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Childless

A stranger’s pregnant belly
plops over elastic-waisted jeans,
and a wish kicks its legs
inside me. I wish it

would sit still.
Forest fires blaze
through Quebec, orange
smoke obscuring the sky

of the mid-Atlantic,
ushering in the new
normal: Tyger Tyger,
burning bright,

burning brush
and rushing through
subdivisions, making
ash out of loved lives.

Is delivering a child
into the smoldering of
the Anthropocene
an act of selfishness

or hope? Still, I want
to feel my breasts
milk-heavy,
like little wine bags.

When I hold
my friend’s tender
newborn, I pretend
she is my own—

journey out of her nursery
into the secret life
where I am a mother,
where the little spittle

on my shoulder
is my daughter’s
spittle, and therefore
made lovely. Her tiny fists

yank my loose hair
and pull me back
into the room
where I coo

and cuddle her
as her big eyes search
my face, saying nothing
of the coming dark.

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The Other Woman

Rotten stem of a girl. Snakes
for brains. I once was a siren
wrapped in garbage. No,

I was the garbage. I made a game
out of ruining: if I let
a spaghetti strap slip off

my shoulder, swirled my tongue
around a glass’s salted rim,
and unhinged the jaw

of my want, I could swallow
entire lives, how a woman pinned
all her happiness in the soft

heaven of her love’s beard.
I enjoyed hurting the women
I didn’t know, enjoyed knowing

my pile of flesh and grunts
could snatch the attention
of men away from the women

who called them home. Like
the woman who called
and called while the phone went

to voicemail, while I conjured
shivers up and down her beloved’s
muscled calves. I was good

at slithering and bad at sitting still.
I’m sorry. I didn’t understand loving
yet, didn’t know love could be bread

and blood, sugar and sky. Now I wait
for the other woman to arrive
and make a snack out of my joy.

I am waiting for her to
chew my sinew, to clean my bones
bare and teach me despair.

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Rogue

In second grade, Kendra, the storybook
blonde girl from the manicured subdivision

who took singing lessons, said to me, quiet
and cruel, in the closet with cubbies

we kept backpacks and coats in, that I was
weird. Her eyes squinted when she said it,

like she was trying to pinpoint the exact freckle
or tremor or Kmart crewneck that contained

my weirdness. Jenny with the light brown
pixie said I stared out the window

too much. And my teacher told my mother
I never spoke in class, wouldn’t volunteer

to read aloud, though I could read.
And they were all correct about me,

I feared, as I spent recesses playing
make-believe with myself, Frankenstein’s

monster roaming the playground, searching
for my promised companion. Some days

I was plagued by diseases the babysitter told me
she wanted to cure—Dimondale Elementary’s

first Ebola victim transversing the monkey bars
at record speed, blood dripping from my eyes.

Saturday mornings I would wake early
and start the coffee for my comatose parents,

curl up on the couch next to my big brother,
who I suspected was weird, too, and escape

into cartoons. My favorite was X-Men
because the mutants got to be heroes

for their weirdness. My hero
was Rogue, who was untouchable.

If you touched her skin, she absorbed
your life force. I never liked it

when grown-ups hugged me. I knew
it was dangerous to get too close,

that it was best to keep your gloves on
if you didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

---

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TO LISTEN ONE MUST LOVE
SEEDS.

To listen one must love seeds.
Or, to love, one must listen to seeds. I forget.
This morning on the bridge across the ancient mills,

the cart driver collecting the garbage stopped to count
the courting cattle egrets. He was crooning
their vital statistics to his shadowed assistant.

The egrets were fluffing their feathers, and
editing the stats. To listen to this morning
is to love seeds. To pull the pole beans, pop

the casings, line the pockets. Every day I gaze
upon the scales of the anona, fruited away
in the canopy of my orchard, and every day

the anona grow plumper, taking their time,
un-anxious to please me. The oranges in their nets
don’t orange. They are enjoying their green phase.

The seed banks of the world change places—the one
in Syria moves to Iraq. The one in Norway
begins to lend out seeds and then to collect.



There are gun banks buried underground—one
in Texas—these are called caches. When you dig guns up
they grow and grow. To love bodies, one must scratch holes

and listen to seeds. These. This morning picking beans,
my shoe slipped into a pocket of air. It was
a cache of vole. To love voles one must hunger,

muster hunger, desire darker ways of seeing,
seed the dark, and must love ceding.

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THE SPIDER

Yesterday I cried until there was no yogurt left
until all my mother’s cabbages rolled out
of the hallway closet, until the river crouched
into a green pool and blinked, I cried
until the too much order signaled its disorder
until a box filled with little bars of soap
appeared until the spider finished rolling
up its white package of meat in the garden
until the neighbor’s barbecue pits were
loaded up onto the back of the truck and
the children popped up like mushrooms
though clearly there had been no rain.

