The Nameless Woman

We have attempted christenings guerrilla-
style, flinging water from the second
and third floor balconies like hand grenades.
Librarians can’t shelve her, and the post
offices pile up with letters to
or from her. The taxonomists have tried
to find her twig by planting countless orchards.
We draw genomes and genealogies
from memory, in hopes of conjuring her
like alchemists. A group’s been gathering
night and day at the far edge of the field
to read out lists of names from every culture--
Kehinde, Lakshmi, Isabella, Asdza,
Elizabeth, Anisha, Dipti, Anne,
Priya, Sam, Margot--
                  sometimes she comes
only to join us, calling into the woods.

Greguería

To be human is to always be
becoming someone else
who makes the same mistakes.

Skin

My skin is an attentive
listener, it brims
with pent-up weeping,
red from the exertion,
when it hears
the sun’s long, lonely stories
seeping out of heaven.

My skin remembers
what the stove, the soap,
the bramble whisper.

Like those cards
libraries no longer
insert in covers,
charting the readers,
my skin keeps
the world’s attentions.

Draped in a shifting
landscape through whose
hills and fields
of hairs I hear,
my skin blends the fine
vibrato of the mosquito,
with the swelling
to crescendo
of the wasp’s gavotte,

and by it as by candlelight
I peruse the breeze
like a letter
from a lover overseas.

Janus Revisited

All is dazzle and dark. Don’t fall
for modern philosophies-- it was all

always dualities: glory all-colored,
void all-voids. Some days God

existed, others the only voice
empty and thin, was the wind between

our offices. I closed my eyes and saw
galaxies. I opened my eyes, and a second

lens of anxieties benighted them.
Looking back, was not night

co-eternal with day, left co-eternal
with stayed, surfeit co-heir

to the fruits of our striving
with blight?

Haiku

       BURNING IN MY CHEST --

                       ON A RUN IN THE NIGHT

I INHALED A FIREFLY

The Sumac Bush

I’m startled by this sumac
increasingly resplendent
every time I see it,

growing over my neighbor’s
driveway. I so want to
get at what it is, to describe

the redness of its fruit
deepening past crimson,
deepening past ruby.

I want to understand by starting
as I usually do, with it
is like. But it is

more and more like
itself only, and chastening,
its color seems to proclaim

that a day comes when
the time for naming
will be over. Soon,

it seems to say,
it will take no imagination
to see things as they are.

Exercise in Conduplicatio (repetitions)

Ploce

 The drowning one cries, “Help! Help!”  

Paroemion

Hurry! He hails, heed his harrowing holler!  

Anaphora    

He weakens! He won’t last long!

 He is the last one left alive in the wreck!

Diacope

His arms flail, his arms flutter!

Epistrophe
Yes, his flailing arms flutter

on the water, like bathing seabirds flutter

Anatanaclasis

and he waves and he sinks and he rises!

Soon he will disappear in the waves!

Syncope

He will collapse, insensible, into darkness!

Bruises

They shapeshift with the hours
in her skin, lilac to forsythia
polygons of porphyry

inscribed with scratch marks
which outline the subcutaneous’
succulent shadows

like the mortar between tesserae
in a Pompeian mosaic.
Unfurling, polychrome

peacocks: think, emeralds
winking through the black
carapace of pyroclastic rock,

think goblets of purpura.
Penumbra, and penumbra
and not a freckle left

solitary in space
---no plane of skin
unorbited. Instead

moles, birthmarks, glint,
clots in the rubble
of a sacked city,

strings in a supernova.

Note

This poem was patterned on an equation lifted from the first 7 stanzas of Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel" which may be read here.

Cookie Manifesto

I

Even a stale cookie provides comfort, a cookie from the back of the fridge, hard, half-frozen, like a heart in mourning.

In the beginning was the dough, and the dough was made fresh, and smelled delicious. And there was much moaning and gnashing of teeth.

II

Ask not what you can do for a cookie, but what a cookie can do for you.

Pump the cookie full of performance enhancing drugs like vanilla extract and baking soda until its chocolate chips bulge like pug’s eyes.

III

Serve yourself the cookie individually, on a teacup saucer.

Dunk only your enemies in milk. Stop eating cookies with accompaniment. Let the thick cream of cookie plaster up the inside of your mouth.

IV

Tear the cookie jar from the shelf, tear the cookies themselves from the jars. Smash the cookie jars in every house you visit, in an iconoclasm of shame.

Whisper cookies to your secrets.

Simply Perfect Sweet Potatoes

a found and markov'd poem

Heat oven to 400° F.
Make It

Variation
Pierce each sweet potato several times with the sweet potato.
Piercing each sweet potato intensifies their sweetness.

Variation
Top with 1 tablespoon of sweet potatoes.

Variation
Make a slit in the temperature.

Variation
If you crave something over the top, try some walnuts in adobo, a pinch of maple syrup, a handful of applesauce or honey, jarred ginger, burnt orange, crystallized chipotles, or caramelized sour cream.

Variation

Top with the tines of a fork

Julia Child Emphasizes Asparagus

found and markov'd poem The show opens with Child stressing the importance of asparagus, the exceptional taste of asparagus, the importance of preparing asparagus. Child emphasizes the importance of cook and eat asparagus and her ingredients over heat asparagus. Child demonstrates how to judge, purchase, and salt. She demonstrates how it can be served cold as well as a substitute for a custard, or a change. Child stresses over heat unusual in a salad course. Child stresses over how much she asparagus. She points over heat until it becomes a sparagus. Child emphasizes the French way, you preparagus.

(--)ily

Enter Emily: Anchoritic anomaly, imprisoned in Amherst -- an insubordinate inhabitant -- immured, immobilized, in anxiety (anorexia?) -- Enacting an intimate, invisible insurrection, Emily envisioned empire, immortality, amorous encounters-- engendered ingenious images-- ennobling, unnerving, enduring images -- images enfolding images -- analogies -- intensities in indian ink invoking entities, energies, infinities in an instant -- America! An Amazon! Animals, insects, amphibians -- emeralds, amethysts, ambers, indigos -- anemones, inlets! -- indigenous angiosperms, inselbergs immolated in amaryllises! -- Intuiting amity in enmity, invigoration in ennui, ennoblement in entropy, Emily ended enduring endogamous antagonism. Indecent interpretations. Inserted injustices. Impaired, incised, analyzed, embargoed. Entombed, inaudible, in anthologies. Ended in infamy. In mis- Understandings. “Miss Emily.” “Poetess.” -- Missing the indefinable defined in the em --

Rubus Occidentalis

Black caps

ruby through obsidian

unripe sparks in the green,

I glimpse you -- your inflamed

hearts, tangled in their summer

tack. Behold, my bold bright

beauties sleeping, your beloved

bridegroom comes through

the thicket. To my lips

I press you with the pink

caps of my fingers, dappled

purple and pierced by your

displeasure. Gracelessness

has cost me, but my arms,

laced with the raised red thread

your thorns inlaid, will carry

you over the threshold

of my teeth. This tongue

where you have lain,

and stained, shall sing

your aubades even when

your taste has faded, for I forage with

the haste that others throw away

in prayer -- to saints aglow

in gilded alcoves and

in their backseat or motel-room affairs.