Tiber

I came to Rome with a lover
who held a secret he didn’t know,
his fate a whisper in a catacomb
a torn note tucked among bones.

When his sturdy legs
stumbled weak upon stones
I took him to a hospital on an island
in the Tiber River.

A place of old miracle
where the god of medicine
drew venom from snakes
mixed an elixir to thin blood
to heal the heart—
a pill on the tongue of the ailing.

After doctors found a tumor
in my lover’s brain,
I asked Panacea—the goddess of cure—
to bless him with a healing rod.

She told me to find a priest
to anoint his brow.
I was given a rosary instead,
a souvenir of her apology.

The late autumn sun
followed me home.
I unpacked his clothes
with tears that rinsed
the smell of his skin away.

One night I crossed the bridge
tucked myself between the railing,
held a space for chaos—
a pill on the tongue
of a wild churning river.

Bear Bells

It is midnight in a tent
in the mountains.
Tonight, we prepare
for backpacking in Montana—
to sleep in wild places,
smell like trees.
Yesterday
I bought bear bells
to wear on trails,
hikers say it prevents surprise—
let animals know I am here.

As my ears tune to wind,
as night animals awaken,
as a pine tree
brushes the side of our tent.
As cooking gear rattles
with a snort, then a growl,
as you wrestle in a sleeping bag—
scramble for glasses,
then find the zipper—stumble out.
And I follow your underwear
with my flashlight.

As I spot a raccoon
just beyond the tent.
As he suckles peanut butter
from a squeeze tube
beneath the tree where
we hung our food—
a rucksack
suspended in high branches.

As the raccoon sniffs the air,
tries to gauge your intent,
as you lunge at him with kayak paddle
and he lumbers away.
As I try to remember when I agreed to a trip
more rugged than romantic.

And I drug my feet then,
as you ran forward—
bought me a new backpack
and kissed me hard to seal the deal.

I hoped the trip was an opening—
that I might find a branch
that holds your wilderness
held under tooth and claw—
that you might drop your guard.

Then I would untie the knots
that hold your secrets
and I would watch them drop—
wait until dark
to stealthily explore you.

Last Rites

I didn’t recognize the priest
as he walked up the driveway
in a soccer shirt
and Adidas pants.

“Be not afraid, I’m here to give
your mother’s Last Rites.”
he said.

It was 10:30 at night.

I saw something in his eyes
as if he’d found
a fruit tree
in the desert.

As if he once arranged chairs
around a table
where he was
the main course.

And I let him in the house,
followed his prompt—
called to old saints.

Words to thatch
a nest—
a respite for her long flight
as she labored
in breath—
a rattle in the lungs.
As she primped
her wings—
found
a way out.

Einaan See Eight

….

Probably all my encounters
are existential jambalaya
—Terrance Hayes

….

long gasps of smokes
…………………….filtered through a grilled window
………….into the dark,
I was sitting at the desk, writing
stolen verses from dead writers,
when you came to my mind,
a gravel road at the end of a highway
I am proud of my weaknesses,
losing you through roiling sediments
………………………………………………..of last night.
There is always an enervating
talk of the town. Every time you and I
walk inside the door, hand in hand,
there is a man accused and arrested
for the sole crime of existing.
We took the exit early trying to avoid
the rush, faces of men and women
new to this land, walking in pilgrimage,
the green junipers in awe let them
clear their heads one at a time.
I am amazed by their patience
with a time already stolen by their
colonizers, and here I am avoiding
making eye contact. A no-man
coming from a no-man’s-land:
you say shoes’ shoe and Joshua’s
Josh
It’s that simple.
I don’t correct them sometimes.
Sometimes I am one of them.

Yellow Wallpaper Resident Alien

….

Tie my shoes, my self-portrait running for fun
in the deep woods, poisoned with the soot
of another forest fire in the distance, another Oregon

I didn’t know how to spell the states in this country
but I reached out to join your name with mine:
they learned to divide us with hyphenated schemes

Just as you are, I know how your face looked in the golden
days when our palms were covered with glue from sticking
posters of the future inside a school building with broken gate

How do you believe there is a hunger in the blissfully unaware?
The dark times don’t darken our hearts, we become just
more distant in the most oblong parallels ever visible

only the waters

….

