the
combination of milk and fruit aimed
perfectly at that part of you
that feels
digust. And I wonder if yogurt
is different, I wonder if you'd be
proud of me, I wonder
how well you're eating, and how well
you're being looked after. I know
he's looking after you.
I don't know how to say it,
other than I want to see
you every day, but there
are rules, and there are
ways we do things, and I
have never been strong enough to fight
--even if I had known what
I wanted. And I
don't call you, don't send emails, don't
have anything to say, except
do you still hate strawberry ice cream and
what does it feel like
to be happy

A Fall

my language has no words
and my culture has no gestures
with which to demonstrate
the intense sincerity of my self-abasement
when I am confronted by your worth
(when I am confronted by my incomplete understanding of your worth)

there is no comparison I can make
to you, the superlative,
except to say inadequately
that you knock the sense from me, like the cement
(pummeled into the lower back muscles of a fallen child
when she slips on the sidewalk)
steals her power to breathe

this love that is more than love
encumbers you, but although I build up
walls for me to slam into, although I weave
nets to catch me, I am locked in orbit

.

when I was small, I threw myself out of the top bunk
to learn what it felt like to fall
but I could just have waited
to meet you

enemy

new and strange to contemplate:
my thoughts are not Myself—
the constant stream of reactions to my experiences
can be my enemy

—can be my tool,
can be irrelevant, is not Me
anymore than my hands are Me
or my memories, or my reflection
or the contradictory set of behaviors
acquaintances lump together and call by my name

and maybe I only exist
in this moment,
maybe in two minutes my body will be made
of a new combination of atoms;
when I pull back, I can no longer see
where I end and You begin, or if
I and the chair are not the same, after all

and maybe I have a soul,
new-created at my conception or as old as Saṃsāra—

—but total nonexistence seems just as likely

Forgetting

There will be a moment
when I don't remember this anymore
when its effects are lost
in the vast complexity of all action
and my mind is empty, or
is full of other things

In this loneliness, this isolation from pre-made meaning
I will find
a kind
of freedom that no other freedoms
mimic,
the delight
of drowning, suspended, head covered, feet stretched out,
in the seeming infinity
of my own agency

If I dismantle my barbican, overflow
my baileys, I will scrape myself raw,
I will expose myself to a rain of sulfur
but I
will move, after a long wait, I will
move, I will no longer be too large
for my skin

Week 38

Hurt people hurt people

I remind myself of this as I watch you on the sun porch,
your belly swollen with potential and your forehead
pushing in toward itself
Each word you spit designed to slice me up, designed
by you and by some other, some other
who designed you
Serene, I say nothing to your tirade; I let it hit me,
and part around me, a great wind blasted at a pillar
of rock; your barbs are blunted
I see what they are, little pebbles of hate

and I remember the times I have
hated, the times we sat
on the sun porch and held sweating glasses of iced tea
Every word I have spat
when my helpless arms grasped
at nothing and my insides were stolen
Some people worry for the child in you but
I have faith

I'm not a liar

Every word of truth was spoken
by my hands as they pushed the window open,
as they pushed the window shut;
every sincerity pulsed pain
behind my eyes, tensed
in my forehead.
If you can't read what is written,
if you can't hear what is declaimed,
come into the amphitheater through any
of its many doors,
and learn another language, one spoken
under the breath, one written
in the tiny spaces between each word,
where there is little room for the cut-out tongue
to sing.

Govinda

Put your mouth on my face and understand me,
see the faces in my face;
slide your hand through my hand,
for I am a specter

Put your lips on my forehead, put your mouth
on me, and understand, beloved, you
who have listened and obeyed, who learned
from our teachers

Ask me your questions; I will give my answers;
they don't match, and oh

I never wish to frustrate you,
who loved me, who were never
so beloved as I

and I know, I know but it was not in my nature
to love, and how much less
can I regret the coldness of my heart
when the path led me to Liberation

(yet love came to me, too, in my turn, and was overcome)

But my words are merely an abacus, so put
your mouth on me,
open it wide and red,
and understand me, beloved, for I
am a specter

Lilacs

This is the week
that all the lilacs bloomed,
bursting out too quickly for me to say
that they unfolded.

Their heavy, sweet smell,
wet with newness,
unrolls across the city, a tapestry
embroidered with May.

I touch them;
I brush my fingertips across each cluster
as I pass, lift them to my face and breathe,
overcome by the feeling of home,
by the idea of belonging.

