Poetry

To write poetry is to keep watch

over your dwelling in a dark forest:

It isn’t often that some creature

catches your eye — most nights pass

without as much as a rustling in the trees.

But when it does, it grabs you, wrestles

you to the ground, and demands something of you.

Sometimes a few pennies, sometimes a warm meal,

and sometimes, it seems, your very life.

Sometimes it is the angel, holding you

by the hip, tenderly but with a strong grip,

and it is your great privilege to hold it tightly

and whisper sharply between your teeth,

I will not let go until you bless me.

And only when this scrappy bandit

of a creature is speaking the words over you

as you hold a knife to its throat

do you realize, as the morning sun

is finding its way through the trees, that you are staring yourself in the face.

 Snowfall’s white descent is piling up, uninterrupted,

in layers of soft milk-chalk, as if this is its burdensome

intent, to lay rule over a silenced city.

Snowflake: not the modern fragile sense, but as perfect

crystallization, the sum of every shade of color,

each one as wholly unique.

Children on the PS 118 playground know this,

know that snow is an invitation, a communal call

that bestows no rules.

A snowman gets built, rolled through dirt and debris,

patted down with wet and snot-smeared mittens.

His dirty, rock-coal eyes wink to their delight;

a smile of stones follows. A child pulls a button

from her thrift-store coat, offering what she can

to make things whole. 

there are some places that invite you to pour

yourself into them all sharp rock

and sand and cactus needles glittered

with drops of nectar where horses

are lean and wild and roam the way

they’re meant to whinnying blends

with wind and there’s a toughness

to everything the air tastes like

determination behind the hard

is sweetness the soft flesh of fruit

under a rind mica shining

in the black scales the lizard

sheds after basking at noon

the heat is a second-skin the sweat

turns to clay smeared by fingers

shaped by calluses the desert remembers

that you are 60% water and it will

suck every last drop

dry.

She jogs the empty corner of the shopping center lot,

where barberries catch the dead leaves.

The wind fills her Buzz Lightyear coat,

thrashing and dingy at the elbow.

The bus hulks against the wind.

She stops and eyebrows my truck

when I wave her across. She grins like the boy

in the shopping cart I saw an hour ago,

in his own Buzz shirt, grin full of stars  

at the galaxy he was discovering,

the world slow as understanding. The woman in the lot

already knows what it means to miss

the bus, to be late, to dare to run in front of a car

when you cannot see the driver, your hair a tangle

in a wind that, outside of any car, only you can feel.

The three-finger wave I give is barely visible

above the steering wheel, a hand

of threat and grace, which she won’t know

without that first step. She jogs the crosswalk, the bus

heaves and hisses, its windows reflecting her arms

and shoulders, her face watching the ground,

where the wind shoves leaves in every direction.

My mom reconstructed our lives from junk.
Unbleached cardboard Orisha beaded masks,
Glass-shard mosaics of proud Mary’s face,
A twisted crown of bottle caps and barbed wire,
Found relics, littered our tar-paper house,
Each objet d’art, a fetish, meant to stave
The shame of being poor. We ate, each night,
On painted plates of resurrecting suns.
She formed so much what others tossed away.
Now I scrounge through virtu and bric-a-brac,
The scattered trifles of remembrances,
To find her, traceless, gone. My soul sets bare.
Unfit to curate memory, I house
No rags, no cracked cups, no heart, fit for pawn.

The re-racked tops, bottoms, frocks beggared us.
Remember, bodies, once, possessed this cloth,
My mom reminisced. When we took the bus
Past bodegas, the hot-press mill, the swath
of storefront churches, tarpapered shotguns,
A land of corrupting rust, engorged moth,
To purchase, for the next fall, clothes the nuns
Found fitting, we, too, made out like a thief
At night. She dressed me like the rich man’s sons,
And gave herself, yet attained no relief,
Cried out, “Come, Jesus!,” where, then, was the Lord?
Without memory, one can have no grief.
Now, she is dead. My loss, my pain, I hoard
Indulgence even beggars can afford.