Anodyne Read online

  across the first continent.

  100 years / 100,000—collapsed

  gesture learned, the mark

  of wanting to make marks in the surrounding

  objects to say: what?

  X

  what once marked the body?—too much

  pressed into bones—

  ancient value feels hopeful, the Blackest millennia

  so vindicated. an ochre block & a herd of cattle sweep across

  hyperbolic

  pastoral, a history

  in skin in blood in everything alive a disturbance

  THE RULE OF OPULENCE

  Bamboo shoots on my grandmother’s side path

  grow denser every year they’re harvested for nuisance.

  Breezes peel blush and white petals from her magnolia,

  lacing unruly roots in the spring grass. For nine decades

  she has seen every season stretch out of shape, this past

  Connecticut winter slow to relinquish cold. As a girl

  she herded slow turkeys on her aunt Nettie’s farm, fifty acres

  in a Maryland county that didn’t plumb until midcentury,

  plucking chickens and pheasants from pre-dawn

  into the late night, scratching dough

  for neighbors, relatives stopping by for biscuits, and the view

  from my window changes. It’s Mother’s Day

  and I’d always disbelieved permanence—newness a habit,

  change an addiction—but the difficulty of staying put

  lies not in the discipline of upkeep, as when my uncle chainsaws

  hurricane-felled birches blocking the down-sloped driveway,

  not in the inconvenience of well water

  slowing showers and night flushes, not in yellowjackets

  colonizing the basement, nuzzling into a hole

  so small only a faint buzz announces their invasion

  when violin solos on vinyl end, but in the opulence of acres

  surrounding a tough house, twice repaired from fires, a kitchen

  drawer that hasn’t opened properly in thirty years marked Danger,

  nothing more permanent than the cracked flagstone

  path to the door, that uneven earth, shifting.

  ANTEDILUVIAN

  Where were you when the truth disappeared or

  when the truth battered us & we pretended fear

  fell from the ripped pillow of our sky instead of

  rising up from the one clear place of us Where

  were you when strongmen told us to die &

  blasted us into nothing Were you downtown

  to witness the smooth mirage stagnate in sky-

  scraper shade & neon glower Did you hop a bus

  & clutch a cold center rail, the sweat of your palm

  making you slip as if at sea Were you at sea

  in memory, gathered into lyric, your body

  pretending any era was a safe one Six persimmons

  ripen unconsumed, mayfly wings flash

  their iridescence in the dark Nothing works

  By swallowing alarm you scrapped what you knew

  near plaza fountains, ultra-anonymous

  Now an arrowhead sharpens

  the blood under our flesh Low to the ground,

  a sea of tamarisks You claim millennia

  led to the false obelisks led to what severs

  the head of connection in the time of least But we

  only ask that you not kill us

  SESTINA FOR PERSONAE

  We choose to call our scatter

  Expansion—openness, inexact song,

  Imaginative loop

  We came to what wants to surface—

  The rest revealed in undercurrents, our bodies

  Insistent

  Insistent

  No one in charge but energy We arrived to scatter

  With half the clamor of bodies,

  Screaming or singing

  For the throat’s own sake, its corrugated surface—

  We arrived luxuriating in the loop

  (light moves downstage right in a frantic loop

  Improvisational movement or complete stillness, insistent)

  We came to (improvisational movement or complete stillness) surface

  We came to be anywhere—to scatter

  Paint but not trash, to turn holographic, singing

  It’s not true that we miss what we can’t give our bodies

  We came to say there’s another, plusher approach—bodies

  (Bromeliads appearing in the staged darkness, in silver, variegated, yellow loops)

  (Improvisational movement or low volume singing)

  Mean what they are—insistent

  When we say we want, the love in it—absent the scatter

  We came to deny the surface

  We came to be impossible and surfaced

  Inside Emily Dickinson’s perfect attitude, our bodies

  Longing—for what? A defect as power, scattering

  Ruthless integrity in a joyful time loop

  We came to consider anything alive respectable, insistent

  Anyone in need of radical devotion can or not sing

  We came to choose (indiscernible mumbling or opera singing

  & unrestrained laughter) chocolate cosmos, floriphages, all summer surfaces

  Maintained in drought, anything we can count on—(folds into self) insistent

  We came through the Taghkanic in autumn, our bodies

  Arrived in red deer abiding a clear path, a loop

  Arriving nowhere, but scatter—

  Who are we? Orion songs, missed evergreens, bodies

  Looped into every surface, looped

  Insistent into struggle—like heirloom seeds, rising in scatter

  SKY ERASURE

  sans bright star equivalent, hoist

  autumn slate

  & dive up, cloud borne

  hooked for purchase, flail

  lark limbed at song ,

  at light bridge, try rocket—

  every angular distance boxed under

  constellations three fists apart

  SYNESTHESIA

  I. Theory

  First, I was twenty-five with no sleep ( )

