Now

I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.

It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows

at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old

and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,

to have spoken your name at all. 

Girls Wear Blue, Boys Wear Pinkwashing

there is this ritual that happens every time a white house
gives the same speech but
applies it to a different body

this moment where the world forgets
the red earth this house is settled on and
the silver bullets that keep it standing
and the blue skies it sends its late night scheduled programming to
delivered to their doorsteps with drones

there is this thing happens when
for a moment
every heart hungers for a dropped word
and forgets about all of the dropped bombs
and promises from the last time this house
invited us for dinner and made us
pay our entrance fee
with blood

nationalism means every mouth is
a walking microphone reciting the same
broken promise –
means the man in a suit
tells us to keep dreaming so we keep
falling asleep
and — the thing is –
when you scream while
sleeping they can call it a nightmare
and not the norm —
means these liberals
are so busy speaking that they
haven’t taken the time to notice
what their hands are doing
beneath them, our
gasping throats mistaken as
applause

so when i am expected to celebrate
the fact that a president included
my trans identity in his
speech: i recognize this not
as a form of denial,
but rather distraction:
a lethal distinction.

when the president acknowledges the trans community
i wonder who exactly he is speaking about?
my sisters slain on streets like discarded sewage
or
the white liberals who carry the numbers of the dead on their tongues
as their for profit tears fall in their pocketbooks
how they are so used to experimenting on our bodies that they have found
a way to dissect gender identity from color and class
to not only be the punchline of their jokes,
but also the punchline of their propaganda:

when they tell me that his speech is historic
i wonder whose history they are speaking about?
she, the white woman who ghost writes his speech
tells him that she grew up her entire life feeling unseen

or we the colors of this earth
who no longer have the words to name ourselves
erased from our histories after being forcibly
assimilated into a gender binary
whose sole purpose is to keep us
killing ourselves so they can
wash their hands of the blood

when they tell me that this is progress
i wonder whose progress they are speaking about?
not the trans people raped and killed by the military
not the trans people raped and killed by the police
not the trans people raped and discarded by the state

how many words does it take to dismantle a bomb?
how many words does it take to erase a border?
how many words does it take bring back the dead?

so i will not pledge allegiance to the trans tipping point
as it continues to crush Black and brown people
across the world until we are so one dimensional
you no longer see us from our rainbow tinted
sunglasses as you continue to cruise across the world
and call it tourism instead of colonialism

i will not pledge allegiance to the trans tipping point
as cis people continue to steal our struggle for grants to make their organizations bigger,
the ones
that have mastered the art of positioning a hand
in front of our mouths
and positioning a microphone in front of theirs
call it “progressive”

i will not pledge allegiance to the trans tipping point:
when visibility for some means
vilification for most
when lip service for some means
life sentence for most
when acknowledgment for some means
annihilation for most

i pledge allegiance to my sisters!
i pledge allegiance to my sisters!
i pledge allegiance to my sisters!

our trans means
we refuse to be used to make
the rich, richer
the white, more conscious
the poor, more criminalized
our trans means we will not help the fascism transition into fashion
bomb transition into diplomacy
prisons transition into justice
our trans means the end of imperialism
our trans means the end of militarism
our trans means the end of police
our trans means the end of borders
our trans means the end of the white man’s house
not being invited to it

so call me to celebrate
when that
makes it
on the news.

The Women Of Dan Dance With Swords In Their Hands to Mark The Time When They Were Warriors

I did not fall from the sky
I
nor descend like a plague of locusts
to drink color and strength from the earth
and I do not come like rain
as a tribute or symbol for earth’s becoming
I come as a woman
dark and open
some times I fall like night
softly
and terrible
only when I must die
in order to rise again.

I do not come like a secret warrior
with an unsheathed sword in my mouth
hidden behind my tongue
slicing my throat to ribbons
of service with a smile
while the blood runs
down and out
through holes in the two sacred mounds
on my chest.

I come like a woman
who I am
spreading out through nights
laughter and promise
and dark heat
warming whatever I touch
that is living
consuming
only
what is already dead.

Ripening

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

Nothing Twice

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,
I can’t help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we’re different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

Your Tongue

That hawk is what
the wind says.
        Aracelis Girmay

Where is your voice now
that you have moved, you have migrated?

