Yes, yes, yes—
the sandbags I have stacked,
and the sheets of plywood
nailed overlapping my storefront heart.

I have made ready
for your grey eyes to turn me
away once more. The cheerful experts

track your cruel silence.
I press to my ear a radio
jammed to the station
devoted to the crisis you bring:

the ways you will ruin me
if you shift even a few degrees.
Yes, I tune my guitar

to the chimes they play on the hour.
How I have rehearsed the way
I will take the dark O
of your no and drift its innertube
to the house of your family,

allow the swollen flood of circumstance
to lift me to your window.

I am poured out like water,
spilled onto the floor, soaked into wood.

A terrible loneliness forces me
to love a man who says I don’t love you,
too many times.

Removed from me: all things visible,
I will not forget the one who came before.

O Lord,
I shall no longer look
for you in another man’s bed.

I’m sure, I am poured out like water,
slipped backward into the oceans.

I who am in love
have forgotten how to sleep alone.
In this bondage I am broken
and hungry.

How did my body liquefy
into a pool of bones?

Listen,
I am poured out like water,
do you hear me,

I hide
not, fear
not, want.

What shall I sacrifice
for healing and how do I
find you—
How many times do I have to be alone
before love
like yours.

There was no one here to tell me I was wrong.

In taxidermy, you skin the animal first
like removing the skin of a chicken.

I’m casting my own form here,
but I am an amateur. It’s pretty obvious.

& you have cast me queerly, firm tendrils falling away. . .

The glass eyes don’t come until later if at all.

I am a pigeon pea.
I am a cowpea.
I am a split pea.

My coils are concentrated.
Crossed and desiccated.
A little tiny puzzle of wild guesses. Sprouting. Again.

Suddenly an invisible leaf or branch!
Paper-thin confusion.
A cabbage butterfly.
The layers are hardly limpid here.

It’s the slipping away of things.
You are a teeny leaf trembling on my chest.

I am trying to find a form for you without all the internal organs and blood.
A unicorn, a jackalope, a mermaid, a griffin the rogue of it all, please.

I am a legume.
I am a hunter.
You are in a museum.
Your eyes are glass now maybe plastic and still see almost everything.

I’m hiding inside my vestibule of hearts today—
among the lanceflower and sour purslane.

I am a little millipede with antennas like an old school radio

the weeds are wracked and riddled,
all wrapped around me.

I’m taking wild guesses about eternity
but there’s no reception
through all this
static:
all the racket blocked
by branches of the wishkisscolor tree
painted out back near the tired cathedral.

I am trying to forget you. Again.
I’m shouting!
I am eating flowers!
Suddenly!
Now.

A silhouette of a past is hanging from a limb of the sorry tree over there—
my vestibule is directly under this jacaranda.
When I roll into a ball like a pillbug,
the forest-angel over my body could live on artichokes and sunshine forever. . .

But all these tiny legs have forgotten how to unremember,
there’s nothing you can tell me about my mouth anymore.

It’s the green sunk into green next to my pulmonary artery—
my world is noise and you still want in like music.

It is, again, unsafe.
At least, it is unclear.

animals, their dark forms when they crouch at the margins of the freeway

The city is charred, as
from a blast. Or the eyes are.
The mind is crumbling into
its own foundations. Or
the homes are. Waiting, even,
is a taut state, the drone
of current through a wire.

silent, tense, they search for a space in which to cross

And negotiations unravel.
Language, a dried gauze, fails
to keep this clean.
Exposes to the air the burnt
stump still raw. Flesh painful
just to look at. The burn wound.
Which refuses to scab over.
Endures like a birthmark.

how we must blur and roar past them

Any impulse must originate in
and move outwards from
this margin of ruin. Quickly.
With little or no allowance

made for the margin of error.
A feint, say, or a blind lunge.

they know we will annihilate them if their calculations contain the slightest imprecision

At this time, in this state,
to stand off and witness
may be better

they know we will not slow down, will not stop until we are well past them

or may not
be viable.

within one of them, under the steaming fur, the main nerve signals NOW and it lunges into

Now is the winter of our inevitable results, unavoidably determined by prior conditions.

