I would crush my own
oregano from what leaves
I’ve baked in clay ovens. I would
tandoori the songs of unborn daughters.
I would diaphragm her grammar, punctuate
her suitors, dye all her petticoats
a raging indigo night. I would smoke
the pyramids and petticoat the stars
with soot of burned scriptures. I would
sapphire all the tears that have escaped.
I would jericho any hopeful lover
if only it would get you to talk to me.
Wander alley where cobbles peek
through brash asphalt. I would brush grief
from the arpeggio of your hair, the slow guttural
promise of leaving, the serpents aching
to show you your godliness.
I would sew your striated veins to my floor-
boards if it would stop you from packing
your basketball into white plastic shopping bags
and making the slow thoughtful pilgrim-
age alongside the eyeless snake of subway trains.
See the constitutions inked on my iliac crest. See
edicts threaded on my breath, triptychs cresting
on shores of death groans. See all
the upheaval in my bones.

To end the old year, stuff some old clothes full of straw,
no voodoo, no hair from the neighbor dog, no nail clippings
from your spouse. Just straw–
preferably dry and purposeful, like what they laid
on Milan streets to quiet the wagons during Verdi’s dying.
Start early so that the Old Year can hang around for a while, perhaps
scaring some birds in the bargain. Before midnight
on New Year’s Eve, set fire first to his toes, letting the flames climb
hungry as a goat, surely as a song.
Before you see the old year playing out in the past year’s burning,
El Año Viejo gives up scenes from his own past, a far land
you both remember, where the old year burns in every village,
amid misery and guns, drugs and blood, and suddenly you see
the pig’s head hung for a raffle in the cafe where you ate empanadas
when you, too, were among them, on the mountain
with no name among many nameless mountains
rising off the edge of the Valle del Cauca
between tiers of bougainvilleas and mist.
Then the Old Year, full of last straws and bags of wind,
offers up some fresher visions: handcuffs and roses, the loose valve
of your mother’s heart, fluttering instead of doing its business,
the skateboard newly arrived in your daughter’s life, there with its skater
flirting with gravity, and as you begin to have second thoughts
about your jeans and once-favorite white shirt on their way to embers,
you feel yourself swept along by loss, so much burning here and away,
so many coffins and even more unburied dead, stars wandering off course,
inescapable destiny –and then BANG! BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
Be glad someone has hidden firecrackers in the pants pockets of the Old Year
to startle you into feeling more alive, the way you resolve to be
now and forever, alert to each moment, cherishing each blade
of the erstwhile grass burning itself into a new year, and while smoke
rises into the surprisingly light night, let go of your pain
a while longer, lose the feeling of being a stranger to your life.
The moon is almost full, and the Old Year is almost ashes.
Throw more wood on the fire and let its glow play
warmly into the wee hours. You don’t have to be the last to know,
however late, that while suffering ends, fear lasts forever. Look.
The real work of fire is to eat and to sing.

This is where most artists would prop up their glossy persona, the airbrushed veneer, the hyper-sure fire starter. I can’t do that, not tonight. I’ve driven through two blizzards almost 400 miles, I’ve again been puzzled about the practical value of human experience, I’ve cried again in front of women I’d rather not see me cry, and I don’t have a poem to write, or I’m too undisciplined and not brave enough to write a poem. A young man I’m becoming friends with recently said to me that he wouldn’t want to live in a world without fear because in a world without fear, there’s no need for courage. The statement has a poetic ring to it, but so do trash can lids slamming down in the alley.

I would perhaps like to believe, in perhaps the least pragmatic terms, that though we are divine beings choosing to have a human experience in order to experience the full breadth of our divinity, and therefore consign ourselves to the limitations of relativity, that fear…well, fear sucks. And so the solace that it is a necessary backdrop for the dazzle of divine love, is just well, kind of disheartening to me.

I’m not making sense. Let me start again.

I was born of the waxy linoleum glow of hospital floors

I was born of an infant concussion and an adolescent I.V. drip, I was born
of a German Shephard ripping open my left face, a beer bottle to the gut

in the front seat of my father’s rental car, or winter afternoons in his girlfriends’
kitchens with the oven on and pots boiling to heat their steamed apartments,
I was born of an uncle’s ghost, an island’s promise, a lover I would meet

in the crevices of girlhood, on the eve of scabbing into a woman, I was born
on his couch, in a hopeful kiss a prayer into his sleeping cheek, led by the wrist
to the kitchen to discover the first set of secrets we’d resisted answering
all those nights spent confiding our ways of hurting ourselves.

