The brief second of pause before
the voice comes through:
I’ve floated through a canyon
boasting such lip-splitting
space travel, but the cup of its
hands were not nearly as vast.
In such feral dimensions, our hips
talk uninhibited stories but
given the lack of moonlight
you finally give me teeth.
Unbeknownst to the grass, a lion.
Hand-shaped mud is bricks, a patience
too, to build what won’t be seen;
no teeth for that, no dahlia song but
a brass bowl ringing soundshiver
around the ears, a ripple of the palm
waters. Gun shy of the rope bridge,
trembling at which clay jar did you sip
from the night? The matchbook talking
sulfur through a finger-greased pane,
speaks the greatest perhaps outlined in
broken crayon; I’ll slow dance with
that lick of salt if you’ll hold my chin
between soft hands. A terrible beauty
—a terror, to split open again, a rill as
rivulet, as glacier-carved and capsizing,
in what name did the years believe
they were chiseled? Such honey is not
hard-won though fought softly, by one-
hundred-thousand words suspended
in the color jab of waxwing belly.
In other words: here I stand
open-mouthed in the rain.

One Night Stands
For Jack Spicer

Wager chemical kick, matter-
matter. May well burrow a
memory bank, but clutch neg-
ative space when you leave.

Remember How Much Searching

we used to do for a fix—like scientists,
all of us, rabbit ears in hand adjusting so
little it wasn’t adjusting at all—eyes on
the tube while hands did entirely else.

Same with radio dials, turning-tuning
straining the ear for clarity or sense. Now,
after Tyrone goes by way pancreatic
cancer, I go to the dial where silence ain't
salient as speech, repeating “He there? He

there?” Some elder calls back “not yet,
baby, try again afterwhile.” Wanda
Coleman shouts, “tell that girl stop playin
on my station!” so I lower my voice, say
“don’t nobody want your raggedy-ass
station no way!” But louder “Well—is he
there?” to right dead air.

People be hankty. But it’s so many poets
passed, I expect it’s a nerve to keep track.
I got a small list who I’m wanting—
Tyrone, Kamilah Aisha, more, that I knew
and could say something to.

after Bhanu Kapil

beauty of west texas
sunsets, like creamsicles reaching their pinnacle, their final
evolution. beauty of every
dissertation title my friends invented every unfabulous
last week of a term. unbeauty of grading finals
while over-yet-still-under-caffeinated & clacking out
our own. beauty of queer texas
tech students forming a queer reading group.
beauty of a dry heat & everyone remarking but at least
it’s a dry heat. beautiful
wind through trees whose beautiful names it took a year
to learn. bur oak, western soapberry, desert willow. hello,
beauties. undeniable beauty of
“of zombies & zest:
a queer poetics of the walking dead’s steven yeun.” undead
beauty of lubbock alleyways & their raccoons. beauty of those dauntless
dumpster divers. beauty of not
caring if the soul exists, so long as the heat of his inner thighs
does. beauty of caring
so much i handwrite a half-dozen cavafy poems i love,
while ignoring two paper deadlines. beauty
of him, & of he who licks
the sweat from my inner thigh. beauty of my ugly
handwriting. beauty of mitski, tweeting about caring
so much, saying, fuck effortlessness. fuck that. try
really hard and let everyone
see. beauty of writing poems
that former poetry teachers would not approve of—for example,
this one, which surely would anger the teacher
who said, you overuse the word “beautiful”
& the teacher who said, never use the word “soul.”
beautiful beauty of the dry
soul of midday lubbock
beautifully, lubbockly unlocking every window.
beautiful anger
of a queer organizer, in the comment section of a poem
online, one of my lubbock poems. the organizer’s beautiful
critique of my complaint
over how small lubbock pride was. her you don’t know
how underfunded, understaffed we are. the beautiful back & forth
we were. beautiful,
to learn about her work, for her to learn about
my loneliness. beauty of our lonelinesses
talking. west texas beauty that some days hurt me into seeing
how much i missed my seasons,
my trees.
but beauty, the oddly
large dollhouse exhibit inside the massive windmill
museum. the beautiful fact that it is home
to more than 160 windmills. the beautiful, powerful wind
that made my beautiful, powerful bangs so unhappy.
exhausting beauty of trying to live
queer & asian, among so few of either, & were there ever
any of both?
yes, there was
one, a poet, who visited for a day. one gorgeously beautiful day,
beautiful regie cabico
on a texas tech stage, performing his poems. regie,
who had been invited by matthew, beautiful
lead organizer of the queer reading group, who another beautiful day,
invited me to a gathering around
my book. beauty of the invitation, beautifully crowded
discussion table. the red & black, unmistakably ttu conference room
queered by beautiful readers,
writers, beautified by queer makers
of t-shirts with lines from my poems, other poems, many.
queer beauty, glory of the group’s questions,
our conversation—enthusiasms fabulousing the room.
& my handsomely beautiful pleasure-honor to say
how queer, isn’t it, our living
here. how queer, west texas, thanks to us. how unfinal, our
unfurlings across the plains, our lines of pain, stanzas of standing
up. & then, on the t-shirt table, one beautiful,
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
shirt, its pinkly
powerful shine—& the students saying, go on!
all yours! & i
sleep in it, now, back among the bursts of green, the long
new england grays i know so well. i fall
beautifully asleep in this shirt, nights when i miss their words,
that wind.

