When You Want to Scream, But Your Dorm Has No Bathtubs

When You Want to Scream, But Your Dorm Has No Bathtubs, So You Go to The Swimming Pool, But Everyone Can Hear You, So You Go to The Railroad Tracks and Wait For a Train, But You’re In North Philadelphia and 3 People Are Walking Towards You and You’re Probably Going to Get Stabbed



Just so you know,
you’re still listed on my Snapchat, like a stupid green button
that won’t disappear.

The world has told me I need to sit down
and say Seattle’s too far for hitchhiking.

They laugh like it’s funny, like it’s funny that I miss fresh air
scurrying crawfish beneath moss-covered rocks,
looking for glassy-eyed lizards

underwater.
I guess the real joke is that nobody told me
college was an option.

The reason I came,
that’s gotten old. Like most people. Like most people,
it’s moved on,

but nobody said that wouldn’t be OK.

Underwater here, under a city,
I’m sinking boat by boat. My sail’s facing the smelly blue sky,
something so alluring, between trash, college students
and a giant mass of air pollution.

I haven’t thought about what it’s like
on the East Coast;

where I come from, we’re not sick of the weather,
but it’s cold, and rainy,

and quite obvious that winter never ends.
You’re always freezing for something.

So it’s OK if you don’t want me at your house show,
I’m playing bass tonight, tomorrow, next week,
next month,

and in a couple years,
don’t cry

you’ll be hosting my band anyway.

Massacre

Massacre
Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired. ‘They cross the bridge at daybreak fleet of foot’ and die with no phone coverage. I see them through night vision goggles and follow the heat of their bodies in the darkness; there they are, fleeing from it even as they run towards it, surrendering to this huge massage. Massacre is their true mother, while genocide is no more than a classical poem written by intellectual pensioned-off generals. Genocide isn’t appropriate for my friends, as it’s an organised collective action and organised collective actions remind them of the Left that let them down.

Massacre wakes up early, bathes my friends in cold water and blood, washes their underclothes and makes them bread and tea, then teaches them a little about the hunt. Massacre is more compassionate to my friends than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Massacre opened the door to them when other doors were closed, and called them by their names when news reports were looking for numbers. Massacre is the only one to grant them asylum regardless of their backgrounds; their economic circumstances don’t bother Massacre, nor does Massacre care whether they are intellectuals or poets, Massacre looks at things from a neutral angle; Massacre has the same dead features as them, the same names as their widowed wives, passes like them through the countryside and the suburbs and appears suddenly like them in breaking news. Massacre resembles my friends, but always arrives before them in faraway villages and children’s schools.

Massacre is a dead metaphor that comes out of the television and eats my friends without a single pinch of salt.

Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham

How I Became...

How I became…

Her grief fell from the balcony and broke into pieces, so she needed a new grief. When I went with her to the market the prices were unreal, so I advised her to buy a used grief. We found one in excellent condition although it was a bit big. As the vendor told us, it belonged to a young poet who had killed himself the previous summer. She liked this grief so we decided to take it. We argued with the vendor over the price and he said he’d give us an angst dating from the sixties as a free gift if we bought the grief. We agreed, and I was happy with this unexpected angst. She sensed this and said ‘It’s yours’. I took it and put it in my bag and we went off. In the evening I remembered it and took it out of the bag and examined it closely. It was high quality and in excellent condition despite half a century of use. The vendor must have been unaware of its value otherwise he wouldn’t have given it to us in exchange for buying a young poet’s low quality grief. The thing that pleased me most about it was that it was existentialist angst, meticulously crafted and containing details of extraordinary subtlety and beauty. It must have belonged to an intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge or a former prisoner. I began to use it and insomnia became my constant companion. I became an enthusiastic supporter of peace negotiations and stopped visiting relatives. There were increasing numbers of memoirs in my bookshelves and I no longer voiced my opinion, except on rare occasions. Human beings became more precious to me than nations and I began to feel a general ennui, but what I noticed most was that I had become a poet.