But I do not belong
to these lilacs; they are not mine;
this house is not mine; this land
is not mine; it is only part of this city
that is also not mine,

and the house with the lilacs
where I lived long ago

was not my home
.

Not a Symphony

I don't want to get better at handling my feelings
I just want to not have feelings anymore

I don't want to spend another afternoon facedown on the floor, wet spots forming in the carpet--
my tears and, uglier, my wet, wide breaths

I am fat and dysfunctional and unpleasant to be around
and I'm lonely but I fuck people up.

I am trying to write this but
the ink is smudging in the teardrops on the page--I'm literally crying on all my work
and its not even interesting or beautiful, it's just pathetic

I drank all the wine we have in the house and
it didn't do anything, I only stumbled
through the garbage can and smeared cat vomit
on my hands because
I'm crying too hard to walk straight

I live in a pile of cat vomit
my life is disgusting
everything I own is made of particle board
and I never get to go outside.

I'm not even an interesting character anymore
I'm a cliche
a mom from the 60s who drinks martinis and hates
her vacuum cleaner

All this pain and I don't get anything out of it
I'm not writing a symphony, I'm not painting
a portrait, I'm not even writing shitty
poetry, just scribbling this down in
ugly ass handwriting, while I wipe snot
out of my mouth-breathing face with
my other hand

The salt in my tears stings my skin--how
have I cried so much and never noticed
that before?

I have nothing that is worth anything to me
it's all just thick-smeared garbage, and
it's heavy, and I

I wish I could go outside, spend more than ninety
minutes without looking at a screen, breathe
air that doesn't smell like dishes that
haven't been washed in weeks

Long-Legged Spider Keeping Up

Of a deeper color than jade

is the pond by the road,

cupped between spring-forested hills

in Michigan, where I pay rent now,

and I would give my jade

and my emeralds, if I still had them,

to belong to these hills and to this pond

or to the fruit of the trees.

I belong only to the road:

each cornfield I drive by cuts neat rows,

even-measured furrows into me, running

endlessly beside me, like a long-legged spider

that barely, mercilessly, keeps up.

And I ache for a home

that I never was born to, for a country

where I never belonged,

homesick for a people whose language

I understood but could never speak without

an accent--

a moth forbidden

from crawling back to its chrysalis.

Beneath the corn and the soy is the soil

I call mother, in whose warm muddy realness

I dream of immersing myself,

hogs and Holsteins lazing over me,

spread open to the unobstructed Iowa sky--

in Minnesota or Illinois, in Wisconsin or Missouri,

somewhere just off I-80 or I-94,

not farther than you'd drive for a fill-up or for

2 for $2 bratwurst

becoming, finally, one of a million farms,

each unique yet indistinguishable among

the million--and all the shame

of realizing I have no use for their uniquenesses

gone with my face, gone with my name.

I love her like no one else could,

this placid mother

who turns her tits to face her litter,

all born knowing how to suck,

while I stare at her spine and wonder

how I never learned this trick,

this skill that automatically comes with being human,

a buy-one-get-one-free at the Farm

and Fleet. I don't think

these softball-dusted girls, these sunburnt

boys in white t-shirts, know her face--

too busy sucking to look up. But I

have spent--oh, decades now--

imagining what her face might look like

if she smiled on me. And if I had money I could buy

a John Deere tractor, but I could not

turn myself into one.

Влюбилась

I read, when I was in Russia, a poem
whose author was fascinated
by the femininity inherent to his beloved's verbs:
вошла, she said, услышала, влюбила,
ла, ла, ла, la la la la ~
and I know what he heard there, because
when I see your emoji,
the spellings you've chosen for their exact shades
of meaning, your use of — where someone else
would use --,
I know you. And in knowing I
love.

You don't have to have a face or a voice to be
a person. All that you need
is a self to express, and
self-expression.

Значение имени

In Moscow, on the street
one Sunday between
the pale tubes of neon lights, recently extinguished, and
the rhinoceros-guarded façade of
a gentlemen's club,
a young woman I have not met since asked me, "и ты --
как тебя зовут?"

and I answered truthfully.
"--Красивое," she said, her eyes
breathing, her mouth
open like a split fruit, "как песня, ты
песня, песня--да?"

"Ну да," I said, tilting my eyes down, down
to her split-fruit mouth in
surprise--
"как песня."

