To be eldest is to be the sentence
before the trial.

Even the exodus left me to wreck
and conquer.

All for a heritage
of lack.

I’ve ruined, drunk, and promised.
Botched my anthems.

I was not born here,
I could never.

I’ve had my own zip code
for years now.

I am tired.
Mine is a country

of excisions.
A citizen unother.

Give me your weary-to-the-bone American Dream myth
and I’ll give you the cab driver in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

who says that he’s a secular Muslim, Ottoman Turkish,
and not the sort of man who spray-paints Allah Akbar

as imprimatur on the brick street beside the Paris dead.
But, instead, the sort blathering on about the iPhone 6s

with the feature where you press and hold the picture
for a sunroof-movie of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge

into Manhattan. He wants riders to hear him translate
the constellations of gang graffiti on the infrastructure,

as if all veterans of the barrel bombings in Syria speak
fluent Blood, this wicked-consecrated city a press-and-

hold Heaven. He brakes. Blares the horn. Says he owns
the 1977 Smokey & the Bandit Trans Am with the T-top

and the wing-splayed raptor decaled in gold on the hood.
Says it in a voice of guarding the pass so others can travel

beyond war, beyond battlefields and the carrion feeders
whose riotous deportment some know better than God.

With my arms clasped across my chest,
wrist atop wrist
bitten fingers emboss bloodied half-moons onto crisscrossed palms.

I try to achieve buoyancy,
name this practice
absolution, the
conquering over the
waves.

A man passes by, smile reaching all the way to his gentle eyes
and asks me if I know that I’m signing the word love,
did I know that?
And I will admit I didn’t.

When I was learning to swim my teacher
tried to teach me the dead man’s float was the only chance for whole survival
but I could not unclasp my arms
even when she told me that in the water,
the weight of my fists would drive into my sternum and sink me deeper.

How can I name everything holy but religion itself
These fists are sacred weapons,
the soothing balm of controlling yourself and yourself alone.
A stoic face can still smile wide.

It is safe to go outside so
I brush my cats on the rusting balcony
to avoid their winter coats matting into the fibers of the carpet.
I pull away handfuls of white
watch the morning breeze blow it away like a cottonwood snow
imagine a bird’s nest made only of fur
delicately woven together.

The first symptom is loss of taste so I go to the Latin American market
and buy a jar of habeneros, place
a whole one on my tongue
and if the heat causes tears  to spring to my eyes
then that is a good thing
if the tears lead to the dam breaking that will be a better one
Both mean I am still alive, can still feel.

Even though I have had her for two years now
my former street cat is still touch starved
and I envy her courage to fling herself onto laps
and to rub her face on outstretched hands
to grab onto the affection when she needs it

I still hold myself back
Tell my friends I hate hugs,
go on dates just so I have an excuse
to touch another’s hand.
I’ve promised myself that when the gate lifts
I will throw myself everyone with arms even slightly outstretched
but I think we all know that’s a lie.
I’ve forgotten what voices sound like without the tin
of the phone speaker surrounding them,
what it looks like for someone to move their body fluidly
without the jerking delay of video.

I promise to write letters,
to call my grandmother back,
to let my grandfather tell me again how to get to his house
even though it was the first place outside
my hometown I learned to drive to.

Outside the search area, a wheat field whisks away sound.
A cross on a collarbone
shines in sunlight like an unseen beacon. When the wind blows over her at night
does the wind know she is already gone? Does she know? Of course not. Death
only troubles the living left behind to feel it. Beetles crawling

through her hair in search
of a soft spot to rest. Flashlights will find her
and she will pass through the back doors of her family’s church one last time
but it will still be too late. Let the tired dogs sleep tonight.

The night we first met, I wasn’t living
in a ‘78 station wagon lurking in the playground shadows of the parking lot.

You weren’t drunk that night
when you told me what love meant and that it most resembled me. Wind on my
face
doesn’t remind me of the summer nights I’ve surrender to wild heat too soon.

The clenched fist sky opened up
to feed me strawberries. That’s the real reason I was late. His lovemaking could
never compare to yours. Your awkward hips knocking against my thighs didn’t
feel like revenge that night. You never saw me cry

and pretend not to notice. The first baby was not an accident. The two that
followed
weren’t mistakes. None of them were constant reminders
of my miscalculations of time or cursed calendars. And none of them have his smile
instead of yours.

You had the heart of a hummingbird, the tongue
of a hornet. Sweet sting. I tried to be a flower for you, or
a nectar. Sickening. I can’t help but be
attracted to disaster.

You had the hands of a sculptor;
I placed myself between them, wet clay.
I wanted you in me
……………maneuvering my ribs.

I tried to be both: the pot, & the lighter.
Something you would reach for.
I held your tiny fingers, let my own grow unfamiliar.
I drew them, & one-line sketches of your face.
You traced them, in a daze.
Pencil never leaving page–because how could it ever
…………………………………………………..want that escape?

I wanted to be fired, coated in glass.
I thought you could have made me into anything,
and I wanted more than anything
to be something else.

I didn’t know what I was
when I met you & my hands began to sweat,
the only words for girls who want to kiss
girls I knew curses, disintegrations on my
dry and panicked tongue even
as I unfurled it into your mouth & pretended it a safe place.
Every admission I gave you: a drunken intimation &
I’m sorry.
I didn’t know     what I was     when you bought me
that gas-station-rose but I went home
with it staining my face & used
our empty bottle of Sofia wine for a vase.

Did you know how much I ached for you?                              Did I?
Much too late.

You told me no one’s place is
in someone else’s chest & I swear I heard
you even over the sound of my hammering
one into yours.

I select a dented copper kettle, a silver fork
…………..scrolled with acanthus leaves to add
……………………….to the anarchy in my cupboards.

This cream pitcher etched with trailing vines,
…………..inscribed Mark and  Janine, 1991, could
……………………….hold miniature roses. On a rack

I sift through a jumble of silk dresses,
…………..threads secreted by caterpillars who
……………………….gnawed mulberry leaves, spun cocoons,

hoping for resurrection. Tables are piled up with
…………..what’s outdated, stained, faded; a broken
……………………….thermometer registers ninety degrees, but I

slip on slivers of ice on the grass. A doll with a
…………..missing eye slumps in a corner. It’s easy to
……………………….lose myself among these objects dense

with the memories of strangers, now jilted, forsworn,
…………..discarded, abstracted from their real homes,
……………………….those places where someone loved them.

A garden wheelbarrow
fills with rain, worms escape
their drowned burrows, a toad
squats on flagstones, expelled
……………from its leaf shelter.

Inside her house, I clean
every room, scrub bathrooms
gleaming white, while rain
traces patterns on windows,
……………focuses the light.

Goldenrod sways outside
the nursing home under
gold-leafed trees. I sort her
clothes, sweaters where moths
……………left their testaments,

pack up fragile souvenirs,
letters, photographs,
a lace-fringed card:
aides-mémoire
……………no longer needed.

You see them at Starbucks scrambling
below patio tables searching for pastry crumbs.
These are the Brewer’s blackbirds, the English sparrows,
the common grackles—disenfranchised souls bereft
of countryside and village green. Some limp on deformed
feet; others hobble on one leg, victims of urban treacheries.

I watch as a Brewer’s blackbird struggles beneath my
table; its unfolded tail and drooped wing drag gritty
concrete, plumes ragged, worn and torn.  The bird
turns her head, looks at me with a golden eye.

What desperate thing drives them here, to this alien
ground, usurps their wildness, takes their spirit?