The border is a line that birds cannot see.
The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half.
The border is where flint first met steel, starting a century of fires.
The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up but making it hard to breathe.
The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend.
The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein.
The border says stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another language, and keeps going.
The border is a brand, the “Double-X” of barbed wire scarred into the skin of so many.
The border has always been a welcome stopping place but is now a stop sign, always red.
The border is a jump rope still there even after the game is finished.
The border is a real crack in an imaginary dam.
The border used to be an actual place, but now, it is the act of a thousand imaginations.
The border, the word border, sounds like order, but in this place they do not rhyme.
The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest.
The border smells like cars at noon and wood smoke in the evening.
The border is the place between the two pages in a book where the spine is bent too far.
The border is two men in love with the same woman.
The border is an equation in search of an equals sign.
The border is the location of the factory where lightning and thunder are made.
The border is “NoNo” The Clown, who can’t make anyone laugh.
The border is a locked door that has been promoted.
The border is a moat but without a castle on either side.
The border has become Checkpoint Chale.
The border is a place of plans constantly broken and repaired and broken.
The border is mighty, but even the parting of the seas created a path, not a barrier.
The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that does not exist.
The border is the line in new bifocals: below, small things get bigger; above, nothing
changes.
The border is a skunk with a white line down its back.
Browsing category: Political
Power
for Marie Curie
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
Nightstick
[A Mural for Michael Brown]
There are gods
of fertility
corn, childbirth,
& police
brutality—this last
is offered praise
& sacrifice
near weekly
& still cannot
be sated—many-limbed,
thin-skinned,
its colors are blue
& black, a cross-
hatch of bruise
& bulletholes
punched out
like my son’s
three-hole notebooks—
pages torn
like lungs, excised
or autopsied, splayed
open on a cold table
or left in the street
for hours to stew.
A finger
is a gun—
a wallet
is a gun, skin
a shiny pistol,
a demon, a barrel
already ready—
hands up
don’t shoot—
arms
not to bear
but bare. Don’t
dare take
a left
into the wrong
skin. Death
is not dark
but a red siren
who will not blow
breath into your open
mouth, arrested
like a heart. Because
I can see
I believe in you, god
of police brutality—
of corn liquor
& late fertility, of birth
pain & blood
like the sun setting,
dispersing its giant
crowd of light
Boat Journey
Sunday afternoon on a city beach.
No sand, slabs of manufactured stone.
I watch two blondes, maybe sisters,
Inflate a raft. They use a bicycle pump.
One tries to assemble two paddles,
Gives up, puts them in her bag.
The one on the pump removes her top.
She has exerted herself into better posture.
Her breasts are larger than I expected.
I want to see if their tiny raft will hold them.
The clouds and current move north.
As they enter the water, Tony Allen warns
Against the boat journey: Running away
From a misery / Find yourself in a double misery.
I recall photos of British tourists in Greece
Frowning at refugees,
Greek children in gym class while hungry.
In the direction the raft floats, the sisters
Paddling with their hands, a planetarium.
I wonder if it houses a telescope capable
Of seeing the double misery on a Greek island.
Maybe its lens is too powerful.
The side of their raft reads EXPLORER.
Their soles are black. If you pay attention
To movies, white women have grimy soles.
I have seen black actresses with exquisite feet.
I recall my mother checking my socks
In the exam room before the doctor entered.
The sisters let their ponytails drag
In dubious lake water.
I’m not sure I hear these lyrics: Even if
They let you enter / They probably won’t let you.
Even if they let you enter / The baron won’t let you,
The baron won’t let you.
I note their appearances,
Takeoff point. Just in case.
I doubt any of our thoughts converge.
What is it like to be so free?
To drift in water in a country you call
Your own. Unprepared because you can laugh
Into an official’s face. Explain, offer no apology.
