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topology

I am an atlas
of transformations

potential of shape
any day I am

a series of equations
a set of polygons

pointy + sharp
like Lara Croft in the 90s

I’m a donut therefore
I’m a coffee cup

when the body
god gave me

feels like a woman
or not

I am a string
of complex numbers

the constant + i

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STRANGERS IN OUR OWN EARTH

We have been made into something other:
something ancient, swallowed—

badland curves set from the once of subtropics,
maybe single-celled algae and zooplankton. Behind each cretaceous sea

we are the same buried peat. The desperate hunger
of crocodiles and turtles, those nubbed skins

affixed in suspension. What marks us is
the trapping of buried shale and siltstone, the early sternum

of existence. We are confessed
in installments, each realm rendered to gully

and splinter. Let me tell you, an eon
is one of my names. Name me in floating and flint,

mercy and sand. Name me bird,
detail, the very least. Name me the punishment

of history, what broke, what isn’t still lit. Name me the water as it lifted up
what it could to make exiled artifact.

We have traveled a long way to dwell on colors
that lip our past. Fragments of struggle. Though it all seems faded

to inner layers, and no one
remembers what’s nested, the story of dying is much more

than some parts swift vaulted. Time is not simple, not
quick pickled deterioration. I was an artist once.




Within me, perfect vibrance, twin constellations.
You could say the years constricted and then sank into silenced. I stopped

and was lost for a storm then droned
a winter by the window. Every angry breath became

the same consistency. But to reshape, you hold what
hollers out from under you.

Some wings are left in the depth
and hogback ridges. Old reds prove safe-kept by compressing.

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IF I TELL YOU HOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHY

Someone left a child’s red boot in the path.
Done with motion and arrivals, it makes me want
to make a list of trusts.
When I lived in Boston, I dated a bus driver.
We went to a club
where I handed over a fake ID
and the bouncer saw me, young
and soft, a plucked berry. He let me in, knowing
that night I might cloudburst
or underworld. The city was bearable with dirty
habits of snowbanks, tired streets, people at each corner
doubled beside beeches
holding up signs lettered Hope. I give
my coats to such suffering. Bus driver bought me a drink
orange with ice. He whispered.
I didn’t know what to do
with a man with a mustache. It’s ridiculous, the construction
of a memory. The club was dark
and smoky and full of decisions. I can’t say
I felt lucky. We left
to walk that old crisp night. Boston was ruined
with slippery weather. He was gentle,
didn’t touch me. Dwindling
flakes latched to the ground and I never saw him
again. One hour bent
to another. I had no armor.
I didn’t need a map to know where we were going.
And then days went on.
And here I am with the boot, with the desert,
the sun, me beside me in the perfect center
of reason which looks maybe
like nothing, but I call it trust.

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PROGNOSIS

My father is all
at once. It is noon and widens
further into another
landscape of feet.
The words he uses are a measure
of the half-point
to silence. We listen
to the mirror on the wall
and my father is bent
down with
grizzle and returning
spaces. My father reminds me
of my father. Father
as conveyance, as legal
document, as night flight, lost
pitch. Next question. For something
to do, we name the body
by streaming daylight:
knee, nerve, stomach. Reason
the tender sound of sun. Name hope
as a pleasantry. We are spending
our time folded
into it, finding
ourselves. We are not
doing nothing. We are planning
the task of letting go
of all thought and my father is root
and tree. I put my hand
on his hand
and build a small
mountain. I haven’t described
his voice. An hour passes again.
A sound not said. A negative



ghost. A rain
unbuckles the leaves.
Perhaps we’ll look
in the mirror and see
what just happened—
what I mean
is, the future.

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SANCTUARY

I collect another phrase
for safekeeping. No need to do more
than hold his fragrance: egg, anger, each thick
river of rejoicing. On my fridge, a scrap
of my father, his perfect print
which held all the black of a day
and its losses. Now he learns the equation
for why I tell him this beginning.
From the first morning of my childhood
when he lifted me up, with iron
in his body and my apple-sized eyes. My father,
I looked giddy and exhaled.
That was Sunday. The village. I was a baby sugared
with indulgence. Fat and black-haired. Those years
of his unfolding wallet and the ongoing thorn
of origin. We knocked on the heavens
with our knees. Such boredom.
These days, the body holds its heat.
We begin with my name: a portrait of belonging.
We pantomime conversation.
I never want to feel ore than I do. No,
it isn’t that. Twitching all night again. Is his presence more
of a parting or a start? My father.
I separate each hollow. I always knew
four months of snow. We bought sweaters,
he tested my algebraic solutions, my mother danced
in our hotel rooms. Her arms were pale.
If train A and train B are traveling at different speeds
from two different cities
what is the time before collision? My father.
I am not looking for a way out.