She spits lipstick at the balding physicists.
They are sipping Cava, scalps
Red with sweat.
She is the meaning of spectacle,
Swaddled in stretch polyester, no
Castanets, her knuckles chatter
Skeletally against themselves.
The physicists are wooden in their chairs.
She is motion as a function of time. Round
And round her heels clack clack, a teardrop
Clip-on clatters into the moderator’s lap.
He considers its parabolic arc. A single tear
Succumbs to the fact of gravity,
Rivers down his cheek.
She is illustrating angular velocity:
Round and round clack clack. They scuttle
Tiny pencils from behind their ears.

It goes all quiet.

Then all of a sudden who comes through
The door but the desert wind flexing
Taut brown biceps. Something old
Fins through the groundwater.
She adjusts her bifocals.
Her midriff tremors, translucent: schools
Of fish swimming in automatic circles.
She opens her throat and vomits out the sea.
It swallows the physicists.
Their mild button-downs float like flags
Of surrender among the kelp and crabshell,
Wine-flutes smiling in the new sunlight.
Round and round clack clack, the churning
Water corrugates her skin. Her eyes
Grow skin. Now look! She is dancing,
barnacles crowd into her crow’s feet:
a million blinking mouths.

Before she left, she kissed me
on the mouth. If you move

back to the States, you'll have no trouble
dating somone. She had pushed

me off her when she was through.
Sometimes you do things to prove

you're worth something to someone.
The next night, I sighed whiskey

breath into my pillow. In Icelandic,
add the softest letter to the word

for poem and you make the word
for sound.

Your dad only drowns females
in a bucket. The others are kept,
unfixed and feral, to hunt rats.

He descends the porch steps,
squirming sack in his fist, and
you look up from playing with

your brothers—through the pink
halo of ribbons your mother tied
earlier—into his vast, hard face.

Mom still lives.
The bracelet I should give her—

a coral snake eating its own tail.
I still take her semi-monthly calls,

though I probably shouldn’t.
I imagine you, Dad, nose against glass,

breath steaming up to obscure
your face. When you knocked in my dream

I refused to answer.
The photograph of your wedding:

Mom, wide-eyed and startled;
you, drunk and satisfied.

Given the date, I know I was there too,
sipping champagne in utero.

I keep our calls safe,
a fractured shorthand in which we talk

about the humidity, my kids, the lawn.
She asks when I’m coming to see her,

even though she knows
the answer—I won’t be going home

until I’m tucking her into the ground
right next to you.