End of Winter

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead
into the dark and light at the same time
eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting
to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity

never thinking
this would cost you anything,
never imagining the sound of my voice
as anything but part of you—

you won't hear it in the other world,
not clearly again,
not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only
persistent echoing
in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye—

the one continuous line
that binds us to each other.

Closings

                               1

“Always Be Closing,” Liam told us—
abc of real estate, used cars,
and poetry. Liam the dandy
loved Brooks Brothers shirts, double-breasted
suits, bespoke shoes, and linen jackets.
On the day Liam and Tree married
in our backyard, Liam and I wore
Chuck’s burgundy boho-prep high-tops
that Liam bought on Fifth Avenue.


                               2

When the rain started, we moved indoors
and Liam read a Quartet aloud.
T.S. Eliot turned old and frail
at sixty, pale, preparing for death.
Then poets of new generations
died—Frank O’Hara first, then Jim Wright
with throat cancer in a Bronx hospice,
Sylvia Plath beside the oven,
Thom Gunn of an overdose, Denise


                               3

Levertov, Bob Creeley, Jane Kenyon...
In a New York bar, Liam told me
eccentric, affectionate stories
about a road trip in Tree’s country
of Montana, and the joy they felt
in the abundance of their marriage.
At Bennington Tree said, “Fourteen years
after the wedding in your backyard,
I love Liam with my entire heart.”


                               4

Liam’s face changed quickly as he spoke,
eyes and mouth erupting with gusto
as he improvised his outrageous,
cheerful, inventive obscenities.
When I first met him—I expounded
at a young poet’s do—his bearded
face was handsome and expressionless.
He would not defer to a poet
fifty years old! After a few months


                               5

he was revising my lines for me,
making the metaphors I couldn’t.
Even now, working at poems, I
imagine for a moment Liam
disassembling them. A year ago
he watched the progress of age turn me
skeletal, pale flesh hanging loosely
in folds from my arms, and thin rib-bones
like grates above a sagging belly.


                               6

His body would never resemble
my body. Four or five times a week
we wrote letters back and forth, talking
about class structure, about how Tree
took charge over the Academy
of American Poets, about
poems and new attacks on free speech...
When I won a notorious prize,
Liam sent me eighty-one notions


                               7

about projects I might undertake.
Number fifty-six instructed me:
“Urge poets to commit suicide.”
His whole life he spoke of suicide
lightly, when he wasn’t preserving
the First Amendment from Jesse Helms,
or enduring two colon cancers,
or watching films, or chatting with Tree,
or undergoing heart surgeries.


                               8

If he walked their dog Keeper one block,
he had to take nitroglycerin.
When Jane was dying, Liam and Tree
drove up to say goodbye. I wheelchaired
Jane to a pile of books by her chair
to find the color plate of Caillebotte’s
shadowy kitchen garden at Yerres
for the jacket of Otherwise, when
Tree would design it. I think of Jane’s


                               9

horror if she were alive to know
that on August fifteenth Liam pulled
the shotgun’s trigger. The night before,
wearing a tux over a yellow
silk shirt, he danced with Tree once again,
before bed and the morning’s murder.
He left Tree alone and desolate
but without anger. Tree knew Liam
did what he planned and needed to do.

Waving Goodbye

I wanted to know what it was like before we

had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we

had minds to move us through our actions

and tears to help us over our feelings,

so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend

and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her

as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,

walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,

and turned my head after them as an animal would,

watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,

her smiling face and her small hand just visible

over the giant pillows and coat hangers

as they made their turn into the empty highway.

Movement Song

I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck  
moving away from me
beyond anger or failure
your face in the evening schools of longing
through mornings of wish and ripen
we were always saying goodbye
in the blood in the bone over coffee
before dashing for elevators going
in opposite directions
without goodbyes.

Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof  
as the maker of legends
nor as a trap
door to that world
where black and white clericals
hang on the edge of beauty in five o'clock elevators  
twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh  
and now
there is someone to speak for them  
moving away from me into tomorrows  
morning of wish and ripen
your goodbye is a promise of lightning  
in the last angels hand
unwelcome and warning
the sands have run out against us  
we were rewarded by journeys
away from each other
into desire
into mornings alone
where excuse and endurance mingle  
conceiving decision.
Do not remember me
as disaster
nor as the keeper of secrets
I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars
watching
you move slowly out of my bed  
saying we cannot waste time
only ourselves.

Leave Taking

I do not know where either of us can turn 

Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other. 

I do not know how we can bear 

The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon, 

Or many trees shaken together in the darkness. 

We shall wish not to be alone 

And that love were not dispersed and set free— 

Though you defeat me, 

And I be heavy upon you. 

But like earth heaped over the heart 

Is love grown perfect. 

Like a shell over the beat of life 

Is love perfect to the last. 

So let it be the same 

Whether we turn to the dark or to the kiss of another; 

Let us know this for leavetaking, 

That I may not be heavy upon you, 

That you may blind me no more. 

Hum for the Bolt

Hum for the Bolt
BY JAMAAL MAY
It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so
of the next closest thing to water to the touch,
or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood

crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm.
But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure
of this town, it is the flash that arrives

and leaves at nearly the same moment. It’s what I want
to be in this moment, in this doorway,
because much as I’d love to be the silk-shimmer

against the curve of anyone’s arm,
as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar
from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man

switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing
compared to that moment when I eat the dark,
draw shadows in quick strokes across wall

and start a tongue counting
down to thunder. That counting that says,
I am this far. I am this close.

When I Look At You Without Speaking, I'm Drawing A Map

I’M DRAWING A MAP WHEN I LOOK AT YOU WITHOUT SPEAKING
………………………………………………….–for Javier

Love not as origin
………………………………………………but as exodus. A parting and then
………………………another. Dust of your country
………………………………………rolling off like sweat or my name from your tongue
………in the time you loved me. That autumn
………………mosquitos ripened in the walls of your apartment
and made a border fence on my skin.

I became the robber whom you fed windows
………………………………fed me frame after frame: your silhouette
………………………………………sleeping, silhouette cutting mangoes
………………………silhouette with other ghosts—

………………Twice you were deported
………………………………before you made it to Nogales, alone and only nine
………………………years old, saguaro shadows
………pantomime. The owls flex against the sky
………………………tiger sifts its stripes of sun and absence
making it day then night. I erase

………………and picture you as I always do,
………………………………………more windfall than friend, more brother to me than fig.

Home como ancla, no como cadenas,      rather you as a worm, hooked
………………………in a little fishing village by the sea
………away from the desert calling
………………………the iguanas Mother, though they could give you no suck.
I imagine you back in El Salvador,

………gambling at a funeral, dice stirring up dirt.
The legs on a pair of ghost roses clipped and joined to your lapel.
………………You won’t die now but you’ll be disappointed you didn’t
………on a mushroom trip in a car of friends,
………………………one Muskogean morning, wheels and wheels
………………and not a scream will break
………………………………through your lobster grin. Don’t lie and say

………………………………………you’ve been here and loved this soil.
………I am unfamiliar with any other images: you on a hill
………………………………in an ocean of tall grasses. You inside Alaska
………………………………………………with ice like chocolate around your mouth.
………………………You in Montana under paperweight sky, land
………………………………………………flat as a pulse.

………………You plant kisses here
………………………………………………but don’t weed them.

………Your bear-mouth
………………………leaves raspberries in my broken skin.
………………………………………………………You’re playing
………………………hard to get, Friend, and it’s getting hard on me
………not to vacate my skirt and lift my thighs in this dry bed
of burned-up rivers. My neck is breathless unfurling
………………lungs into a map of where you’ve been.

………………………So if immigrating is loving two women,
………………………………which one of us do you dream in?
………What’s another woman to the other woman
………………………………except an extra pair of hands to bring in the harvest

………………but I can’t take you home.
………………………………………………………………………………I’m not a coyote

that way. I’m the girl you guided through the reeds
………………………………………………down to the loading docks. We lie on our backs
………………………watch October get cut to pieces by helicopter.

