my brother in the kitchen

my brother making jokes

my brother opening the fridge

my brother talking at me

my brother eight years old

my brother asking for help

my brother needing a coat

my brother holding my hand

my brother in the Ohio snow

my brother getting on the wrong bus

my brother waking up laughing

my brother going to school

my brother talking at me his thoughts

my brother waking up late

my brother asking for food

my brother growing Russian boy

my brother not knowing the right language

my brother trying to make friends in the U.S.

my brother getting on the wrong bus

my brother telling stories to strangers

my brother laughing with me at his jokes

my brother asking me for help

my brother asking me for English words

my brother walking with me in the snow

my brother getting suspended for talking

my brother home after punching a kid

my brother mispronouncing the stories

my brother laughing with me in the morning

my brother reaching for morning cereal

my brother on the apartment balcony

my brother sneaking into the country

my brother not understanding legal documents

my brother seizing on the train to Ohio

my brother before language

my brother before morning cereal

my brother before kindergarten afternoons

my brother before the school teacher gave up

my brother before he got on the wrong bus

my brother before the corrective classes

my brother before he stopped laughing

my brother before the Ohio snow

my brother before the police came

my brother before country lines

my brother before I left him

I got married.
I had kids.
I was who I was
supposed to be

except those times those two times those
hunting trips up through Iowa
to North Dakota where ring-neck pheasants

flushed faster than you could follow their red red patches
with the left-to-right arc of a shotgun

Being who I was supposed to be, a best friend
on a journey with a best friend, the scrick-scratch of two Carhartts
together, matching Catfish Hunter bags unfurled, best friends
with their best secret bestly kept

That was the second time—the first time I went
was my 15^th birthday trip with my uncle, beloved

who on the long drive described to me the man who he expected me
to be and in the must of his canvas tent showed me who I might suppose
to be and those two things though opposite

were also true, were the planting of the stones
now grown ravenous in my bones, the ones too calcified
for chemo to curethose stone seeds,those stone seeds sown

in the belly of shame never to know lightnever to split and shoot
never to know the wind or the jostling of the honeybee’s gold pollen sac
or the crisp chill of a Dakota day

I’ve been made to be a cupbearer,
saint of travels, savior. Spindle, blood lust,
I’ve been made to be heir
to the matrix, vertical, supercharged.
O Dawn, who lusters the sky,
shapes the intervals, crucibles the billowy,
O Plasma Beyond the Window

•

It’s said that I came from dust,
breath across the iris.
From a nematode, bony fish.
That I arrived by plowing the living
under the earth.

•

With upset placemats & silverware.
With disruption, disorder,
disfigurement, disturbance,
displacement, discontinuation.
I’ll begin to get in the way.

•

I’ll live symbiotically.
As an ion, a crow.

•

Senatorial & corrosive.
Sprawling & triggering.
The shape of my body is death.

•

The radioactive hammer
that goes where my mother goes
smashing her subjects to dust.

•

I remember bees buzzing
a mulberry tree, creekwaters
carving the ground.
Something too feral for words.

•

Some say silence is the way.
I say it just disseminates
more motherfuckery.

•

My kind practices
dismemberment with machetes,
guillotines. Wheels, rocks, horses.
My kind refines it with vocabularies.
With portraiture, legislation, jurisprudence.
Art, brothels, commercials, history.

•

My golden ticket means
I’ve been immune to fear.

•

I’ll live
by abdicating the throne,
remodeling the castle.
Let there be no castle.

•

If I could, I’d say our love
is a verb, not a noun.
Not a bridge, but to bridge.

Chinese finger trap world,
quicksand world,
world made by fools making
men and women mad
to stay sane in the world,
plunge into work or other pursuits:
marriage, child-rearing, debauchery to drown
the low humming music,
ambient sadness of the soul:
That the ostrich’s posterior remained
exposed while burying its head.
That the housewife accompanying the kids to the beach
sat inside the umbrella's shade, afraid of the sun.

I look at the sunrise full of blood,
the chanter of aulos penetrating my skin, the far-off echoing
cave, a long time ago. I pull a crayfish from the mineral stream running over
the burial ground of my bloodline, claws between my thumb and forefinger,
I cut it up
& toss into a bucket of copper rings.
My cellmate shifts on his bunk,
humming, I’m up, I’m up.