Blossom
What is a wound but a flower
dying on its descent to the earth,
bag of scent filled with war, forest,
torches, some trouble that befell
now over and done. A wound is a fire
sinking into itself. The tinder serves
only so long, the log holds on
and still it gives up, collapses
into its bed of ashes and sand. I burned
my hand cooking over a low flame,
that flame now alive under my skin,
the smell not unpleasant, the wound
beautiful as a full-blown peony.
Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands
with the unknown, what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future, naked
and small, sewn back together
scar by scar.
All of Us
Every day I am born like this—
No chingues. Nothing happens
for the first time. Not the neon
sign that says vacant, not the men
nor the jackals who resemble them.
I take my bones inscribed by those
who came before, and learn
to court myself under a violence
of stars. I prefer to become demon,
what their eyes cannot. Half of me
is beautiful, half of me is a promise
filled with the quietest places.
Every day I pray like a dog
in the mirror and relish the crux
of my hurt. We know Lilith ate
the bones of her enemies. We know
a bitch learns to love her own ghost.
Legacy
after George Jackson
Because something else must belong to him,
More than these chains, these cuffs, these cells—
Something more than Hard Rock’s hurt,
More than remembrances of where men
Go mad with craving—corpuscle, epidermis,
Flesh, men buried in the whale of it, all of it,
Because the so many of us mute ourselves,
Silent before the box, fascinated by the drama
Of confined bodies on prime-time television,
These prisons sanitized for entertainment &
These indeterminate sentences hidden, because
We all lack this panther’s rage, the gift
Of Soledad & geographies adorned with state numbers
& names of the dead & dying etched on skin,
This suffering, wild loss, under mass cuffs,
Those buried hours must be about more
Than adding to this surfeit of pain as history
As bars that once held him embrace us.
Appeal to the Grammarians
We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we’re capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we’re ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn’t bounce back,
The flat tire at journey’s outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it—here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, “See, that’s why
I don’t like to eat outside.”
Aubade with La Bestia
[ La Bestia is a network of Mexican freight trains utilized by U.S.- bound migrants to more quickly traverse the length of Mexico. This mode of travel is dangerous & punishable by law.]
i shrunk at your side while you waited
on the train headed north. you wanted a better
story that was days away. you had stuffed two
hundred dollars into the lining of your shoes.
you told me about people on train rooftops
who fought sleep. how those who failed lost
their limbs to wheels. were deferred to towns
they sought only to pass through. i watched
the maps of our countries kill people & saw you
become untraceable on a globe. i thought
of the police uniforms who ambushed & held
for ransom the people who could only offer a name.
you spoke about the patronas who threw
bottled water & food to folks riding through. the hands
that rose for rice hung from a telephone
line. how people found sleep in a church under
a crucifix. a horn wailed the train’s arrival.
there was a rush of wind. i looked into your face.
you carried your country in your eyes. i told you
even when you leave you do not leave. you turned,
leapt into a metal blur—
I, Too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
About the Bees
I do think of them
from time to time—
just now sucking the pulp
of a tangerine
the taste of which
is mostly texture,
in this spin-drunk season
that seems to forget
—us. —itself.
At the job I lost,
their husk carcasses
with the locust bean’s
cracked brown pods
rustled on the brick steps
leading into the white-walled
hours of computer screen;
their compressed toil
missing from the hives
they left agape in the backyard
of the next-door neighbor
who, recently divorced,
had brought us the jars
of honey I spooned into teas
I sipped in the break room
and watched at the window
as he continued to tend
the needle palm and hydrangea.
In the age of loss there is
the dream of loss
in which, of course, I
am alive at the center—
immobile but no one’s queen—
enveloped (beloved) in bees,
swathed in their wings’
wistful enterprise. They pry
the evolved thin eyelids
behind which I replay
the landscape as last I knew it
(crow feathers netting redder suns),
their empire’s droning edge
mindless in the spirals of
my obsolescing ears.
Beneath my feet
what kind of earth
I’m terrified to break
into sprint across to free
myself, to free them
from the myth they make
of me and then bury
below their dance
of manufactory;
what kind of future
they could die for if
punching into me their stings—
what future without risking
the same; and while, in either body
the buzzards of hunger conspire,
what kind of new
dread animal,
this shape we take?