Dead deer line the shoulders.
Struck and alone with their soft
and regal features. I count seven
between Pennsylvania and Virginia.

It’s my own disappearance
I worry about. The dark, the broken
axel, the shredded tire, the spin,
the need to rely on strangers.
I’m never close enough
to someone who loves me,
when I’m out on my road trips.

Brown and trying to get to the next place.
Feared dead in the middle of progress.

You said you wanted to marry me.

Once, on the couch where we first kissed.
And again, in our twelfth story room,

the sickle moon an apparition
between hotel curtains.

*

Back home, a girl walked through
the railroad tracks that ran

in tangled paths.
The town drowned out

by music, she couldn’t hear, couldn’t see

the speeding death machine
headed in her direction.

At the crossing
gate, neighbors left candles and flowers,

prayed each day for a daughter,
the chance to rewind

to that ultimate track.

*

Woosh of rush hour
slinking past, I couldn’t hear

you leave.

Perched on the pavement, I
find a chipping sparrow, thumb-sized

with tiger wings and a rusty crown. Precious
and not asking a thing of me, I approach

the bird now, still, bloodless
but breathless.

And I want to tilt my ear to it.

I’m sorry we lost touch and couldn’t marry each other as we promised at twelve! I have doubled in age and killed some monsters of the sea. Knowing my country, though, it has been a matter of what atrocity replaces them. In here, you don’t grow up from a disaster; you grow up under the roof of its shadow, wallpapering the wounds into a shallow grave. I’m writing a book about the Tsunami and struggling to elegize the apocalypse, while straddling my haunted existence. Survival is a nightmare in auto-replay mode. A part of me misses you. A part of me doesn’t know what I am missing. A part of me isn’t mine.

And the night heron shifts weight from one leg to another

My tax dollars support genocide
And the flagrant fish lay still near the surface of the canal

My tax dollars support genocide
And my wife lays her warm thigh on mine

My tax dollars support genocide
And my beautiful niece walks slow under the jhapta

My tax dollars support genocide
And the trees dress in glossy leaves and block the river from view

My tax dollars support genocide
and the susuk swims sideways in muddy water

My tax dollars support genocide
And my grandmother declines, open eyed in her hospital bed

My tax dollars support genocide
And the cardinal flashes red

then abandons the shaking branch

tough world this world
tough as farmers and tractors
with treacherous parts that turn
because it takes power in what
you hook up to a bush hog to
set the blades to turning
one for one with energy
transmitted via this semi-
phallic part that takes your
hands to hitch up to man-
ipulate until a spring-loaded
pin clicks into a place I often
thought I loved my mother
more than my father
thought love tougher
than a world I might work
out in if working might
click me into that place
where metal meets metal
in making me think love
might be farmed like a worry
of one or another my father
a fine but tough teacher
tougher than this tough
world is graspable by design
dangerous if you forget danger
powers the connection

Both English and Rohingya language versions by Rohingya poet Ahtaram Shine

O gardening, you are my uniqueness,
an identity of the Rohingya's khet*
which always reminds of greenery.
Even if I am dwelling on the hillside,
I won't scrape you from my practice.
I pledge you to preserve from descending
like a skin spilt from the body.

If I could sow a seed,
I can imagine a tree
which may have a surface of shade.

As a gardener,
my tool is compost soil,
my favor is moist loam,
but my weapon is cow dung.
I can bullet it up if I have the sunlight.

Each soul is bliss
in praising the golden soil of Arakan.
Even a teilá-zobin*
could bear zal moris*
with the efficacy of natural fertilizer
only by quenching their thirst with water!


*khet means farm; teilá-zobin is an area of high or hilly land; zal moris is chili pepper, a staple of Rohingya garden and foodways.