            What has the land done to your tongue?

It is not dirt I hear in your crumbling mouth.
We did not bury you. When a tongue burns,

            is it burned always? Does it hurt you?

I can’t understand you, or you are not
speaking; there is nothing to say or

            there is no way to say it. I wish you could

write to me. I miss your script.
Where is your voice? I know more or less

            where your mouth is scattered,

where we scattered your mouth, but where
are your teeth, where is the gold in them?

At Your Age, I Wore A Darkness

AT YOUR AGE, I WORE A DARKNESS

several sizes too big. It hung on me
like a mother’s dress. Even now,

as we speak, I am stitching
a darkness you’ll need to unravel,

unraveling another you’ll need
to restitch. What can I give you

that you can keep? Once you asked,
Does the sky stop? It doesn’t stop,

it just stops being one thing
and starts being another.

Sometimes we hold hands
and tip our heads way back

so the blue fills our whole field
of vision, so we feel like

we’re in it. We don’t stop,
we just stop being what we are

and start being what?
Where? What can I give you

to carry there? These shadows
of leaves—the lace in solace?

This soft, hand-me-down
darkness? What can I give you

that will be of use in your next life,
the one you will live without me?

The Poem Speaks to Danger

Beautiful things fill every vacancy.
—C.D. Wright

I am a buzzard sky, late
fall, the smell of kerosene.

The flicker of a deer’s white
tail in the tree bones.

I am grass rustling.
In the lake, you are a fist

around a ponytail, the hum
of nearly stopped breathing.

A plane wrinkling a sheet
of night air. The belief

that everything ripe,
everything that will ever

ripen, has been picked.
Impossible. I am the mouth

that can hold more. I am
the moon watching the girls

swim, the night sky pucker
in the jet’s pull. Softening,

flushed, I am a cheek.
Peachskin. The globe

of some new, ready fruit.

The Fortune Teller to the Woodsman

Gaunt and salt-and-pepper as the birches, wolves
are starving in these woods. From here the moon
is a crystal ball. I don’t need to look inside

to tell you that if you walk into the trees,
you won’t come out. The twigs will just stop

breaking under your boots. The moon backs off,

the later it gets. You could learn a thing or two
from her. Soon she’ll be far away, and the tiny
pictures inside will be buzzing lights, like fireflies

in a jar. But I can still swirl my hands around her
and see you in a shock of clover, your bones

gnawed to talc, your wife’s shriek filling the forest

so completely, the wolves lap the air for a taste.
Go home and watch the stars bare their small,
shiny teeth. Tonight I’ve spared you,

but you can’t be spared forever. If the moon says
you’ll be picked clean, believe her. You’ll feed

whatever hunts you the heart hot from your body.

Suspension

Nothing burns the bridge, and then it burns.
- Terese Svoboda

Once you cross, as you must,
you cannot go back. There is nothing
to retrieve: when the bridge catches fire,

leave it all. Your hair, your hands
may be lit; if you take photographs
into your arms, they too will burn.

You can see the lights of the city
you left behind, but in miniature
from the distance, a diorama.

When the bridge falls, the smoke
of its scaffolding hangs in the air,
burning our eyes. This is architecture

in the new world: the mere shadow
of structure, the suspension bridge
refusing to suspend. To be light

enough to cross, you must be less
of yourself. Remove everything
down to your wristwatch.

Whittle yourself to transparency.
Cross the bridge as it burns, sparks
in the wisps of your hair, and don't

look back. It is already turning
to smoke. Soon it will not hold you.

It Is Born

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.

Marine Snow At Mid-Depths And Down

As you descend, slowly, falling faster past
you, this snow,
ghostly, some flakes bio-
luminescent (you plunge
and this lit snow doesn't land
at your feet but keeps falling below
you): single-cell plant chains, shreds
of zooplankton's mucus food-traps, dust motes,
fishy fecal pellets, radioactive fallout, soot,
sand grains, pollen...And inside
these jagged falling islands
live more micro-lives
which feed creatures
on the way down
and all the way down. And you, a human,
in your sinking isolation
booth, you go down, too,
through this food-snow,
these shards, blown-off
bits of planet,
its flora
and flesh, you
slip straight down, unreeled,
until the bottom's oozy silt, the sucking
baby-soft muck
welcomes you
to the deep sea's bed,
a million anvil's per square inch
pressing your skull.
How silent here, how much life,
no place deeper on earth,
nor with more width.