I can see the roof of my mouth, my hands (thin & drowsy) &, again, I fall into the dream
of crossing the border, from Toronto to Buffalo,
with the dope, the K, the MDMA & doses
all strapped inside the door panels. A gunshot.
My bones on a grill of fire, the cave is singing closer now. In me: white corn & milk,
& those fucking triads who pushed more weight.A .38 caliber dream. The pop & roll
of the cell door.My bare feet swallowed
by the emptiness of concrete.I wake up

lying on rough fabric, & remember they only got the runner at the border,
I’m here on something else.The earth’s shadow, like my blood, goes by many names,
rousing the inmates to cry out,Dream! Dream! Dream!
The cave in me is silent,
like a faithful dog it waits for sleep.
Brothers, sisters, siblings, all of you, these walls girded with barbed wire
have stolen everything.I choose,
endure,
turn and go deeper –
deeper still,
I choose the horizon inside.

Belonging (Clostridium Tetani)


It wasn’t to flood, fire, or treefall
that you lost a home, just the slow salvage
of a slanted second floor, a burst water

main under a newly cured driveway. And yet
you wanted me to see how you saw
something through. So I helped you

crowbar trim off plaster, plaster off stud,
stuff bags of loose insulation. In the sharp
heaps of wood we found faded

wedding photos, baby socks, Sears home
catalogs. I remember liking the thought
that each box we packed and left unmarked

held for a time, our belongings.
Before the hundreds we pulled from beams
too bare to suggest room, I pulled a single nail

out from your foot. Before you asked if I would
ever want a life with you there, you asked,
how bad’s it look? But it was too shallow

for stigmata and much too early
to be history.

Name Day, Dallas, 1972


Tejas is singing yourself que cantaba el rey David
on the warehouse floor today. It’s an uncle’s living room, a cousin’s bed,
until you move up from hemming prom dresses to mending

army uniforms & you trade Tejas for Texas, but by then both mean
your fingers go for the seam of every man they try to feel—that is,
when not picking your father’s clean-shaven memory up off the dirt

onto your lap, gasping Susana, as if your name were lighter
than air & left you Texas meaning so much less valley & tremor,
so fewer declared “missing” the dogs don’t manage to rescue

because Texas was as far as your mother’s eye would ever see,
& now Texas is looking over your shoulder because Texas wants you to know
it means it—like the bullet your father’s lungs confessed, like the two

cigarettes still lit by his bootheel, or the next town over
his best friend moved to because Texas, then, was eternal—Despierta, mi bien,
despierta, you keep rhythm by the pedal under your foot & finish sewing

wounds hatched on the other side of the world.

Cowered under playground
equipment. That I do. Cowered
under play. Ground. Yes
coward and play. Performance
of cow and gourd. Celebration
underground. Cowered American.
Masculine as nothing under
play. I do. I do
not need to say father was American
man. But did.

//

Man, “the negative being who is only to the extent that he suppresses Being,” is identical to time, stuttered from Debord who sutured, again, from Hegel. I can’t utter Hegel, his German whetted to untouchable points, but can grow more dependent on glitter and diversion to fill the void where all human is gutted.

//

But your growing ahead of
yourself. Man,
your father, negates himself by
suppression, occasional
slip, spill. You know
what I mean. Do I? Two
hands smother face
to top sheet, unsexual though rank,
rancid without breath, oracle
giddy with Doppler. Some
spectacle. And hear, finally,
you arrive at Ferry Trail, where
you started in, perhaps, 1998.

Father yelled. So what? Every father yellows. Soda on carpet. Dog chews pen. Will not adopt dog as adult. Will not. Father identical to time. Farther identify with dog. Debord knew. Hegel his father’s faster. He drank. Debord, I mean. I mean why should you care? Why should I?

//

Had rat as friend as adult. Aceyalone, Annette, Francis, Jonas, Crowley. Gave Aceyalone and Crowley a way. Annette died. Jonas died. Francis died in dog’s mouth. Was adult, was raining, was. Is that why you right about water? Not more than two years.

//

Man is time. Adult is
rat. I am []. Will not speak
further on this matter. Fur, her,
matte. Cat vomited while
writing. Cat is her. Here. Man
is time. Adult is. I watched,
fur matted in spectacular
fashion, hers or mine?

//

Bright with syllogism. I all am. How it is when you’re young and ready to scatter. Months passed. I was in Michigan then or by then. The money rolled. Mother let me buy the toy. Shell in pocket, pick up pebble, place inside. I put a worm in once.

Brutalist Poem #71

Imprecise lite of
element. Dirty
outside working under
nails, a hallway
unsupervised. Smirk off
cheap acrylic pain
drying. A classy room. Accumulated
small movements. After
noon’s equipment.