Oo kheti, tui mor kabiliyot,
Ekkán Rohingyar khet boli oiye oo sinno
Ziyaáne hamica monout goraide fosón lagede heindella aal khet hola.
añái zodi murar hañsat thagi leyo,
Añài nize baze kheti góraré sóuri noy felaiyum
Mui tolloi waada goromor toré hifazat gori gorom boli hoiye, forai zaáttu
Zendilla gaar sam ekkán gaarti alok oití noyde

Osse zodi añái eggwa daana lagai,
añái acá gori fari eggwa gazsollá
Zibattu ekkán saabar sáiyah taibo.

Ekkán kheti lagoyá isaafé,
añái samiya nah oilow de fáñc-soú meçí,
añái foson oilow de beza norom meçí,
Kintu añái hathiyaar oilow de guror gúu.
Heinloi goli mari fari ossa zoudi añái baylor górom fai.

Forthi ekjon manush kúci
Arakan deyshor sunar meçi okkollor tarif goraát.
Hatta'ke ekkán teilá zobin ót,
Daurai fare zal moris
Kudorotir fáñcor bolloi yaro
Shudé tarar fanir thiraj mari mari!

My mother says she loves me, but
I’ve ruined myself. Her proof lies
In the back of an old, white minivan—
Petrichor rising in front of the transitioning
Light of a Saturday night
Drive-in movie. I only hear
From her around the holidays. In the fall,
While flowers melt off their petals, she knows
It's time to think of me again. She’s like a bird
Migrating for winter.
The opposite must be true, too.
In the thighs of spring, while I shed
Off snowflakes, where does her mind go?
Yearly, my skin sloughs. In passing,
Would she recognize me?
I hope I’m like a caterpillar in a cocoon,
preparing for our next summer movie.
Soon, I’ll emerge & I’ll be waiting
In front of the screen.
I’ll buy her popcorn & catch her up,
Say: see, it’s not complicated.
The birds will be back.
I have ruined myself
In beautiful ways.

Please don't stand so close to the poem
We are trying to write tonight
When you are photographing it
About an occupation, an evacuation of
It’s really not necessary to approach
Babies who cannot evacuate
At a perpendicular angle to the line
Themselves yet. And there is a gathering
Which is not three-dimensional, the line
We have decided not to attend
Which, in fact, pertains to a painting
In light of its mingle and eventhood
Of—the artwork label tells us—a stoplight
And police and abstract facial geometry.

chirr
say the crickets

coyotes cackle
beyond the brush-line

or is it inebriated college students

a woman crying out
repeatedly

help

in the fog of war
down below

the rockets red glare

through the virginal tulle
that veils the valley

with the starry halo
secreted
in mothballs

yellow daubs
like eyes
disclose a mansion on the hill

while dark geometries
of acanthine leaves
swallow what’s left of heavenly light

our neighbor has long since stopped
hitting little dimpled balls
in his yard

the hollow whops still echo
like a heartbeat

but as soon as I solve one face
the other goes off the rails

a meteor flares
above the blueblack ridge

it is now
your turn

Before dipping the kittens in the sink
I drew a soapy finger around their throats
to stop the fleas running up their necks.
The variable-message sign has read
you are not alone since last November
but today reminds us to take an alternative route.
Milling and paving tomorrow. The river emits
its own light. When the limb came off the maple it was impossible
to countenance that it had simply happened.
No wind, no lightning, no ice. In full leaf it was on the tree
and then it wasn’t. God, it is awful to be saved
sometimes.

after Thriller, dir. B. Nowicki, 1972

We met like any other people meet. Me on all fours, spitting colorful
feathers out of my mouth. Plumage you could call it. You, on your
hind legs, emerald and hissing. Me in a plane, smiling through gold
teeth. You in a swamp with a canon. Me trying to dance getting my
head stuck in high places; you actually dancing and walking away. We
keep ourselves all over the house. You’re in a bowl and I’m in the
piano doing my best impression of string and hammers hoping no
one gets wise. I eat a hand grenade and get the pin stuck in my teeth.
Me a ghost, you ready for war with the devil. Me a sound in
the distance. You a gust of wind carrying that sound.