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ON HARMONY

Train stops and eggplant and the grim little sun and our clapping
all morning and later we slicked down to righteous
dance moves, pink greasy boxes of dough. Some would say

we were not divine between us but we hummed our shared holy
family in a quarry of folding chairs. One hour skimmed
to another and they were not forbidden, or clarified

with reason, but the ache of the olives and responses
rendered in timbal, qanun, tarub, the oud, and the sounds again
of distress and truth. Darwish said “Nothing is harder…than the smell

of dreams while they’re evaporating.” On those days we dressed
in our blacks and thick tongues, and the narrative
we offered was not an acceptance, a raging. We wanted to forget

to kneel. We spent the days linked to our divisions
of oppression and we fixed to the matter
of beginning. Every thought claimed five wounds. Dresses loose

with their fine threads, red and lime,
wheat gold. Outside, a stone bridge watched the great river
weeping; a mother sang to her baby. My taste in the mouth

of this crowd. Habibi, our losses, and the most of us rustling
our arrows beneath them. Five times a day we ate the oily
sweetness with our vigorous fingers, our tongues moving to cumin

and cream, and we passed from news to a chapel
of pita, to portions of dusk, our ghosts and marginal angers.
I took 48 photos of shadows in quick succession,



thinking one better than another, and saw in each photo
a lapse to spot evidence. I deleted them
from my memory which wanted not to hunger

for these compulsions, statistics. We were taught
so many instances to doubt, but the light came along
singing and we joined it, taking its melody as a apology.

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Because Memory, I Am Told, Is Unreliable—

Lie, just a little, about the color of the grass, the quality of sky,
the air and whether it is breathable. For instance

that house across the street is not broken down yet,
its sockets retaining the same panes of glass it was born with

just like the eyes we keep forever if we can—aging,
but the same. Tell me it isn’t February and colder

than usual. Don’t explain to my soul beauty;
I don’t want to know. I want to believe that this small town

is a place I’d stay forever. That the men
smoking outside of the halfway house don’t scare me much—

or intrigue me some because I am also halfway.
That after years of being named the offender by my abuser

[the man from whom I’m still running], I’m not confused
concerning the snow falling today and whether

it is desirable for its whiteness and coolness on my face,
or if I am tired of its falling. I only know how long

I’ve been tumbling into grief and too many questions—
a disassociation from every present moment into an obscure past.

The house across the street invites workers for remodeling;
the coffee shop in town makes breakfast sandwiches I like.

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How to Forgive the Predator

All living things must eat.
The stomach is not impartial; neither

the soul. We survive
by what we do and do not nurture,

and sometimes this requires teeth.
I say to my son, Don’t incise

the soft part of your heart.
But he does,

creating a scar—each time toughening,
each time making the tissue

less susceptible to pain. When I got
divorced I learned quickly

that this is what made me desirable
for eating, having been broke down

by a mallet, my husband’s
hammering anger tenderizing me.

Having forgotten pain.
Having learned not to squeal

in a cage but continue to release
the lactic acid that keeps the slaughter

from spoiling. My son
teaches himself to forget pain too



in the same house, on the same street,
with the same sort of fleshly

cravings, a little indifference
to break down his appetite for love.

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Taxonomy

There is a way to say a name in the present
that changes the way you say that name in its future,
like the way my own name
and my mother’s name
became both blessing and curse
in the mouths of the men that spoke them.
When I first left my home
two years after divorcing my husband,
two years before my son’s graduation,
and three years before my daughter wrote the poems
that would break me,
I said my daughter’s name to the breeze,
then my son’s name while standing by a river
in New Hampshire feeling finally free, not feeling
the names like blessing or curse,
or anything so weighty. Only
their inscription in the earth of the journey that carried me,
as if I was sure they could hear me,
as if to declare: Mother is alive. Follow.
As if I didn’t know I was leaving.
As if I really thought they’d come running behind,
waving their arms with joy.

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I Wanted to be a Boy

because I want to be a wolf; because the earth smells
of sinew and green. Because his hair was made of corn dust
and cloud, and I wanted to weave it around me, trust
his sky. Because Eros did not strike my thigh or breast;
instead he plunged knives into my chest and kept the heart
beating. Because lunge is so similar to lung, both
attempting a breath. Because I was breathing
when my mother bore me, and this was written down
on a chart next to the names of other living things—
and some of them were masculine; because this was not
a female breath. Because it took years to tame my teeth,
and still I try to use them; because they are pretty. Because
I feel like thunder often, dance like snow; because
I am living. Because his arms were made of roots,
and I wanted to trust cultivation. Because the sky tastes
of lilac and honey; because I am breathing because its wound
has made more room inside my chest. Because I lunged
when hungry and almost used my teeth; because
a body seems heavier after it’s dead, even though it isn’t.
You can heft its corpse anywhere without cooperation
if you have the stamina. If you’re big and strong enough.

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