I run my tongue over my teeth, linger over each tooth
the tang of my bleeding gums stains my teeth scarlet.

the taste of my blood gumming between my teeth sings
of the parts of my body I have eaten today.

I have eaten parts of my body day after day
a bit of finger yesterday, a bite of liver the night before.

I ate half my ring finger, put the rest with the liver leftovers.
my fridge is full of heart, meat, and marrow soup.

I like to drink the meaty marrow soup fresh, it warms my frigid heart
or what is left of it anyway- I’ve picked apart my aortas so much

that only a few pinched at chunks of aorta are left floating
above my ribboned left lung, fluttering each time I breathe.

I can barely breathe so I ribbon at my fingertips, bite after bite
until each tooth lingers bloody on my tongue, my teeth.

The spiders living in my hair
know how to scatter, infecting

my life’s furthest corners.
Dead eggs have been put to rest

in fresh laundry, carpet threads,
car seats. All day I turn trash

cans into coffins—temporary. No
matter how many effigies I build, life

keeps coming back. I’m terrified
of inevitability strung in the back

of my throat, considering the web’s origins,
knowing the soft underbelly. The spiders

are the most consistent part of living,
and I grieve when they vanish.

All night I lie
awake, swatting empty skin.

I wake to the memory of a sugar cube
swimming in it, the bitter edge
taken off. For polio? Or was that
the four-pronged prick? Then the scar

I carried for years, a scrape, a small raw.
I took them all and more, military
kid, ready to board the next plane
with my father in his crisp, substantial

blue, Air Force uniform, not pilot,
oh that sharp loss, but stout black shoes
shined, and multi-colored bars attached
to the stiff breast like a DNA sequence.

Protection I could count on. Maybe not
an even temper or every hug I wanted, but
the basics, freedom from disease
and grievous bodily harm, space enough

to read a book, write a line, live.
I learned to relax my arm so that the needle
didn’t pinch but went in smooth and clean.
And I was well. Those are the gifts I

uncover. Not wealth or dazzle or what
I’d call cultural richness. It was all pretty
basic and bare. But I was essentially safe
and warm, protected in needful ways.

Sound. That gift, like buried cable
taking power to the house. Now as I wait
my turn, in the Covid vaccination line,
I conjure up that world.

I’ve waited so long to be the one with the wide-eyed
toddler at the outdoor concert, under trees older than
anyone I’ve known. And yet— here I am, sizing up exits

before the music even starts: which ways we could run,
which doors of what buildings might still be open. And
the white college boy standing just outside the crowd,

blue duffle at his feet…The string quartet is playing Bach,
and I’m looking at the living on blankets and lawn chairs,
thinking of 400 elsewhere who won’t make it to midnight

because of variants often called inconvenience these days.
The piece swells so that even most kids zigzagging through
friends stand still to absorb it. And then, of course, all those

decades my body tried to be a lighthouse to pain sit down
beside me, even as the toddler brings me a cicada shell, then
lies on the brick path staring into canopy, as still as I’ll see her

all week. That pain couldn’t kill me, but I was told it wasn’t
real enough, even carried that lie until it almost did. Perfect
cadence, perfect excerpt of an evening when my daughter runs to

me, shoeless and cackling, and I know my body for sure can get us
home, tell me when we’ll change for one another, really change.
Or what it will take to believe the wound, the first notes, the root.

This morning, the sky was as purple as a giraffe’s tongue,
and it licked me before hardening into sapphire.
What is it about dawn’s kiss that urges Go,
go do something before it all turns blue?

My muse is asleep by late afternoon like the river
otters at the zoo. I’m not sure what color
their tongues are, but I knew an old woman
who, before she died, told me one of her greatest joys

was to let a child feed the otters on their birthday−
the child’s, not the otter’s, of course, for who knows
when a rescued weasel was born or how
they’d like to celebrate. Imagine that!

Imagine being seven or eight and on a field trip
and being handed a cold bucket, the only child
handed a bucket of shellfish to throw and send
the whiskery-slicks into full-bellied doze.

Imagine waking in mid-afternoon blaze, mussel-
drunk, empty black husks surrounding you.
Now imagine yourself a gorgeous, necky ungulate
licking the face of a salty boy. Imagine

yourself the boy. Go on, feel that
lilac snake swab your cheek, that shell in your hand.
If the sky can be a giraffe’s tongue, then you can be
a boy again.

