Swallow it Whole

The day cracks itself
on my forehead, like

an egg.

from “Soft Targets”

Don’t blame the wisteria for setting off a feeling like freedom a feeling like joy.

We watched the people walking in the open square—

one of them was a specialist in killing, fear was the way of others.

I’ve seen the most extraordinary thing about people, their faces.

Mechanics of Action

From far away the child’s singing
            sounds like the cries of a rat
in the mouth of a python.

Three Poems, Three Watercolors

We thought again of Francisco de Zurbarán’s hands
And if what they held had half the weight

Of beauty and half the heft of truth, his
Beautifully dressed martyrs, ready to wear

Their death, which will continue to remain
Unfashionable

from Darklands

Nimrod & Gabriel
Set up shop
One was a gaoler
One a cop

For Alem

He doesn’t know about the boys
she elegizes in poems
Resting beneath waves
bound & thrown there

Chirality

On the other side of the mirror I see that poisoned life, each molecule built so backward even the water became poison.

                                                        More precisely: thrashed in the spiral seawater makes between rocks.

    Butterfly, web history, thyroid, locked phone, the spill of tablets on the kitchen counter, I carried your child.

Reduced to evidence, the state sees your point: Hispanic female, 35, 208 lbs.

Three Poems

Topaz eye, a hurricane
that rips the pages until the spine sprains, 
until the foot on which it spun swells,
until the knee of the wind straightens and extends
until the common tongue pants for dexterity in the air.

Two Poems

I’m lucky, ghostly lucky,
when I start roaming
and recognize the sign on the door.  
That’s when I whisper
to the nail, “you know
you little heathen
what you have done,”

Two Poems

Translated from the Spanish by Mónica de la Torre

Make It So

I heard somewhere that in Ancient Times folks believed the voice inside their heads (their
conscience? consciousness? homunculus?) was god/s
lol

My Poem About Last Sounds

The summer deck is filling with riotous rain pouring down from your hands,
I think. I’m terrible at these supernatural images and you wouldn’t like if I kept it up.
I know you are trying to water the plants, and the seedlings and all of everything
I might have neglected for the last three months while I’m here fucking it all up.

The Holographic Principle

Dutch men explain things to me. Nederlandse mannen zeggen me dat ik de wereld ervaar in drie dimensies, en toch, zeggen Nederlandse mannen me, valt die tweedimensionaal te beschrijven. Dutch men tell me I see the world in three dimensions, but Dutch men tell me we can only solve this in two.

Two Poems

Translated from the French by Jay Deshpande

Diary of the Ghost of a Mestiza

                                           Written in the sorcerer’s house mis palabras

are a mutilated palace
                                           spread across a lake.

Preview

There are worldwide, catastrophic storms
When earth’s network
Of weather-control satellites
Is sabotaged by unknown enemies.

The Rabbits

They expressed my desire
To mount and be
Mounted as they scurried
Into the darkest parts of what

Lovers in the Time of Nuclear Power

Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

Two Poems

every poem I write is about the same thing:
how ordinary it is to want a long line of sunrises,
bowls of oatmeal with you—in other words

Three Poems

Sit still you told me. Give the desert
           what belongs to the desert. A vessel of dust
is all you will be, dimwit. Be a dear and shape

Epistle

            In the market to be a sense is
pealing out the surface areas. A fruit seller
is terse, sagittal. How summer is
a fit expression, as germane as botanic.