  & my body said feel this And I didn’t

  want to ( ) then It turned into a constant & ( )

  burned to be felt I couldn’t harden

  away from it couldn’t ease ( )

  or sleep or not-feel my way away because ( )

  it was myself &

  what my child could see ( ) & what I was

  watching ( )

  Semiotics—

  a feeling as dagger ( ) as gestural shard

  sheathed expensively ( ) dividing itself from its origins

  from evidence of uncertain shifts ( )

  Dreams for three nights: I sang hush to a wounded man

  ( )

  ( )

  gunshots, my brother ( ) and he lived. I said a

  prayer &

  a ghost running crowded ( ) woke up calm.

  Streets and shady hallways. I severed

  the angriest part of me ( )

  only to have double the raging

  ( )

  weapons grow in its place

  II. Signification + Gesture Drawing

  A mechanism crumbling its history, I used to

  ( ) build up my own hard feelings ( ) with

  those of

  others Can you believe

  I (signifier) would take them like they were mine

  or take them

  like I could take them away ( )

  like I could

  learn the texture of a heart as if touching it ( )

  in the dark like in Grey’s Anatomy

  when the power went out ( )

  Dr. Yang has to put her hand inside a man to feel

  where the hole is, feel how to save his life

  & now I ( ) sketch a tender gesture: />
  smell of antiseptic as the squeezing of a lover’s hand versus

  grinding against a stranger’s crotch ondulato

  ODE TO 180 PAIRS OF WHITE GLOVES

  smacking that ass

  making a phat beat

  (the thinking man’s Beyoncé

  endlessly sketching

  Isaach de Bankolé)

  O hair as urgent bulletin

  cosmic drifts of hair

  emitting important information

  O untapped talents and salted bravado

  a syntactic turn-on

  a paragraphic chasm

  stirring up hallucinogenic

  invader magic

  resembling a hoarded apocalypse

  of fetishized resistance

  against a corridor of wounds

  O honeypot hand in a real

  busy honeycomb

  watching the bees

  suck on brown girls’ legs—sharp

  like hustlers or suicidal stargazers

  O pink lips first pulling on a Kool

  I DREAMT YOU AT THE TATE

  Leaned forward on a long bench, long legs

  taking up the whole sleek area

  Drawing your own sneakers & eating a tuna melt

  cut in half

  After you offered me that 50%

  I took out my own giant sketchpad & we switched—

  Size 14 men’s & size 7.5 women’s, archival

  Who cares about matching

  The dream occurred on a plane

  traveling north from Phoenix to Denver & now

  carouseling slow is my neutral hardside

  & Sade, through Bluetooth, intends to leave like a lion

  RETREAT

  If I had the bones for this, I could cheat

  the finish. Melodramatically, die

  trembling as I peel tangerines

  in a state, catering to doubt.

  A lifetime thinking I know who I

  am here—I avoided erasure, I fought—

  Can I collect my fragments,

  fragile now in the gentleness

  your questions taught?