I was born in the ragged gasp for love when I taught him to choke
me, in the angry humidifier sputtering false promises in the dorm corner,
in the first dark poem I wrote on his kitchen island and stuffed angry
into a backpack I’d soon cease to carry, I was born to die
and wreck cars and die in wrecked cars and car wreck the lives

of men who saw me push thumb tacks into my arms. I was born of faulty brakes,
a skid on packed snow into aluminum medians, a hangover, a one night stand,
the acrid smoke of burning brake fluid and charred steel, I was born of a woman
who liked to steal lipstick from department stores, and skirts she would outgrow
then be too small for, a woman whose breasts mine resemble. I was born of a perfect
circle of ember plopping on my breastbone and searing away any fear that you would hurt me

and you did, again, though you assured me it wouldn’t be that way again, you wouldn’t be that
man again, and I believed you. I was born of spare sets of keys. I once dreamed the space heater
shorted out and lit the blanket that hanged off the edge our your mattress, and we cooked
there together, spooning, beyond recognition, a portrait of horror, walls singed and black, coils
fused with our tangled bones, foam melted into the soapy fat of our four thighs. I wrote this poem
and it’s printed in some journal some where and we will always be that some where, a fossil
of lovers who wouldn’t stop holding hands even when the room began

to burn. I was born of burn, a tiny cast swallowing my hand. I was a toddler who’d never learn
to play piano or flute, whose palms still hold the yellow callouses of those scars, who should have
caught the coal before in landed on my chest and squeezed it out with my hand. With a hand
bloodied by burns, we wouldn’t be locked in that always fossil lover sleep, I’d never let you
hold me, and whenever you said that you weren’t leaving again, I’d hold up the hole in my hand
or show you the scar on my left toe where your clippers cut me open, and I wouldn’t have to say
You’d see the inside of my wounds and stop lying. Sometimes I dream that love doesn’t hurt
and I wake up to the ghost rattle of the radiator, the teeth marks on my ankle I can’t explain,

I was born of torn ribs,
in a swing set under
your window, in kisses
I can’t undo. I was born
but if I could I’d unborn
myself sometimes so burn
wouldn’t be the sobriquet
your mouth twiddles for my name
when you’re working a string of meat

from your teeth.

the last 300

Undulating steam flaps away from his sweating head
when he swipes the fleece cap off, trotting, smile lines
whitened by fine dry salt, toward me, his number peeling
away from the diagonal safety pins I’d fastened in the dark
morning. One pin is flailing open and I worry for his tender nipple,
smarting from wet friction. The race is over. I’ve brought towels
to sop away the mud and slush, bananas to soothe, granola we’ll
fist into our jaws

in bed, lilting into afternoon dreams, scraping the chill
away from our flaking skins. His muscles ache and I envy
their knots and twitches, his lithe thighs, his compression
shorts soaked through. This was only a few miles
cut through heavy gray March. I can’t wait

to hold him after the marathon; we’re not jumping
ship – I’m there for every last meter of the race.

ways to die

Crash the Sundance, crash
the Sable, crash the Maxima, dance
on wet rocks hunching against the spray
of Lake Michigan’s unexpected summer
ferocity, dance on the lip of the Canyon,
sit on the canyon floor, step off the curb
in London gazing the wrong way for traffic, forget

the full bottle of ibuprofen squatting in the dark
of your spice cabinet and buy another. Buy another
bottle and remember he was with you when
you bought the last, laughing in the pharmacy aisles.
Drop your gloves ziplining in Nosara, crash
another Nissan rented to get you across
Costa Rica, speed around the narrow road
choking itself through mountains. Speed
into a sharp curve somewhere between Chicago
and Champaign, flip six times, speed
into a deer. Teach him to love
your throat collapsing in fists, moan
for it. Exorcise your past hurts in plays
whose endings he won’t watch. Applaud

the raucous forgiveness. Step off the platform
at Damen. Step off the platform at Clark, let the weight
of your laptop shuffle your bones to the tracks, hope
your father believes it was an accident, diffuse flesh
and curls into a ferocious spray under the electric
weight of commute. Write letters. Untangle

blue veins with thumb tacks and kitchen knives
and sewing scissors and barber shears and the inert
chattering teeth of house keys. Smile anyway.

Crash the Intrepid. Kneel in the closet. Fall
in love. Be alive.
Live.