Pre-American Elegy
I dug graves in the first century before America.
Most mornings I carried the shovel to the verge of tears.
I summoned my friends and the rain cloud, gushing
like an emergency room. In our America
we ran away with war and returned with April,
shared our poems before our deaths in case of dying.
Maybe America and I were shoe-less, awake in only a big leather coat
and ash skin. To pass the time we’d think of
funeral songs and write with fire on soaked alleyway paper.
My skin had no shadow because my
America sat in the forever eclipse. I mourned before I could scream,
but both were under a receding April moon.
America left dried leather in our mouths
and like men in white robes groped our larynxes for words,
words for seashells, for roosters and tree bark crackling, for steam fields and
dead poets without bodies. I bled silently onto American sky and grave-
stone while America stomped saddle and bone to ghosts. It’s hard to choke
on the bodiless words dusk and promise in a prayerless America.
Most evenings I kneeled before a sore America
summoning an America without running and an America
without the devil. Tried to picture the devil—
the loin of his jaw, the starch on his grave-dirty tongue—tried
to reach the Aprils of ourselves
before America. America dug in the first century of these graves.
How to fight a fascist when you’ve got a hangnail
You are brutal, desire;
gentle like my misunderstood
mother, and loyal like
a butcher. God help
the Brooklyn grandfather
who never made it to Manhattan.
God help the arcades of tragic college students
whose stomachs ache with gender
and their mothers’ icy no-
comments.
I live in the cul-de-sac
where my mother chases me.
Skin on the lampshades, sheep
on the deboned fence:
in the time it took for her to slice me
with everyone is sick, you know
I grew a singular daisy
on a bed of shame and nail
clippings. I have tenderized
my cuticles so I can unravel like language
and so she won’t catch me this time ’round.
I want to imagine I’ll have more blood
to water the peonies.
my mother’s eyebrows may as well be oil
from all their sliding in the rearview mirror.
Fascism peers at me when I don’t tell her
she left her father in Williamsburg
and that the butcher is closed on Thursdays.
The fascist owns all the words.