  No such marginalia. In every burst

  of agreement, no turbulence to try

  & estrange us, no opposition to

  map onto the joke. Observe

  the rough architecture a whole person

  bases key decisions on,

  its faulty edges hazed against

  clarity, uncut nails

  catching on unfortunate silk—

  RECLUSIONARY

  Stranger, the stone forest

  alive with limestone

  says come on over to my place

  à la Pendergrass & watch the LCD TV

  but only ’til I die & not after

  None of that Poe shit

  Let’s watch animal gods meanwhile

  probe the floodplains—

  red in beak & claw

  How else can I live alone

  having read ol’ Herm through 1857

  Knowing what’s corroded its way

  into the heart itself—the entrance

  full of swifts, Archimedes counting

  principles of loss & we can get joy

  clocking subterranean

  pursuits of cave-evolved fish on Nat Geo

  IN THE QUIET

  I ended things & need to migrate soon

  I’ve had a rocky epoch

  Not boring & non-hairsplitting so

  resort to heating leftovers in the oven

  Or in a blue skillet on a hot eye

  Watch a wasp behind blinds escape

  Laconic ease in the new absence,

  so beigy safe & later, fiddleheaded

  Souped-up in a fast sleep

  I furl at the least pain

  For fun & distraction—American Horror Story

  Violence I can turn off

  DECLINATION

  The truth is I am lionhearted. Dreaming

  no match for the waking flame. We fell asleep smelling smoke,

  placed damp towels on all the sills. Now the ground is frozen

  and in the dream, distance evaporates. I say every word

  held back, bold in touch too, lengthening in spirit. The mountains

  shadow the rust of the cold day breaking and we hum with energy. Winter

  keeps us lucky, rested, like suns.

  Are you an eagle yet?

  Serpents, they say, can’t keep

  lies from breaking their tongues. In the dream I resist

  your silence protects me

  from my own. One touch to eradicate all sense except, electric,

  what you know you control.

  On a day like this, mottled grey-blue with threats of yellow,

  I watercolor until hunger overtakes. I might write but words don’t feel

  brave enough.

  Do you draw upon waking? Do you first spike a coffee or

  rinse dreams from your skin with wet heat? I dare not ask. I make. I make

  messes I delight in. I draw, too,

  darken my small hands with charcoal, blow its dust

  off the paper, use up chamois after chamois

  deepening shadows, black as lust. Or ink. Sleek

  lines improvised across the cotton rag. Why can’t this work

  make me not want you drawn

  over me, a dream in rowdy fragments, impossible. Midwinter

  the day thrilled frozen, denatured minute by minute

  into a graveyard for night and dreams.

  I could want you or hate that want. I heat

  last night’s plate just as light snakes in. I add lemon to the cool

  water in a faceted glass. Set it down heavy, ringing the wood.

  My sister would tell me

  I need to stay focused. I do.

  I am writing this in the creeping dawnstrokes, having made my list

  and folded the white paper into crude fourths. I have to manage.

  Foolish, I know, to try so many times

  after spectacular failure. But I refuse to fight the urge to

  rise from my low camouflage, letting hunger quicken the hunter in me,

  shattering pretense. I make a show, don’t I, blushed

  and modest even as I etch your departing silhouette in gold.

  IF GOLD, YOUR FIGURE AS MIRROR ON THE GROUND IS

  after Pizarnik, after Pessoa

  I.

  Comic screen to change what came to notice Even though sky

  at first was the same blank slate So literal. The value of it

  You make your own lion’s teeth sink in, slowly

  II.

  So green the insects claim you don’t belong here

  then bite & bite

  Virtue the undulant yards as penance

  III.

  The capuchin stays silent in the void

  You feel the sun of unknown experiments

  IV.

  Hordes of animals without teeth crash the window in a

  dream & it means you are not hungry enough

  V.

  Once a choice comes to full & the act carries the joy

  of struggle The winter mother severs only a chance at

  restarting. Could you sorrow the one unchosen thing

  infinitely so it feels occasional, the act is itself

  VI.

  Where the jewelry case in your closet holds

  Not expensive things but purchased—

  Acquired in a place that no longer exists

  If I write a texture I could make it stucco like childhood

  Aloe or cactus spines / to cut is to heal the rough of a cut

  All dark blue against good skin like leather

  VII.

  Aloud your voice heightens its wrongness

  You speak anyway because you are learning / I think this might be the

  end of insecurity

  VIII.

  Imagine the root of oppositional archetypes Next to m
e

  chrysanthemums the rust of blood when it dries but in front of me So

  much blue & a broken white

  I can’t see myself on purpose

  IX.

  What rocks itself out of time on a wing beat Is not a

  name or a silence

  As in sanity’s meager gestures. Downriver, the unruly

  sound turned

  C-shaped / Real secrets as fragrant & familiar as

  what’s under the smoke

  I stand next to the rocks

  Where you choose to return without choosing / Some black,

  some silver

  The lines of ash & passage A neon swig of enlightenment

  X.

  Don’t be exceptional in this false.

  All fluent in nothing, hiding where your debt grows

  Be aggressive or do not mind, you say

  I feel like a chicken after boiling

  Or like you do now—smooth from the pain