Three Poems

Standing in the implacable solitude
I felt sick and doomed
and all too delicate.

Poem of No Regrets

or few, or less than
should be expected,
or a handful, or as much
as a normal living
human hand

from Multitasking

Translated from the Spanish by Rachel Galvin

Diamonds

Judith Butler, I am calling you
here in the kitchen where I’m unloading the dishwasher
performing my gender as I’m wont to do

Two Poems

I found a border in my body, slipped my fingers over
its simple seam until
I felt its stitches unwind and open. Out come scattered

les milles

haiti? must every place-name on earth
be a shorthand for violence
on a map of grief?   

Two Poems

Only babies slept through the howling winds.
Morning finds the madman absent from his post,
though his bicycle bell keeps ringing.

Whitman

I’m trying to imagine what it was like for Walt Whitman to kiss a man. Not
           because I want to kiss a man
(and if I did, certainly not “one of the roughs,” the unwashed, uneducated type
           Whitman preferred)

A Short History of Destruction

In the palace of the cats, we minused and gnawed.
We burrowed and simulated, skirting the wormholes.
In the shiny halls, cubist paintings looked down on us
Like startled Martians; lavish flower arrangements loomed
From the persistent étagères. Our peril

Two Poems

I am the last american wolf
I am scrubbing lavender lipstick
off the bathroom’s mirror
I don’t want to kill I am
staying quiet in a field of bodies

Song

Maybe if I route my broken life through this glowing field.

I guess this jug of bleach jammed in a stone wall.

I guess this disused road will do.

Elegy beginning in the shade of Aunt Mary’s mulberry tree

A week before the woman whose tree
that golden dog was tied to died, I watched
my daughter trust its limbs.

Aubade

Pardon my asking, but do you think I could drink
this and be okay? I am still learning the scents

of poisons, can’t yet smell them in the wild. Sip it
and tell me if you die.

Among Some Anapests at Civic Center

The fascists have entered the town

           Sun like a late        ripe peach         

           City says no
           to masks

From “Shale Plays”

Two counties away, an Iraq vet with PTSD
braces for the next tremor in a beige La-Z-Boy.
He watches a documentary about the tides and sea.

Three Poems

We gather here for you
Yours are still growing
This is near where we live
Pineapples and strawberries