………………………………………………I say, look out over the vastness and forgive it all.

………………In sleep last night, I pulled three boats ashore into your port. See the
………………………………rope burns, the labor
………………………of trying to bring what you love close enough
to tie down and then ride out
………………again onto the waves
assuring the land animal that appears in all your poems,
………………………………………………this time the mule doesn’t drown.

………………………………………………This time I don’t keep a vigil until you return.
………………………This time you go and make it back to everyone.
And when we dream there aren’t oil drums.

https://youtu.be/jyZuIP5x-tQ

Bitch

Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.
He isn’t a trespasser anymore,
Just an old acquaintance tipping his hat.
My voice says, “Nice to see you,”
As the bitch starts to bark hysterically.
He isn’t an enemy now,
Where are your manners, I say, as I say,
“How are the children? They must be growing up.”
At a kind word from him, a look like the old days,
The bitch changes her tone; she begins to whimper.
She wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe.
Down, girl! Keep your distance
Or I’ll give you a taste of the choke-chain.
“Fine, I’m just fine,” I tell him.
She slobbers and grovels.
After all, I am her mistress. She is basically loyal.
It’s just that she remembers how she came running
Each evening, when she heard his step;
How she lay at his feet and looked up adoringly
Though he was absorbed in his paper;
Or, bored with her devotion, ordered her to the kitchen
Until he was ready to play.
But the small careless kindnesses
When he’d had a good day, or a couple of drinks,
Come back to her now, seem more important
Than the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal.
“It’s nice to know you are doing so well,” I say.
He couldn’t have taken you with him;
You were too demonstrative, too clumsy,
Not like the well-groomed pets of his new friends.
“Give my regards to your wife,” I say. You gag
As I drag you off by the scruff,
Saying, “Goodbye! Goodbye! Nice to have seen you again.”

With No Immediate Cause

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten
every five minutes a
woman is raped/every ten minutes
a lil girl is molested
yet i rode the subway today
i sat next to an old man who
may have beaten his old wife
3 minutes ago or 3 days/30 years ago
he might have sodomized his
daughter but i sat there
cuz the young men on the train
might beat some young women
later in the day or tomorrow
i might not shut my door fast
every 3 minutes it happens
some woman's innocence
rushes to her cheeks/pours from her mouth
like the betsy wetsy dolls have been torn
apart/their mouths
menses red & split/every
three minutes a shoulder
is jammed through plaster and the oven door/
chairs push thru the rib cage/hot water or
boiling sperm decorate her body
i rode the subway today
& bought a paper from a
man who might
have held his old lady onto
a hot pressing iron/i don't know
maybe he catches lil girls in the
park & rips open their behinds
with steel rods/i can't decide
what he might have done i only
know every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes every 10 minutes/so
i bought the paper
looking for the announcement
the discovery/of the dismembered
woman's body/the
victims have not all been
identified/today they are
naked and dead/refuse to
testify/one girl out of 10's not
coherent/i took the coffee
& spit it up/i found an
announcement/not the woman's
bloated body in the river/floating
not the child bleeding in the
59th street corridor/not the baby
broken on the floor/
there is some concern
that alleged battered women
might start to murder their
husbands & lovers with no
immediate cause'

i spit up i vomit i am screaming
we all have immediate cause
every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes
every 10 minutes
every day
women's bodies are found
in alleys & bedrooms/at the top of the stairs
before i ride the subway/buy a paper/drink
coffee/i must know/
have you hurt a woman today
did you beat a woman today
throw a child across a room
are the lil girl's panties
in yr pocket

did you hurt a woman today
i have to ask these obscene questions
the authorities require me to
establish
immediate cause
every three minutes
every five minutes
every ten minutes
every day.

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring–

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

Erotic Poem xvii.

xvii.

Lady,i will touch you with my mind.
Touch you and touch and touch
until you give
me suddenly a smile,shyly obscene

(lady i will
touch you with my mind.)Touch
you,that is all,


lightly and you utterly will become
with infinite ease

the poem which i do not write.