Как песня--я песня,
народная песня,
рождественская песня,
старая, святой песня,
запрещённая, так же,
как все суеверные, красивые лжи запрещённые--

and in the wet breaths of her eyes were
древние крестьяне,

крестьяне, которые танцуют по кругу,
забытый хоровод,
француженки с толстыми косами и
молодие люди;
томятся; ищут любви.
В глазах были карие глаза, светлые волосы,

тысячу лет назад,
в то время, которая мир забыл,
в стране, которой язык уже не говорят.

In her small, plump face, turned up at me, I
could read that her "Красивое" was
earnest, that her breaths were
alive, that песня meant something
big, bigger than a continent, as big as
history, and imagine
my astonishment--
because in English, all it means is

me

Туул гол

The year that I died,
Saladin at Al-Karak strode in through gaping archways.
Karak's echoing hallways were not then so undefended,
but the sky was as empty,
as impenetrable and deep and as deeply blue,
and as deeply blue and empty as the sky over Khatan Tuul
in the year that I died.

She is an almost worthy lord:
she sucks the willows through her long, splayed fingers,
and the sturgeon dart in and out,
piercing her belly where she over-boldly bares it to the sky;
the sky is a window that looks through itself,
a mirror that paints my secrets on the faded grass
more vibrantly as my search moves east.

I was turned inside out by the sky
in the year that I died,
and my name became the steppes;
my bright hope became the Altai and my hate Baikal,
and Sakhalin was all that amounted of my purpose.
But Saladin tore forward,
fueled by the condensed flame in his own belly.

There were flames that year,
when my lord turned inside out
and his insides were nothing but meat,
meat and terror and the desire to be covered,
painted over with saffron and jade.
I am a painter

and his bones burnt up, and every arrow
was the arrow that opened me to the blue-razor Eye.
I felt my armor peel like skin,
and I faced forward.

My body was left at Al-Karak,
my doors burned to ash and my ashes blown westward,
the idea of a fortress,
resonant,
with nothing to echo but the faded grass.

If Saladin comes again to Al-Karak,
let him flow in like winnowed grain;
let him fit doors to my doorways and meat to my bones.
I will paint him emerald as a virelai;
I will paint him vermilion as an Atlantic sky,
and he will fill me with his name,
with hate and with hopes piercing bright,
like the scales of sturgeon,
sucking me in with the vacuous blue that precedes the flame.

Khatan Tuul and the sky reflect each other,
transparent and impenetrable,
beyond the Altai,
behind Baikal.
Now I dart between the willows and unfold across the steppes;
now I am vast and animated.
But if Saladin comes again to Al-Karak,
doors will fly up against the sky.

I am a painter

Every

I am so
angry
that I don't want to get dressed,
that I don't want to take a shower,
that I don't want to eat;
I'd rather sit on the couch and be
angry,
the ache on the sides of my head spreading
around and down to my neck, shoulders, back.

I want to scream at someone,
but my throat's not working;
I want to smash a window,
but that wouldn't help me escape.
I want to punch somebody,
but no matter how much force I put into the blow,
it lands too softly
to be felt.

That's the nightmare I have,
over and over--
I can't touch anyone; I can't feel anyone's skin.
I'm trying to hurt people,
but nothing I do reaches them.
And rage builds up inside my face,
and I can feel it shrieking, hear it slamming against my sinuses;
there's no room for more but it keeps
growing.

I can't go anywhere
or do
anything.

My Mother Wants to Know

My mother wants to know
why I don't have babies yet.
She wants to know
why I don't adopt them,
why I don't select one and bring it home.
My mother wants to know
why I can't be happy,
why I refuse to accept
that life just isn't going to be that great.

But it's not about reproduction;
it's not a matter of He won't sleep with me? No skin
off my back. Who wants to have sex
anyway? I'll just adopt a baby and that
will be all the love I need.
It's a matter of Right and Wrong, as in,
it's wrong to use your kids for that,
wrong to let them watch you live in miserable disappointment,
all the while telling them you want them to be happy
--Do as I say, not as I do--
wrong to to let them think it's normal for parents
not to love each other.

But--says my mother, confused--
people do that to their children all the time.

Uh, yeah. I know they do.

Wedding

He doesn't care about anything

and I don't care

about him

Zoe is a poet

Zoe is a poet
and she says she isn't
but the lines she pens between
SCREAMS OF CAPITALS
all dashed out breathless
like a child with news of the
stock market crashing, the hospital
falling down; and Mama's
too tall, too all, too forever,
between the
SCREAMS OF CAPITALS
are too full of beauty
for their unintentionality
to make them
meaningless.

