The old canoe rests on the sand
at lake’s edge, its stern still
in the water. How many

strokes of the paddle wore away
the varnish on the gunwales?
Many. So many. And years

of sunlight and rain. Years
of snow and wind.

You sing songs to the pug in your fake Cantonese
and seem surprised when he doesn’t understand. You make coffee
a party: dark-roasted beans, gleaming French presses, and hand-thrown
mugs plucked from thrift-store shelves.

1. Here I am
His creased dress-pants hang on bony anatomy:
pelvic brim, iliac crest. Long foreleg ankles without socks.
I don’t know why a Nuer, reputed to walk for days without rest,
measuring the horizon with metronomic femurs and tibia
reminds me of my adolescent father, but he does.

Valley of the living
Valley of the dead
You call me back to my roots
Here, I can pause & look
I see
I see my people
I see me
Who am I?
I am a part of Gwembe

There will be no words,
no tributes, sonnets or verses of consolation,
borrowed from the great poets or philosophers
for an angel called up too soon.
Only the cries of infinite mourning rambles will reach the heavens.

She drowns on the sofa for two weeks. But each day she makes herself rise and wobble to the kitchen for water, a bite of toast. The blistering pain in her pneumonia-filled lungs causes her to grab the counter as if it’s an overturned boat, yet she hangs on, gasping for dear life.

اماذا أر تديي الحجاب

The clouds are filled with rain
but they do not bring rain
just like a woman
sometimes
does not bring any current
so, look again

It’s late, and I’m doing the last dishes of the day. I rinse them, swing the door down, pull out the lower rack, and then I sigh. Every time.

Someone designed this machine with a lot of thought. There is a right way to load it.

Once she’d been busy,
unapproachable,
hard to get in touch with,
too cool for the likes of me.

Now she’s here to stay,
not leaving me for a second,

I’m not going to be famous,
but my kids might remember me.

Perhaps I’ll have the luck
to kiss a child and be forgotten,
a lingering creation left upon the earth,
consumed by a mad dash to replace us all.

Tell your kids that love is essential but do not love yourself. Keep a spider inside your shoulder. Let it tuck itself there as it protects a lead ball residing in your stomach.

and, just back from the Farmer’s Market, the last of the year, I’m wearing a summer sweatshirt the amber and aubergine of falling leaves. The cats mill expectantly, for what I know not.

1. Saturdays in their kitchen,
my mother watering her cactus, my father
pulling out mozzarella and bread I have lost joy for.
The drowsy sadness on my father’s face whenever I didn’t want one.
Changing my mind was the gift. The day moved on sweeter.

Evil whispers echo through the space behind my eyes
penetrating to the core, they absorb my last drops of youthful exuberance
“it’s safe here, no need for change”

You taught me how to say and spell my name
On an old wooden dresser at our farm house
You pointed to herbs in the garden, parsley and oregano
We put on old dresses and Dad’s ties

Do your eyes discern my halo? The world at large seems blind.
Affluent obsess on phones, poor scramble to survive.
One group calculates its commerce, one simply stays alive.

Somewhere beyond the order of the sun
I would crouch sullen in the steppe wolf’s lair,
Gather the darkness into bloodlit eyes,
Tune raw sinews to a pitch of rage,
Howl incessant fury to the sky.

In the woods behind her house,
in a season where the world tilts most
from its ball of light,
upon her small part of Earth’s
rounded back —
naked oak branches covered in white:

You’d think 2AM conversations would be nonsensical and funny,
not rational and sober avenues to despair. Round and round
and round we go, down the looped rabbit hole all new methods,
medicines, discoveries have to go to become less… detrimental.

There isn’t such thing as flat emerald and agreeing to a suicide pact with a falsely familiar stranger is not worth the novelty. We are all children of divorce. Olive, teach me the art of being quaint. Show me how to construct the soundproof walls you’ve built for proper use to love as loudly as we do.

I was walking in the hot, still LA heat
That blows nowhere, so your own thoughts begin to circulate
And you go mad
And upon walking on some particularly rocky asphalt,
I lost my footing
And hit the back of my head and heard a
CRAACK

The first strains of the overture
Intrudes on the calm of normalcy.
Several measures of gentle breeze
Slowly crescendo into true wind.
The key and rhythm suddenly change,
Then revert to the original.

Sister Mary Rose (so young she could’ve been your actual sister)
marched you and her other seventy-two second-grade students
(no teacher aides, no volunteer parents, just the good nun)
eleven blocks west toward the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge
to the palatial Hobart Theater

Whatever anyone
tells you know
it is possible
common in fact
to exist
in one place in
another two time
transience one
location contains
many dancing