asl? stats?

  are you a virgin?

  can you meet now?

  are you down?

  are you Asian or are you normal?

  can I be your dad for an hour?

  do you know how 2 love yet?

  i can get a room

  u can do ur homework while i work on that ass

  are you there?

  hey i won’t hurt you

  call me

  faggot

  I need you

  fuck you

  All of it draining back into binary code.

  Then the gypsum, calcite, plaster, and lead particles rise from the pavement in massive billowing clouds, and the North Tower reconstructs itself and September’s clear and blue again, and the people float up, arms open, to stand looking out of windows in good suits, in good bones.

  And the tulips raise their heads, their chins high along the courthouse lawn.

  //

  The tape scrambles and I see the boy dancing with his mother in the front yard in the ’97 nor’easter, snow floating back up the sky as he twirls under her shadow—cast larger than life by sodium lights. The flakes going up to thicken god’s pillow for his never-ending sleep.

  The ice retreats, the ground beneath him red and ochre as if an enormous mammal had been opened at his feet. And the leaves rush in the gusts, attach themselves, by thousands, to oak branches across the yard. His mother, at the window, lifts her head from her hands, eyes drying.

  I see the boy walk backward into his house, ease his mother down on the kitchen tiles. His father’s fist retracts from her nose, whose shape realigns like a fixed glitch. If I slowed it down here, I might mistake the man’s knuckles for a caress, as if soothing something with the back of his hand so it won’t fall apart.

  //

  The cake on the table, air returning to the boy’s pursed lips as the seven candles, one by one, begin to light, and the wish returns to his head where it’s truer for never being touched by language.

  I am starting to root for him, on his way to dust.

  //

  The tape skips to the family howling, ecstatic on the front lawn, their arms waving in a summer night. The son, clutching his stuffed Elmo, runs in circles as they all head inside, where the mother picks up the phone: she’s gotten a job at the clock factory in Meriden.

  The Hubble telescope swoops the other way. Halley’s Comet shoots back behind the trees as the Humvees roll, again, into Iraq.

  He walks backward past an empty carnival where a tobacco field had greened a few months back. It’s the day after the Tri-County Fair, I can tell, where all that remains of October are sunken pumpkins along the road to the city jail, and the clowns sweating on stools behind their trailers wiping away makeup in pie-tin mirrors.

  The cornfield husked and rattling in the breeze, the highway beyond the pines with its air of gasoline and burned rubber. He walks backward—though there’s so little time left to destroy. Backward until he bowls over, on his hands and knees. Until he’s crawling on his belly almost like a soldier with a missing ear, his grey Champion hoodie browning in blotches, until soot appears on his cheeks and neck. His jeans fall away in crisp pieces as he drags himself down the road where he made his name. A thin line of blood lights along his jaw.

  I press pause here but nothing stops because my hands are his hands.

  And all that’s left are his tattered boxers as he crawls backward, half-naked, arms covered in cuts, toward the smoke rising from the ditch by Risley Road.

  When he gets there, he slips his feet through the Mazda’s mangled rear window, fastens the seat belt, turns his head toward the shattered window and waits for the glass to reassemble, for the friends in the front seat to sing again, here at the end.

  Reasons for Staying

  October leaves coming down, as if called.

  Morning fog through the wildrye beyond the train tracks.

  A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family sleeps.

  That I woke at all & the hawk up there thought nothing of its wings.

  That I snuck onto the page while the guards were shitfaced on codeine.

  That I read my books by the light of riotfire.

  That my best words came farthest from myself & it’s awesome.

  That you can blow a man & your voice speaks through his voice.

  Like Jonah through the whale.

  Because a blade of brown rye, multiplied by thousands, makes a purple field.

  Because this mess I made I made with love.

  Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured.

  Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.

  Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.

  Because I made a promise.

  That the McDonald’s arch, glimpsed from the 2 am rehab window off Chestnut, was enough.

  That mercy is small but the earth is smaller.

  Summer rain hitting Peter’s bare shoulders.

  The ptptptptptptpt of it.

  Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.

  Because this body is my last address.

  Because right now, just before morning, when it’s blood-blue & the terror incumbent.

  Because the sound of bike spokes heading home at dawn was unbearable.

  Because the hills keep burning in California.