Ball Gag

I just want to be in love with someone who comes to me and is like,
Listen.
There are like three hundred guys out there,
and I'm not gonna have time to commit seppuku,
can you hold them off for a bit?
and I can be like,
No problem, boss. I have GOT THIS.
and then we quote some Buddhist scripture at each other and
I write a tanka or something and head out there
to die fucking gloriously
before the compound goes up in flames.

I wanna be in love with someone who is like,
God dammit, woman, how many times have I told you
not to fucking LOOK at me after nightfall? and I can be like
Well how the fuck else was I going to find out
that you're not ACTUALLY a talking polar bear?
and I can harness the winds until I find
the troll palace and wash the tallow
from his shirt and bring him
back to my castle.

I want to love someone who says to me,
This is a beautiful rondeau--
but I, like Dian, cannot be pierced
by the golden arrows that arc out from Nox's unfathered egg.
and I will say to her, Lady,
here is where they have wounded me,
and maybe she will let me fetch her goblet
and maybe she will touch the top of my head with her fingertips;
maybe she will allow me to drink the wine of oblivion
and watch her dance, beneath the stairs
and past the forests of silver, gold, and diamond.

--and I don't want to be tied up or beaten anymore
or reminded that I'm worthless;
I don't need somebody to tell me when to eat
or what to wear or how
I feel right now--I know how I feel--
and it'd be nice to be given orders,
but only if I knew I wouldn't be asked
to sin against myself and even then
I wouldn't obey if by disobeying I could save my beloved
even a breath's worth of an inconvenience--

but what I do want, and what I think maybe
it's possible to have without also choking
on a ball gag--those things are so gross--
is a slap on the back and a Good job, soldier,
thanks to you I'm no longer
a goddamn talking polar bear, having no thumbs
made it kinda hard
to charm angry ghosts with my biwa,

so I can throw back my shoulders and be like,
No problem, boss. I have GOT THIS,
I have always got
your back.

To you who are the chirp in my jacket pocket

I felt loved

when I realized how fiercely you protect me
with little words, little ways of manipulating a conversation
to your ends

I was submersed in hot water; I felt myself
cooking, my meat turning from red to gray.
Love drove through my stomach,
a thick, wooden spear
that did not splinter and stayed
there, in me, heavy
and pleasant, enough
to anchor me so I am no longer pulled off course.

Gratefulness welled up in me,
rose in my throat and burst out;
my head thrown back, I open my eyes to the sky,
and my mouth is pushed wide open, jaw aching,
and it pours out, golden, pours up,
and when it is exhausted, I remember your words
and it wells up again,
throws itself out of me so hard my muscles jerk

I want to
lay on you all this light,
shining like yellow hair, like new money;
to cover you with it,
a shield to warm you

I want to cut open my skin and show you
the spear in my belly,
the glistening of the organs around it,
my liver, my gallbladder, my ovaries--
see how clean they are
when my skin is cut open,
when they touch the light and the air.

I want
to give and give and be empty
and be filled and empty
myself again.
I want to hold myself
up for hours and hours until
my arms give out
But what good would that do you?

It isn't beautiful,
this kind of overwhelming response,
knee-jerk, uncontrollable,
breath-crushingly intense,
and it's so obvious that I
am missing something, that I have not
had enough of Love

and that's--
that's a lot to lay on top of you,
to punish you with when all you did
was love me

so I don't know whether to hope that I
can keep it to myself
or to hope that you
would like me to love you, too

Homecoming

October is half-over--
I run my fingertips over the back of my paper-dry hand.
Dusk, like an ever-threatening rainstorm,
encroaches on the edges of the day.

And I can smell, far-off from me,
the charcoal fires
and the girlish squeezes on the bleachers;
sweaters with too-long sleeves fall
like phantoms over my arms,
and I remember

nights with crisp branches and leaves,
the bonfires, the metal scraping
beneath the shoes that let me taste invincibility,
mouth open, waiting,
an unplotted course,
the clock that struck at midnight, and forbidden kisses
in the bare-stripped cornfield beneath the low, low moon:

eagerness and too much energy,
a certainty that the future would be something
and be something to be proud of.

I no longer have a girlfriend to cling to;
there is no boy with carefully sculpted hair
and wounded, liquid eyes.
Still, I would go and watch the game,
look at the girls in their sweaters,
but there are no tickets to sell to me,
no cars I can ride in,
and the taste of beer is even more unpleasant
when I drink alone.

I should have taken more
forbidden kisses; I should have
made my bed every night beneath
the open sky; I should have
clung tighter to her sleeve--

but I did not realize
that there are twelve months in the year,
and only one of them is
October.