Forecast is gloomy despite the sun breaking out in pillars of light inside this one-bedroom apartment.

I walked about two miles to get home. The guy over the counter told me I can’t have an ID until my green card application gets processed. So I am a nobody until then.

Inside the bedroom, she is in tears. HelloFresh charged her sixty-five bucks without her knowing. She was enjoying the meals and making them. It gave her a sense of power. But now it’s all radiant red spots on her face as she feels guilty, crumpled up like an open half bag of Doritos she loves so much. Red spots like red dust specked across the bagged dioramas.

So much life has been sucked out of us.

We keep giving, giving, and giving, but for some reason it’s never been enough. I close the door on her as she wants some space. I think I guess it’s all over. July 15th. My parents’ marriage anniversary, and I am losing our marriage to HelloFresh. Is it a cliche phrase? Losing a marriage? English is not my first language. But I pretend.

Isn’t everything cliched when it comes to maintaining a marriage?

We got married out of love, out of fear of losing each other. The US government wants to see how on earth it is possible to love somebody from a different land, a different language and decide to do taxes with them until death do them apart. I can see Uncle Sam’s hand inside a bag of Doritos as he watches our marriages crumble down like individual Dorito chips inside his salivating mouth.

Two point three per one thousand. From those who actually report. Imagine the number that never reports, or estrangement, or slowly falling out of love trying so hard to stick together.

We break apart but still remain close inside the mouth of our giant swallower. We lose everything. We disintegrate.

Clouds outside are coming down on us in the sweltering burst of sunburned slaps across our skin. A pandemic never ends. We welcome another earth-ender inside our ecosystem and call it quits at the dinner table. My wife keeps weeping in the bedroom. I can hear her over the sink water running aimlessly into the upturned pots and pans, as I wash them in the kitchen.

My parents stay awake hoping to see a glimpse of us together on the other side of the world. From their bent and broken bodies to a tiny screen, I get to delegate two countries, two cultures that float together like oil on water. I get agitated when I cannot explain things to them. Why are we so close but so apart at the same time? Why do these relics of crusty old societal values scare us? Can’t we too defy them as they’ve done, as their ancestors did for centuries and pretend it’s all okay?

I scrape off the leftover curry stains from a non-stick pan and rinse them with water. One crusty flake at a time. Wish it was that simple doing so when it came to our inane family values that desperately try to hold us despite resentment, despite bitterness that grows over time, unwashable, insoluble. Two cultures don’t blend in. They either exist side by side. Or one has to go.

It starts to rain finally. I can no longer hear her weeping from the bedroom. Only the waters.

Stray

Twins of droning tv’s
outmatched fans tease poor
forms too liquid to move

confused octopus kids,
Gordian on the couch
mother in the love seat

sixty-fie pound lap dog
shedding fur, trapped under
the heavy of August

like a dream of daytime
waking hours hazy
as drunken memories

till sonic boom jaws snap
over stray cat yowling
a living room grenade

echo chamber screaming
as beloved tail wags
disemboweled the stranger

Seventeen Seconds

One one thousand
two one thousand
three
…………seconds of silence
and
words I assumed were
eyeblink easy
suddenly feel flimsy,
a sheet of paper in a puddle,
reality
taking one shot for every second
four one thousand
five one thousand
six
steps before catching the walls
anchor
for the spinning room
before crashing
hitting
the floor so hard, nose crumples
leaking
patterns,
…………illustrations of unvoiced nightmares
before anyone moves
to help him up
seven one thousand,
and I consider an awkward laugh
an attempt to rephrase
to
laugh off the weight
multiplying with each
eight one thousand
nine one thousand
ten one thousand,
and she looks away

The weight
of eleven one thousand
too much for my shoulders,
a heart
shedding shards
like a dying flower
till
…………at seventeen seconds
I’m walking away
from a pile of scarlet petals
a fragile
puddle on the floor

Why I Want To Be a Pastry

Croissants don’t break bones,
don’t
……….entertain thoughts of holding down another croissant
beating it
……….into submission
……….……….grunting violation
………………..……….……….in blood.