  Through red smoke, singing. Through the singing, a way out.

  Because only music rhymes with music.

  The words I’ve yet to use: timothy grass, jeffrey pine, celloing, cocksure, light-lusty, midnight-green, gentled, water-thin, lord (as verb), russet, pewter, lobotomy.

  The night’s worth of dust on his upper lip.

  Barnjoy on the cusp of winter.

  The broken piano under a bridge in Windsor that sounds like footsteps when you play it.

  The Sharpied sign outside the foreclosed house:

  seeking cat friend. please knock for kayla.

  The train whistle heard through an opened window after a nightmare.

  My mother, standing at the mirror, putting on blush before heading to chemo.

  Sleeping in the back seat, leaving the town that broke me, whole.

  Early snow falling from a clear, blushed sky.

  As if called.

  IV

  Ars Poetica as the Maker

  And God saw the light and it was good.

  —Genesis 1:4

  Because the butterfly’s yellow wing

  flickering in black mud

  was a word

  stranded by its language.

  Because no one else

  was coming—& I ran

  out of reasons.

  So I gathered fistfuls

  of ash, dark as ink,

  hammered them

  into marrow, into

  a skull thick

  enough to keep

  the gentle curse

  of dreams. Yes, I aimed

  for mercy—

  but came only close

  as building a cage

  around the heart. Shutters

  over the eyes. Yes,

  I gave it hands

  despite knowing

  that to stretch that clay slab

  into five blades of light,

  I would go

  too far. Because I, too,

  needed a place

  to hold me. So I dipped

  my fingers back

  into the fire, pried open

  the lower face

  until the wound widened

  into a throat,

  until every leaf shook silver

  with that god

  -awful scream

  & I was done.

  & it was human.

  Toy Boat

  for Tamir Rice

  yellow plastic

  black sea

  eye-shaped shard

  on a darkened map

  no shores now

  to arrive—or

  depart

  no wind but

  this waiting which

  moves you

  as if the seconds

  could be entered

  & never left

  toy boat—oarless

  each wave

  a green lamp

  outlasted

  toy boat

  toy leaf dropped

  from a toy tree

  waiting

  waiting

  as if the sp-

  arrows

  thinning above you

  are not

  already pierced

  by their names

  The Punctum

  According to the Smithsonian, from 1830 to 1935, there were over 350 poorly documented lynchings in California, the victims being mostly of Mexican, Chinese, and Native American descent.

  There is sunlight here, golden enough to take to the bank. There are daffodils and sweetgrass. We have made this for you with our hands. Look at our hands, they say. There is nothing to hide. But you look closer and see, in the photo, a shadow staining the ground, over the sepia flowers, attached to no one. A hole in the dirt. And you wonder if it’s an entrance or maybe the mark of something higher, something already leaving, on wings. Yes, it’s just a bird, they say. A smudge of flight, defects in the camera. A product of its time. This is all a product of the times. Look at the sunlight, they say. How it falls right through. Some things are hidden in plain sight. Look, there was so much space back then. And you do look. You look and you look and it’s true. There is so much air to be answered for. But your eyes return to the one black moon fallen on the ground. Life-size period unspoken for. How faithful the memory of a shadow, you think. How you can almost see the author of its curve. Now, if you could please look directly above you, they say. There is still the sky. Blue as the single eye pressed down on us. There is nothing to hide under all this sun. And your hand moves to your throat, to make sure you are still the speaker, that English is still your reckoned wreck. That it hasn’t pooled into an ink-dark puddle at your feet. You feel for your throat because history has proven the skull lodged in the gravedigger’s hands is often the one behind your face. But these are marigolds, they say. And these the horses. We have retouched them for your viewing pleasure. We have touched and retouched. Now, if you would come this way, they say, there is so much more to see.

  Tell Me Something Good

  You are standing in the minefield again.

  Someone who is dead now

  told you it is where you will learn

  to dance. Snow on your lips like a salted

  cut, you leap between your deaths, black as god’s

  periods. Your arms cleaving

  the wind. You are something made, then made

  to survive—which means you are somebody’s son.

  Which means if you open your eyes, you’ll be back in

  that house, under a blanket printed with yellow sailboats.

