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Passage

It’s hard to tell what will be important. The river
is high again and so are the teenagers encrusting
its edges, beady-eyed and black-clad, sideways
glancing, suspicious as crows. Each in the cluster
a dead version of yourself: one scratching peace
signs into the dirt with her toe. One singing
ugly. One poking a drowned worm, expressionless.
And you stand apart, head cocked, remembering
that the French for to happen also means to arrive,
that sometimes we say deceased when we mean
departed. The obscure chorus of your own life
keeps cawing into the diamond dark, under the roaring
of each body you inhabit, the waters, the others
you’ve flocked to, even when all you can hear
are your own hard swallows, or the sweet shriek
of those far-off trains you suspect are coming
to claim you. To lay open the hills you haven’t seen.

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Petals

after Jay DeFeo

Nude, you stand before the painting
you will sculpt for another
seven years — your eyes are closed,

your feet apart, your arms spread
like wings about to rise. Rays that you
will chisel into petals

blaze from your body at
the center of a star, the beginnings
of a rose breaking forth —

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Autobiography

And we will not remember everything.
We invent to fill the gaps, to make a story
with which we can live.

We invent: this is who I am.

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Butterfly Pavilion

I stand before the cocoons, waiting
for a twitch in the shells, a crack revealing
a colorful wing. There are none.

The cocoons are pinned
to cork boards, each dangling
from its tip, ordered
by species and country of origin.

Some look like snails.
Some look like tiny black bugs.
Some are the green of the first leaves of spring.

Nothing today.

I turn to the butterflies
around me, broken
out of their shells, dotting the forest
with their bright colors.

They flit from flowers to leaves, pause
on branches, their legs arched,
their wings folded. Once

they lift their wings, they launch into flight.

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Island

Before I was born, the sea rolled up
to my grandparents’ house, but the view
I knew was the strip of asphalt

beyond the barbed wire. The garden
was overgrown with mango, guava,
and jackfruit we picked ripe

off the branches, the sole rambutan
that could not bear fruit, the coconut
decaying from within. I caught

butterflies. I flicked my wrist, pressed
their small brown wings. They left
skeins of powder on my fingers. Then

I let them go. I imagined the sea
rose and flooded the garden. The coconut
fell and bobbed in the waves, too dry

and hard to eat, the shell broken
only by a knife.

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Faraway Places

Desire makes us face ourselves. The selves
we keep at bay want to break out of our bodies.

I wonder if the saying that women cannot read maps is meant
to keep us from venturing out on our own.

Maps are guides to our dreams,
where we want to go and who we want to be.

I heard a crack that sounded
like a thunderbolt, but it was not the sky.

Dust blows in the wind to faraway places, washed
out to sea and rolled back to shore.

Maps hold the stories of our lives, a record
of journeys into the unknown.

I leave it for the waves to reclaim, the sand to fill,
the hole I make in my wake.

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The Plant’s Eye

This is speculation I know but
idol flowers have always born
our mean-making scissors

Consider scissors nature’s trope
deploying astonishing devices

The pitcher
marooned and white
not attractive unless

you reinforce the species
w/ a question of mimicry
intended to scare Victorians

An arc of corseted breasts
crowned w/ clitoria

Consider an insect
evolved to conceive
as female and male

captivatingly from behind
A frenzy of intercourse

ensures pollination
Our factory is olfactory
tactile attention not just to

simple chemicals
signals so far as creatures are things
to secure pollination or a meal

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For the Least Dead Brains

These synthesize molecules

These design brains

Animals sometimes attract a flower
So a hummingbird slips her tender tongue from her hovering
needle-like bill

But often animals repel
even destroy outright

flowers/ poisons
lick frogs’ viscous skin

Here—one species of hairy prick because a powerful-death-dealing
      selective-
predator eyes
the great evolution of pesticides

Designed to kill is rendered better to repel/ confound/ cancerous facts
to expand the astounding

earning potential

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Pressed Against This Smart Glass

Happen to find yourself a particular afternoon notice a makeshift
	craft
floating through the narrow and bounded by steep shoulders
	waterway

Notice fairies harnessed/ boiled a ramshackle armada of miracles
	from the comparative wilderness caught that afternoon
care evidently distrusting the order ‘wanted alive’

Hollowed out logs lashed to a skinny man w/ a burlap sack deemed
	to be snoozing
A rent in the net under the weight of streams blanketed with moss

The sun already knows my nickname
An arrow shot clean through my ribs
Clock fragmented clots of day

plan/ plant/ drain the fertile forest hills
The wilderness riding me
out across out of print autobiography

w/ a resonance of mathematics learned bargaining sharply
for apples can tease murderers and settlers to domesticate the frontier
	with old world exotics

Disparagement might return a golden habitat
an emblem of marriage
from man’s peculiar craft

Passengers point at a sign
working for food
waiting for the bumblebee to wake up to hover among wide eyed

We give credit the power domestication represents
take to dance
Generations assume naive scenes
Animals sit it out

Nutritious acorns buried any arrangement with us long before
boatloads dependent on bank territory or at least the folk hero
	I figured

Modest our orchard or/
our childlike wishful/ wistful thinking
how lost

We accept fate in the tang of strangeness sweetened beyond
	recognition
a blemish free plastic dimension
one all-purpose-single-use-just-as-described-cheap-fake-sugar
	substitute for the strong desire to
	live to

lounge in queerness
with no address
Hallow defiance
a night swim

a vegan frontier
do you mind
to ride a horse or punish a worm

Children are not rumors

For some cis-godfearing-rapist-white-men emphasis relies on their
	dress/
color of skin/ mitigation/ migration/ maps

Some far flung account/ song led to the river
the reality and the pipe littered behind

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Help a Hundred Billion Honeybees Powder Their Thighs

Fact is we’ve been aware of indifference to the flower taking part in
every being

As acorns witness somewhat self-centered angiosperms move freely
trial and error find the best way to induce mater by playing

Or flowers manage to choose the exact moment seduced
off its knobby charms

Clever purposeful fungus conceives
of rotting meat

We care about making copies
Cost and taste make us mortals risk covid for a burger and fries

Time and location select countless generations
Design and catenation are culled by miracle

Trivial semiconscious evolution insists
as this novel strain mounts deaths

a token inventing/ insider/ outlaw contingent desires apparel and
impunity

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