Essential? Absolutely. Logically. Required.

Convention, on the other hand, dictates plenty of things that are none of its business. Poke convention in the eye with a sharp stick.

Effects are not always what they seem. Beware faulty reverse engineering. It only seems logical.

S seh seh seh incessant abscess accede exceed concede proceed recede secede ancestor. S.

So what, that’s my motto. So fucking what.

Absolutely essential, needed,

Required—what small, scratchy volume contains the overlap of necessity and love? Will you tell me?

Yes I said yes I will Yes.

Consider housekeeping, consider the rain. Consider
the fly dancing on the window. It herky-jerks its
relentless heartbreak of trying to get out.

A fall warbler appears on the seedy maple stuffing
itself for its long flight, feathers weathery dull in

post-connubial anonymity, hard to identify.
Consider the dirty window. You lift it to see more
clearly. The fly stumbles up with it, then out.

The warbler is gone but you can see the rain, its
needled finery gently wetting the patient, nodding
trees. They gossip in whispers among themselves.

Consider the lifetimes spinning out before you, each
small choice weights in one direction or another:

1) You stare out the window with notebook and
pen, channeling the array of tiny beauties before you.

2) You rummage for bucket, sponge and squeegee,
vinegar? ammonia? the window needs cleaning. You
clean it and the rest of them, too, for you are responsible
and efficient. You take a nap.

3) You stare out the window, on the limb of your
thought of how dirty the window is, it really should
be washed. This grey tatter grows between you
and the real rain. The notebook dies on the table.

Consider. Choose a door. Open it. Think
of what is the most important house to keep.

Everything returns to a source:
gladness to the tree, fruit
to the cradle, flesh from the bone.

Water lashes the roofs in the town,
but also the pink and yellow roses
that appear as if out of nowhere

in a corner of the garden,
where once there was only
a hard rectangle of dirt. But

ask yourself how you truly feel,
what the bones in your ribcage
might be singing

in the silence of night
to each other, as they hold
the stricken heart in place.

Ever since the latest spot opened nearby, the limos leaked models onto the sidewalk, the guys in ties lined up the block, the girls in their hypodermic stilettos shouted redundancies, “I’m so drunk!” The patrons humped in front of my girlfriend’s building, blocking entry and the bar’s outdoor area was canopied in a din so relentless it formed a hardened shell, interrupting our intimacy and our arguments.

One night, kites flying high, we decided to penetrate the shell and leave our mark with feminine products. We placed our soiled tampons and panty liners into a plastic bag, added the rubberized contents of several never-used safer sex kits, then shook the bag to let the immaculate dental dams and pristine finger condoms soak in our womanliness, before tying the bag by its handles, creating a menstrual piñata.

If we hurled that thing over the fence, we speculated, those yuppies won’t know what hit them. We celebrated our genius with high-fives and scotch and tequila. We got out the bong, danced around to Nirvana and argued briefly about the amount of toilet paper I used when I stayed over. My kite crashed and I passed out, body half on the futon, half off. The girlfriend lasted long enough to dump a glass of cheap vodka out her window onto a couple cozying up to the stoop.

The next morning we disposed of the bloody mess in the garbage like civilized people on our way to brunch.

There were nights
when the moon
rolled down my nose,
paused at my lip
and slipped
down Arévalo street.

The children’s feet
confused it with a ball.
As they screamed “goal,”
it flew back among
the stars.

There were nights
when the moon
was melted with milk,
cinnamon and corn
in the big pots
at Floresta corner.

I drank it in a paper cup
with an empanada
covered with stars
and powdered sugar.

There were nights
when the moon
was everywhere.

***

CALLELUNA

Habían noches
cuando la luna
se resbalaba por mi naríz,
pausaba sobre mi labio
y se deslizaba
por Calle Arévalo.

Los pies de los niños
la confundían con una pelota
y volaba hacia las estrellas
mientras gritaban “gol”.

Habían noches
cuando la luna
se fundía con canela,
mote y leche hervida
en las ollas de la Floresta.

La bebíamos
en copas de papel
con empanadas,
cubiertas de estrellas
y azúcar en polvo.

Habían noches
cuando la luna estaba
en todo.