Donuts don’t break bones,
don’t
……….Segregate by sprinkles, chocolate coverings, vanilla filling
……….hang others till their bodies stop twitching
have never
……….Whipped other donuts
……….……….till tears filled the night sky

Bagels don’t break bones
don’t
……….weep disappointment as they beat their children
have never
……….disowned gay bagels
……….……….hurling them into the streets.

No Pulled Punches

Molasses legs taught my fingers to fist,
words
too flimsy a shield
for the pipes and knives
that stitched my neighborhood together.

When the Orchard Is Gone

I will grow a forest: weedy
box elders, fast-spreading pine.

I will cast the spores of mushrooms,
seed them throughout, those cool-

season eaters of dirt
and flesh. Perhaps I’ll live

long enough to harvest, but if
I succumb to hunger, leave my body

in the grass. The heart of the world flutters
like a bird in its failings.

To the thing that comes next,
I would contribute.

Faced with the death of trees
I’m forced to believe in death

believe in the way I believe that I once
caught a ten-dollar ride in a van, fitted

with benches made of lumber, traveled
the highway to Darjeeling (beltless),

how when we stopped to let a young
woman puke, I almost collapsed

beneath the crush of white Himalayas,
a white moon peaking over jagged

edges setting the world on tilt. Mountains
crumble down into sand someone might

dig from a hill, like we did as kids,
unearthing pockets of rotting granite

that crumbled like sugar-cookies. I’ve peered
inside the metropolis of a fallen sequoia

and photographed the wild crossings
that once were her guts and whispered

greetings to her babies, and all of this
I have done and never measured death.

But show me a dying oak, my uncle’s oak,
framing his view of a lake, going gray

with wilt and an entire evening of news
without one word of a species

passing, and now I know death’s measure,
know to be afraid of trees dropping in forests

or in yards, hybrid poplars rotting at the base,
branches bleaching, giant ash, the skin

hidden by bark burrowed under by beetles.
Or something simpler: my grandmother

clipped a willow branch in her twenties,
rooted it in her backyard. Grandchildren

strictly forbidden from swinging
in its branches limited themselves to only one go.

She outlived it. They took out the stump
when she moved into town, to a small house,

one without stairs. Nothing to carry us
upwards, to renewal, or some other quiet end.

*This poem previously appeared in Lakeshore Review 22 (Fall 2022).

What To Make of the Bodies

The orchard I planted for my father’s memorial
languishes. Fungus infects

the spongy trunks. They slip bark
in rings, sloughing it off like tokens that have lost

their meaning, like dry skin, like ash. I’d like to dig
him up, my father, turn his time-torn

body loose, let the wind
flake away the graying hairs, the strands of red

that still clung in his beard. I would grind
his bones with the gravel of my driveway to mingle

with the ribs of a redbelly snake and the feathers
of the wren I wrestled from the cat.

She lies beneath the winter-burned boughs
of a pine greening at the tips, feeding

what creatures come by her. My dying
orchard. I dream of your blooming,

of petals felled by rain, caught
in grass, dissolving with the dew.

Lament

No butterflies came to the garden
this year. I could hardly stand
to look at the milkweed,

prolific but empty. My flowers
withered unvisited.
Not a single monarch. No yellow

swallowtails or blues, hardly
even a sulphur or a cabbage
white. All summer the ox-eyed

daisies naturalized, waved
their yellow masses, mixed
with the goldenrod in the perimeters

of our yard, but nothing fluttered
among them. It’s enough
to make me fold this poem

into the shape of a butterfly to launch
like a paper plane over the flower
bank if only to fill

the loneliness. Maybe this is the future:
we’ll decorate our yards with the memories
of flowers, of bees

and dragonflies and all manner
of flying or crawling bugs. A million crafters
employed to shape

them from tin, wings
attached with springs so their flapping might
comfort us, so many motherless

monkeys wrapped around our water
bottles, or chicks huddled
under lamps, a widower lunching with a photo

of his wife, or the insomniac
who plays a recording of leaves
turning, of waves

lapping stone, of birds
breaking through morning. Until we
forget. The air

this summer has been so still
only a poem can float there. It rides
the red hum of the sun’s

descending and crests a hill
out of sight. But listen.
Do you hear how it whistles?

How it answers the sky’s
gloaming blue?