  Your mother’s boyfriend, bald head ringed with red

  hair, a planet on fire, kneeling

  by your bed again. Air of whiskey & crushed

  Oreos. Snow falling through the window: ash returned

  from a failed fable. His spilled-ink hand

  on your chest. & you keep dancing inside the minefield—

  motionless. The curtains fluttering. Honeyed light

  beneath the door. His breath. His wet blue face: earth

  spinning in no one’s orbit. & you want someone to say Hey . . . Hey,

  I think your dancing is gorgeous. A two-step to die for,

  darling. You want someone to say all this

  is long ago. That one night, very soon, you’ll pack a bag

  with your favorite paperback & your mother’s .45,

  that the surest shelter was always the thoughts

  above your head. That it’s fair—it has to be—

  how our hands hurt us, then give us

  the world. How you can love the world

  until there’s nothing left to love

  but yourself. Then you can stop.

  Then you can walk away—back into the fog

  -walled minefield, where the vein in your neck adores you

  to zero. You can walk away. You can be nothing

  & still breathing. Believe me.

  No One Knows the Way to Heaven

  but we keep walking anyway.

  When you get here it will be different

  but we’ll use the same words.

  You will look & look—& see only

  the world. Well, here’s

  the world, small

  & large as a father.

  I am not

  yet your father. I tried

  to speak this morning

  but the voice only went far

  as my fingers. Can you see it

  now?

  For the first time in weeks

  I saw my reflection in the

  cup of coffee

  & kept drinking anyway.

  Strange, what a face can do

  to a face. Like once,

  I let a man spit in my mouth

  because my eyes wouldn’t water

  after Evan shot himself

  in his sister’s chicken coop.

  The chickens long

  gone. I had been

  looking for a sound to change

  the light in the room.

  But all I could find

  was a man. His bright spit. I

  lifted

  my tongue as he stood

  above me.

  My jaw a ransacked

  drawer.

  I said Please,

  ’cause I’m a cold man

  who believes every bit

  of warmth should be saved

  & savored. It’s alright—

  no one can punish us

  now. Not even

  the speaker.

  I am wrong often—but not enough

  to forget you. You

  who are not yet born. Who will

  always be what remains

  after I build my Ark

  out of everything

  I lost.

  Because when a man & a man

  walk hand in hand into a bar

  the joke’s on us.

  Because when a man & a man make

  love, they make

  only love. There’s enough

  for you, but not enough

  for you. You indistinguishable

  from rain. Rain: to give

  something a name

  just to watch it fall. What

  will I name you?

  Are you a boy or a girl

  or a translation of crushed water? It doesn’t

  matter. Maybe extinction

  is temporary. Rain as it

  touches ground.

  Hey, maybe I’m right here.

  Your dad

  is right here. I’ll leave the rest

  of this blank

  & when you get here, I’ll tell you

  everything. When

  you get here, I’ll show you

  this incredible thing

  we can do to mirrors

  just by standing still.

  Almost Human

  It’s been a long time since my body.

  Unbearable, I put it down

  on the earth the way my old man

  rolled dice. It’s been a long time since

  time. But I had weight back there. Had substance

  & sinew, damage you could see

  by looking between your hands & hearing

  blood. It was called reading, they told me,

  too late. But too late. I red. I made a killing

  in language & was surrounded

  by ghosts. I used my arsenal

  of defunct verbs & broke

  into a library of second chances,

  the ER. Where they bandaged

  my head, even as the black letters

  kept seeping through,

  like this. Back there, I couldn’t

  get the boys to look at me

  even in my best jean jacket.

  It was 2006 or 1865 or .327.

  What a time to be alive! they said,

  this time louder, more assault rifles.

  Did I tell you? I come from a people of sculptors

  whose masterpiece was rubble. We

  tried. Indecent, tongue-tied, bowl-cut & diabetic,

  I had a feeling. The floorboards creaked

  as I wept motionless by the rehab window.

  If words, as they claimed, had no weight

  in our world, why did we keep

  sinking, Doctor—I mean

  Lord—why did the water swallow

  our almost human hands

  as we sang? Like this.

  Dear Rose

  I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.

  —Roland Barthes

  Let me begin again now

  that you’re gone Ma

  if you’re reading this then you survived

 

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