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NAMING THE ANIMALS

Shopping  on  Friday  F  tells his   wife   about   the   animals.
There   is  a  mouse   that’s  made a   nest   in   the   sea  chest
where  he   keeps  the   rum. And  a  rat  that  is  chewing  the
feet  of  the  furniture.  He  forgets  its  name. It  is  a   rat   or
a   mouse,  he   feels  very certain,   and  there  is  a  roach  in
the  bathroom.  Well,  it isn’t  in  the  bathroom, it  is   at  the
foot of his wardrobe, but his wardrobe is near the bathroom.
If   he   sees    it    again,   he    will   spray.   There  are   gecko
stars  upon  the  screen  but   those  are  just  their  feet,   not
really  stars,  and  guinea  pigs  in  the   garden, but  we knew
that  before.   On   Sunday  F   enters  the  bathroom,  poison
bottle   in   hand.   But   the  only  thing  in  the  bathroom  is
his  wife,  who  looks   up   from  the  mirror. On  her  finger-
tip is  a  long thin  whisker,  or  possibly  a  hair.

---

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GRANTED

You,   said   the   wife to   the  husband,  are  taking  me  for   granted.  What,
answered the husband, would you prefer to be taken  for? In  the  husband’s
pocket  were  a  wine  opener, a business card, and  a piece of  lint.  I  should
like  very  much  to   be  taken,  replied   the  wife,   after   combing    through
the   lemons,  for   an   impertinence. The  husband  looked  at  the  wife. The
husband  took off  his sunglasses  to  better  see  her  pupils. No, no, said the
wife.  Now  you are  taking me for an aperture, and  that  is  what  got us into
this  dark  place  to  begin  with.  To  illustrate,  she  listed  all  the times  that
she,  as an  aperture,  had  had  to illustrate. I  did  not  realize, answered the
husband,  that  an  aperture  was  so  dutiful.  The   husband  walked  twenty
paces and  sat down. He  began  carefully  to   persuade   some waves  into  a
harbor.  Then  he  directed  them  to  lap. Here, said the  husband  hopefully,
is  an  incipient  setting  for  an  impertinence.

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SEED BANK

My parents could hardly get through breakfast
without mentioning sex. As in, I told you
I had a cold last night, but you insisted,

in lieu of bless you after my father sneezed.
We never invited any school friends over.
To love is to learn new habits, with holes in them,

for a vole or a mole, they too hunger, for a seed
or surprise— for example, an aboriginal grass
with exceptional nutritional value sold in hip

restaurants in capital cities at night, which
is how I discover decades later the weeds
in my garden were chicory. Meanwhile,

my father and brother discuss planting organic
—you can make a killing if you pitch it right
and if the insects, weeds, drought, and rain

don’t mess up a crop. Life isn’t a hobby,
after all. To love is to discern which fields
will become habitual, which words will turn over,

which pauses will yield sturdy seed banks,
which silences will reduce the water content
by 1% and which will reduce the temperature



in the room 10°F, for, taken together,
this will double the seed lifespan.
Which trees, for example, can be grafted

in such a way as to yield oranges, grapefruit,
lemons, and pomelos, all from a single trunk.
And which pecan trees can survive a watering

by the progeny with a gasoline can—he said
he was only trying to help, though, knowing him,
he was also trying for sparks, and for sparking

the pollinating flies, for love, it is so flighty a thing.

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compactifications
of infinite series

sometimes forever turns up inside us
small as a heartbeat      steady      forever

has a bunch of forevers in between
its ordinals kinda like stone lions

guard a driveway + each big forever
like art has small forevers

paintings of fruit or ponds with a wee island
+ reeds       compactifications everywhere

little tiny cute modular infinities
e.g. the smell of a new tennis ball

+ daddy issues like my ghosting daddy
who piously davens to each letter

of the seventy-two letters in The Name
the six hundred and twelve laws

numbers scholars say are immutable
until they mute them + they should

for god’s sake when a life’s at risk
but what is my child to the infinite



asks daddy    god doesn’t respond
god has already responded

god has made flowers that are capable
of jackhammering rock slow + soft

a productivity nightmare    this forever
of a flower      like learning to love a child

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gematria

What lovely theory: math
as a madman, dancing nancy.
Pythagoras had a cult about it
but like modern math, ascetic.

So many people hate math
or simply aren’t very precise
so their sums would be
spooky, their maths full of moons

over a harvest threshing.
o it’s a superstish, babe, we’d say
nowadays. But go back to dark,
when our fore-fore-fores made

the first number, a spell to count
the days until rain. People mapped
the fucking stars. You’re so new
+ spoiled. They mapped the stars!

Whoever figured that out
deserved the attention. There
was a line out the door,
people waiting for someone

to reassure their safe harvest.
If the star-person kissed them
it was the talk of the town.
Did the kabbalist see numbers

in your eyes, + which?

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