Cebu 1

Once in Lausanne, under the loose black soil

came undone the girl whose father braided her hair,

offsetting the ends with polished fish bones

when her eyes (now gone

to white) still blinked blue.

Two boys on a pale horse will ride by me,

laughing,

while they wonder what sad man

chases a sunset with both hands tied behind his back?

What man waits sleepless for three months

watching for sugary petals taking root at her eyes

to burst and blossom,

and giving from them new light to see?

I hold in the shadows of mountains, soundless,

drawn by her delicate fire. 

Vignettes

Where the great plain of the dinner table

stretches until it consumes a horizon of

Midwestern sky billowing out into

golden streaks of ninteen-sixty-one,

my mother sputters and hums at the edges

like her black Oldsmobile cutting across

cracked and gnarled highways that split across

the open countryside like the tree branches

my brother and I would hang from as kids.

Pass the salt.

My brother kicks at me under the table,

his little bird-legs like arrows darting

and diving into my shins, but I don’t

dare turn my father’s grimace into an open-mouthed

war siren like the ones we listened for in class,

expecting a swash of red men cutting across our

golden fields while nuclear warheads singing through

the atmosphere turned the cold war hot.

My family hovers like heat at dinnertime.

Pass the water.

Unknown Depths

upon a scacchic trevally,

a boethic isba quelmed,

the reg avayed, and finally,

the o vrille was helmed.

though the yarraman was adiated,

the folgoth yandied still.

yauld ebernines unabated

fashed against nibel.

when the vorant abatis broke,

the nazold went gly,

then halimous kelds of raad spoke,

and weeshy ivi.

Concessions

I will stop using my body as a brick wall

for you.

Expectation, the rise and undoing,

is a learned thing.

 

For you,

stepping out from under your skin

is a learned thing

(as it always is).

 

Stepping out from under your skin,

as a visceral child understood

– as it always was –

softness kept us naked.

 

As the visceral child understood

expectation, the rise and undoing

of softness keeping us naked

I stopped using my body as a brick wall.