Young Poets

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.

Manicure

One week after my rape I decide

to get my nails done for the first time.

Him and I divided by cloudy Perspex,

a small hole in the bottom for

our hands to slip through.

We talk in hands, pointing to

ballerina shape, shade 317, a blushing pink

from a wheel of magentas, corals, fuchsias.

Dremel whirs through the soft lit salon,

haze of dust rising to his face. I fantasise it

filing off the – bites forced on my breasts.

Holding hands, he shifts from one finger

to the next, careful as a child

making a daisy chain.

Box of blue gloves sit on the shelf,

untouched – I surprise myself hoping

he forgets to put them on.

Salinity

Him and I sit in the bath together, legs tangled and twisted, seeing each other from our opposite ends. I’m working on acceptance. Accepting how my brain was passed down by my mother and hers before. How in this moment I am not here. I float above us, a sheet of sea glass muddling our bodies in green blues. I think about breaking a shard of it to use later. Depression laps at my knees in waves, coursing to drag us under. I see straight through his unclouded eyes to that spotless skull, a rumble bursts through his chest that wants to shake the salt water out of me. I wonder if he can pinpoint the moment the wave washes over me, a shudder beneath my eyelids, my salt seeping into our bath.

The waves gulp us down.

I drag you to the seabed

by our knotted legs.

Holiday

Here, the water and sky pulse

blue. Light casting down

a yellowed haze.

Waves lick the rocks in greedy laps

slapping their tongues,

a boisterous dog.

I pluck my antidepressants

from each foiled packet, flick them

into the sea, hoping one will slip

inside an oyster’s gullet, get coated

in its chalk, smothered under layer

after layer, until it is reborn

pearlescent and glamorous.

Finds itself dangling from a rich ear

so it can keep on holidaying

when I’m long gone.