You & the Raw Bullets
Why the image just now of a bullet entering the mouth? Why call it raw, when it isn’t sticky and pink like a turkey meatball, just the usual: gold, and shiny, and cylindrical? What about this bullet is uncooked? Why does it multiply with you in parka or short skirt, versions of the you that you were, swallowing raw bullets as you walked? The images come without assailant, without gun, just the holes the bullets opened, the holes through which they went. And now at the age in which you ride enclosed in glass like the Pope or President you are spitting up the bullets slow-simmered in your own juices. You are shitting them out, feeling them drop from you in clumps of blood, in the days of bleeding left. But you cannot expel all of them. Some, raw as the day they entered, have expanded their mushroom heads into the flesh, or lodged their hot tip into the taste center of the brain. Will the tongue’s first encounter with pomegranate seeds be forever a lost Eden, that fruit of your girlhood, which, also meaning grenade, was perhaps never innocent? Do your own raw bullets come back to you, my friends? Let us legislate the active voice, instead. Not, “Many bodies have been used as blanks, aluminum cans.” But, “Here are the men who pulled the trigger, look at them.”
Firing Squad
On balconies, sunlight. On poplars, sunlight on our lips.
Today no one is shooting.
A girl cuts her hair with imaginary scissors—
the scissors in sunlight, her hair in sunlight.
Another girl steals a pair of shoes from a sleeping soldier, skewered with light.
As soldier wakes and looks at us looking at them
what do they see?
Tonight they shot fifty women at Lerna St.,
I sit down to write and tell you what I know:
a child learns the world by putting it in her mouth,
a girl becomes a woman and a woman, earth.
Body, they blame you for all things and they
seek in the body what does not live in the body.
Quarantine
Because I did not have to smell the cow’s fear,
because I did not have to pin the man, watch his eyes
go feral, because I did not have to drag the stones
that formed in the child’s body, because I did not sheathe
my hands in dank soil, or skirt the machine’s battering, the needles
knitting my lower back, because when the factory collapsed
I smelled no smoke, and no one made me kneel at the cop’s boots
and count the pulse slowing beside me as every sound
soured, because my hands have never had to resist being comforted
by the warmth of blood, because the plastic-
wrapped meat and the mousetraps, because my job
was to stay clean and thankful and mostly imaginary, I have been
stealing
what little I can:
onions. sandpaper. handfuls of skin.
the dumpster’s metal groan. hurried breath. hot knives.
Paul Robeson
That time
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
The Moon After Election Day
I’m looking at the moon tonight,
the closest it’s been to Earth since 1948
and feel relieved we can do little to ruin it.
That can’t be true, you say, and for a moment
even the moon’s loneliness escapes isolation
and depends on something else. It’s attached.
Like us and what we abandon. Us
and the evil we refuse. The same evil
we share history with, the thin membrane
between you or me and the worst of life.
It’s already past midnight and another election
is over in the United States of America.
The oceans will not continue into infinity.
Nor will our money. Nor will this suffering.
We have voted and proven again
we do not know one another. I am trying
so hard to understand this country, I tell you
even as I’m about to fail loving you (I know this)
in the way people need to be loved
which is without deception, which is almost
impossible. Don’t you love it though, you say,
and I remember the first time I saw you in a room
without anyone else. Don’t you love the moon?
And because it’s easy to say it, I do, I make sure
to tell you I do. Despite the news I knew years ago:
no one saves anyone. We’re on the moon.