Could have been worse. Could have been
crows pecking our eyes out or the earth
breaking open like fresh bread. Could have
passed in my sleep before I could say good
bye. Could use a cigarette, she says, fingers
drumming on her thigh as we sit in the car
with the windows rolled down. I never hurt
nobody but myself, she whispers, and I know,
I know. The way she turns her head towards
the moon that will soon blot us out. The way
she opens her mouth as if it all starts and ends
in the wound. Praise the blues that tumble
out of her deepest self, praise these bruises
whose hands enclose around my heart like
a secret, praise the refusal to die because
the song isn’t over yet. The dark looms
as if the stage is set. We take a deep breath.
As if an afterthought, she reaches for
the gardenia in her hair. As if by touching
it will bloom still, even without her there.

Calm emanated from the old swami I met.
His B.O. did, too.

The Fourth Noble Truth: a misnomer, a cheap trick.
It’s an Eight-Fold Path!

Cute thought bubbles up, a floppy water balloon,
chuck it at your head.

I lost all my friends; my life ended suddenly.
I should celebrate!

Dying’s not so bad, though it can be a long slog—
living’s often worse.

A hologram Christ I bought in Jerusalem—
eyes open, eyes shut.

God’s a bad movie; at the end of the drama,
it was just a dream.

My widowed father, I saw him cry only once,
watching Patch Adams.

Star child’s fetal curl; planet’s cooing and burbling,
puking and shitting.

The Dome of the Rock, royal blue and gleaming gold.
Pigeons run inside.

Sunny balcony. Bee falls in my orange juice,
flails, swims in circles.

I crush half its legs—the centipede jolts to life,
dancing, speaking tongues.

I lord over bugs. I trap a fly in a jar
of crushed tomatoes.

Lashes camouflage, at the brim of an eyelid,
a perched mosquito.

Unseen teen sniper high in the checkpoint tower.
A nerve-racking walk.

Two homeless brothers, their mother under rubble
behind where we talk.

As a kid at night, pretending to die alone,
playing war in bed.

Ramzi or Nadeem, names I wanted then.
More Arab than mine.

Coked up Parisian in the David Lynch nightclub
calls me sand_____.

Short hike from my house to Mahmoud Darwish’s grave,
a pack of wild dogs.

Throwing pillows high over the Apartheid Wall,
not all go over.

Some poems, don’t remember writing them.
Some old lovers, too.

I pocket a rock, my red rock from my red soil.
I may not return.

Shank

Buried on
the prison
yard six
paces east
of first base
a toothbrush
whittled to a point
more fang
than blade
glints like
a gumball trinket
its bristled hilt tickler
of the sucker
the debtor
who’s undug
this bone.
Be wolf
or be gone.
The fake owl
atop the guard
tower rattles
in a breeze.

This Call Is from an Inmate at a Federal Prison

“Dad, what do I do
when a friend
calls you a loser?”
My son waits
until near the end
of our call, his voice
snagging on vowels
and hollow like he’s holding
a log under his chin.
When I was last
around for bedtimes
he’d ask me each night
to guess the hand
in which he held
a kiss for me (a game
I never lost), his fist
no bigger than nectarines.
His limbs since
have outgrown the grace
that’s let him, these fatherless
years, live with uncertainty,
and the cords that keep
him steady now stretch towards
the tensions of the world.
I do not know how tall he is.
I do not know his weight, his
shoe size or if he takes
stairs two at a time.
I do not know how he moves
through crowds, if his body
barely gives. “However
you responded, Baby, I’m sure
it was best.” I’ve lost
the right to send my boy
into battle. I do not know
what he’ll do with the fierce
river he must feel within.
In a different version
of our lives I tell him
to lower his shoulder and surge
like a dam break, aiming
for the divot just below his friend’s
ribs. “Listen for the bongo
thump, clasping your arms
around his waist, your eyes
focused, always, past him
on a point in the distance
where all things meet.”

A man wipes a woman’s mouth,
thumb like a white boulder.

Don't say you're sorry,
if you don't mean it.

100 million years ago
all this land used to be water.

It went boulder to ocean to fertile land. Truthfully,
there’s no one here but me,

there’s only my mouth saying
boulder, ocean, fertile land.

I ululate hard to soft to something new.
Truthfully, he’s only asking me to say sorry,

but what is a liar? I'll ask more clearly:
what is an apologizer?

Here, dear: I'm sorry boulder,
I’m sorry ocean, I’m sorry fertile land.

Water shifts seamlessly around objects,
sinks a boulder effortlessly, feeds the land.

Does that mean water has the last word?
I’ve seen it sink my own mouth.

Now, I speak eschatologically.
What is an eon? I’ll wait.

A talisman for the end times,
I let these words seep:

boulder, ocean, fertile land,
truthfully, I’m sorry, I say, this time.