Fathom and League

Two miles down the sea floor is a skull,
the wounded head of a monster - fractured,
faulted, ridged. It won't make me think
of the earth as Mother or understand Gaia,

but that my heart is inside my body
and neutral buoyancy is good. How else
can the world be studied? But if life begins
in the ocean, it thrives on hot and cold,

in the tumble and boil of the sea no longer silent.
In genesis there's no happiness, only awe
and improbability. The hideous is beautiful:
worms ten feet long, clams the size of Frisbees,

and shrimp that swarm like insects. And something else:
water burning inside water, smoking spires
and chimneys. And here and there, to calibrate
and measure, a weighted buoy, a probe or camera

I'm coming to retrieve. The sonar pings
as if it had an ear to my heart. the echo
coming back goes through and doesn't stop
until it dissipates, a question formed of sound

empty of the shapes it failed to find beyond
the submarine's perimeter of light. Now
at the site of the world's making and unmaking
the way to stay intact is to remain inside the sphere

as if it were a choice I'd made to define myself,
but it's no choice. The hatch is held in place
by the weight of 300 atmospheres: sky upon sky.
There's no courage in this safety, no danger

in this passing. The data siphoned, the vents named
Godzilla, Hulk, Inferno. My metaphor of monster?
The figure of fathom, measuring the depths, holding
the unseen dark close, hearing in it the sound

of its own shape--a name, then a creature, an issue,
made of what I hold, and nothing more,
the span, fingertip to fingertip, of an embrace.

for John Delaney

Heart

A child of, say, six knows you’re not the shape
she’s learned to make by drawing half along a fold,
cutting, then opening. Where do you open?
Where do you carry your dead? There’s no locket
for that—hinged, hanging on a chain that greens
your throat. And the dead inside you, don’t you
hear them breathing? You must have a hole
they can press their gray lips to. If you open—
when you open—will we find them folded inside?
In what shape? I mean what cut shape is made
whole by opening? I mean besides the heart.

Lula

We’ve been at this for years.
So long, it’s a kind of marriage.
Why not believe the shadow

feels affection for the flesh?
That it longs to be bodied, that it dreams
of all it could do for me?

Sometimes I imagine handing it
a bag of groceries from the trunk
and sending it into the house.

We’ve been at this so long,
it’s grown on me. It grows,
blurry doppelganger

so nondescript, it’s hard to know
even close-up—all outline, nothing
inside. What is a shadow

if not vestigial? A partner only
in a certain light? I’ve thought
about calling it Lula, the name

I’d been saving for another
child but will never need.
We’ve been at this long enough—

so long, it feels like marriage.
We touch without touch,
take turns outgrowing one another.

Lacrimae

Green dashes for grassland, brown dots
for desert, solid blue for water—
the children’s atlas is all simulacra,
from the Latin for likeness, which always
reminds me of lacrimae, Latin for tears.
That’s the rickety bridge my brain makes
over the river, or the kinked blue line
that stands for it. What a landscape
in the symbolic distance: dark green
lollipops for deciduous forest,
a cluster of black carats for mountains.
Once, doing dishes, I overheard
my children bickering about metaphysics
in the next room. The three-year-old
said, Everything is true, and his older
sister countered, Do you mean real?
When I think likeness, I think
tears—blue always for water, blue
running through and under everything.

Midwife

The woman saves every heart- or wing-

shaped rock she finds, studding the mountain 

with markers. When the babies don’t breathe, 

when they arrive frail, small enough 

to be cupped in a palm like a bird found 

fallen from a nest, their dusky, blue-gray 

heads too heavy for their bodies, 

she nestles them down into the soft earth. 

Even when there is little—just pulp, 

a tuft of hair, once even a tooth, so peculiar—

the earth takes it tenderly. But for the woman, 

the end comes in blood, nothing even 

to bury. She delivers babies to the holy 

wilderness of this mountain but bleeds 

her own into cloth—no recognizable shape. 

The woman can’t even make bones. 

Burning her soaked and rusty clothes, 

she hears a song in fire and farther off

a howl so mournful, it could be human.