Women Are Doomed to Be the Angels of Love
This is so true I involuntarily doodle hearts everywhere I go. I sign my letters compulsively with hearts,
dream of disobedient hearts, work with hearts. I eat them. I boil sauces and the tomatoes on my cutting board form a daisy chain heart. My foot is a pretty ballet slipper,
Lisa Frank style, engorged with crusty satin hearts. I pronounce my name with an embarrassingly hearty accent. My colostrum pools with the plumping of an inflamed heart
inspired by the nutritional needs of my babies. Hearts spray-painted on trains are talismans, guiding me eventually to the Heart Afterlife where my treasured friends exist in heart time,
drinking wine and organizing a workers’ collective named Heavenly Valley Emotional Laborers in the mossy hidden Heartclouds where my restless heart tires of hearing famous singers
singing sweetly about unsatisfying love in the grocery store when their hearts could be screaming about environmental devastation and global capitalism;
the way this callous dorm pillow I saw online plastered with hearts and dream catchers says “only good vibes” is in no way related to what the hearts of this country really need.
On good days I submit to being a committed student of the heart. On bad days I am paranoid and anxious about my heart being kidnapped by intruders in blue uniforms,
and how the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the sacrificial victim’s heart gets ripped out in one of Hollywood’s stereotypical cinematic presentations of indigenous culture
nevertheless sent me a message about men who are so powerful they could take what they wanted from my body with their bare hands.
“Where do bad folks go when they die?” asks Kurt Cobain on my favorite Nirvana album. I replace “folks” with “hearts” and marvel at the candor of strange smarmy men on tv who want
to be president, who have no clue that being part of a community is different than owning investments in a city. My heart is stone sore. My heart wants to close forever
to protect me from market combat. But as a black woman bred for strength and openness I lack options. I’m pretty good at the precarious art of choosing what gets in.
Doom makes a great gatekeeper:
it’s rainwater in a vase of roses on a sleeping hero’s grave.
Riddle
We do not recognize the body
Of Emmett Till. We do not know
The boy’s name nor the sound
Of his mother wailing. We have
Never heard a mother wailing.
We do not know the history
Of ourselves in this nation. We
Do not know the history of our
Selves on this planet because
We do not have to know
What we believe we own. We believe
We own your bodies but have no
Use for your tears. We destroy
The body that refuses use. We use
Maps we did not draw. We see
A sea so cross it. We see a moon
So land there. We love land so
Long as we can take it. Shhh. We
Can’t take that sound. What is
A mother wailing? We do not
Recognize music until we can
Sell it. We sell what cannot be
Bought. We buy silence. Let us
Help you. How much does it cost
To hold your breath underwater?
Wait. Wait. What are we? What?
What? What on Earth are we?
It Comes in Every Storm
translated by Mary Crow
And don’t you feel also, perhaps, a stormy sorrow on the skin of time,
like a scar that opens again
there where the sky was uprooted?
And don’t you feel sometimes how that night gathers its tatters into an ominous bird,
that there’s a beating of wings against the roof
like a clash among immense spring leaves struggling
or of hands clapping to summon you to death?
And don’t you feel afterwards someone exiled is crying,
that there’s an ember of a fallen angel on the threshold,
brought suddenly like a beggar by an alien gust of wind?
And don’t you feel, like me, that a house rolling toward the abyss
runs over you with a crash of crockery shattered
by lightning,
with two empty shells embracing each other for an endless journey,
with a screech of axles suddenly fractured like love’s broken promises?
And don’t you feel then your bed sinking like the nave of a cathedral crushed by the fall of heaven,
and that a thick, heavy water runs over your face till the final judgment?
Again it’s the slime.
Again your heart thrown into the depth of the pool,
prisoner once more among the waves closing a dream.
Lie down as I do in this miserable eternity of one day.
It’s useless to howl.
From these waters the beasts of oblivion don’t drink.
Instructions for Stopping
Say Stop.
Keep your lips pressed together
after you say the p:
(soon they’ll try
and pry
your breath out—)
―
Whisper it
three times in a row:
Stop Stop Stop
In a hospital bed
like a curled up fish, someone’s
gulping at air—
How should you apply
your breath?
—
List all of the people
you would like
to stop.
Who offers love,
who terror—
Write Stop.
Put a period at the end.
Decide if it’s a kiss
or a bullet.