Pluralite des Mondes

Outside, nothing moves: only the rain
nailing the house up like a coffin.

Remember, in childhood, when it rained?
Then, the whole world sailed down the alley:

leaves, paper, old shoes, the buildings,
everything like a circus going to sea.

Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys
is closing all the doors …

and I think we’re all dead. See how the sky
sits like a tombstone on the roofs.

Our downstairs neighbor
Watered the
Concrete backyard
Twice a day religiously
To keep the dust
From his basement
Apartment until
The bare slab grew
Moss & lichen
Its own ecosystem
Water of life
We laughed at him but
One morning I went out
To the balcony hung
Over the backyard
To have a smoke—
Are you picturing
All this? It was
That time of month,
& I became
Light-headed
Bleeding through the white
Nightgown, I fell
& passed out for
A few moments
Woke with blood
Pooling
Around my head
& crotch—
But anyway, it was
Neighbor who found me and
Cared while I
Writhed in cramps
On his green love seat
Until the ambulance came
The ER was actually
Just a few blocks
Away and
When it was all done
I walked back the
Few streets over
Still in my long white bloody
Nightgown
& waist-long dark
Goth hair
A fresh stitch by my eye
Making a cross over
An old scar
Teen Madeline Usher
Or so I fancied
Walking through
Yards of dusty Zagreb roses
I wanted to control
The stream of time
Keep open the portal
To the parallel world
Where I was cared for
Something I somehow
Knew I deserved
I took on faith
As the first planes
Flew overhead

(Again, for Ty)

In this poem, you’re not dead.
You do not come to me

lying on your back, your face
gentle & quieted into

sleep. I like to think the years
backwards until we’re

small & together again. After
class we play tennis till

the sun recedes, none of us
aware of how your body

betrays itself. Here, I wipe you
clean from all that dust,

lead you upwards into a room
slippery with white, & the

doctor (this time around) cuts
open only the right spots,

leaves nothing to remind us that
you could have lived—

Here, could you have lived?
Nothing reminds us. Leave, cut

open only your right spots. This
time around the doctor,

slippery with white, leads you up-
wards to all that dust. Cleans

you. Wipes you. Your body
betrays itself, none of us aware

that the sun recedes. After tennis,
class. We were once together

& small. I like to think the years
backwards: your face gentle

& quieted into sleep, your back
lying on the floor. You do

not come to me. Dead, you’re
not in this poem.

From the pantheon of hot niggas online tonight, out pops
its most glorious cicada. Who else, Reader, but Summer,
rattling louder than a muhfugga under the fuss of high air,
crushed velvet & Black Ice air fresheners, sweeping the block
in only the loudest Deuce n’ a Quarter he could snatch?
I can smell him from here. This swamp, a ripe heat,
one crushed bud of lavender under my tongue,
one degree over peppermint & I am trying to impress.
I haven’t wanted to be someone else’s as much as I do now.
I didn’t say belong: I’m talking about romance. Smell it
from here: the tease of his call thick with frictional liquid,
the clap of twerk & shout the same & gahtdamn, my ass
feels lovely. Feeling lovely, how much can a chorus jiggle,
refrain against itself before the slap starts to purple, hollow
into language rusting itself because, as you know, dear reader,
it was hot when you got here & it didn’t stop dripping?
It was chainsweating: A screaming sling, its wet-cry,
of metal & metal. This heavy bangled spell work, sweet
as the slump of my wrist. You already know how it hangs.
2am reminds you you can see yourself glisten. Smell us
from here: Generations ready to be wrung out. The swelter.
The swagger. Extraordinary bass—it’s stank. & I am alive.
In the air, a radio girl, swinging her glory sure as the Moon
sits low, calls herself a stallion. & who am I to think
I am any less powerful?

I stand in front of paintings a long time
and think about the bones once belonging
to you and how Egon Schiele could line
a body into movement. Because you no longer
have a shape, I’ve made a practice of nearness.
A hawk lets me stroke her mid-flight,
I let comets land in my mouth,
when they’re small enough. My lover
pushes all their weight on me because I asked.
They flatten me into astonishment.
Because nothing can astonish you, I tempt
what’s alive by doubting I could love it more.
It’s a neat trick. When I use it, raccoons
visit often, their fingers closed around mud
older than me. Missy, this is me moving on.
There’s a noon rain to get caught in and many
clavicles to behold. I wish you could see this one,
tilting across a century.

^{at the Keesler AFB Post Exchange in 1987 (Biloxi, Mississippi)}

No one looked after me or my brother back then, no CPS,
no Social Workers, the SP’s couldn’t be trusted,
the off-base cops even worse.

When the P-EX mini-mart clerk told me
I wasn’t supposed to be there
and had to leave my Pork & Beans

and bread on the counter, you caught up to me in the parking lot,
my items in your tote bag.
I got caught stealing a sleeved stick of butter

the week prior, but today had returned
with the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin I found in the gutter.
All I had was that and my pocketknife for opening cans and gutting fish,

the reason my privileges were revoked.
I wish I had answered your questions—What’s going on?
Why can’t you shop here? Where are your parents?

before darting off into the night with the can and bread,
dropping the piece of money at your feet.

I’m crashing in my parents’ basement tonight
because it’s closer to my gym, and in the final days
before my final fight, even driving home takes too much energy.

My father, who at seventy is still
fighting off old age with sweat and suffering,
has waited up for me. He’s convinced
I face death in the cage to an extent that I unlikely do.
Sit down, he says. He’s always hated poetry, yet
he wants to read his father’s favorite poem to me.

The wind is blowing hard against an archer’s bow.
It must be fall because the grass is dried out
and the eagles have sharp eyes.
Snow begins to drift and the horses
travel quickly. He pauses and looks back.

When the April heatwave came, my mum sent a WeChat video from Malaysia of an evening downpour. You can’t see the rain, only the effects of it: a gasp from her mouth and a yellow flame tree reflected in the wet, shaking.

/

I see a yellow blur from far away and walk closer, disbelieving. Here is a kōwhai tree on the edge of a garden in North London, in full bloom. For a moment I do not breathe air, I breathe yellow, I breathe myself home.

/

My phone is vibrating, telling me: You have a new memory. Here is a stream of pictures collected into an album, all taken somewhere far away. Home is not a place but a string of colours threaded together and knotted at one end.

/

Kōanga, springtime, often synonymous with kōwhai, yellow. In another time and place, I watch the hills above the house turn gold.

/

When people say things like the hottest April day in sixty years it becomes necessary to make note of the bright heat of the concrete, the fallen magnolias with their shy blood roots, the fingernail kōwhai blooms curling translucently like discarded chrysalids. Be still. You have a new memory.

/

Ua kōwhai, light spring showers, or: kōwhai showers — when the world becomes a sea of yellow. I now know it can happen anywhere, even somewhere cold.

/

In her childhood bedroom my mum slides back the mosquito net and holds her phone against windowpane, recording the rain.

It was all so different than he expected.
For years he’d been agnostic; now he meditated.
For years he’d dreamed of being an artist living abroad;
now he reread Baudelaire, Emerson, Bishop.
He’d never considered marriage …
Still, a force through green did fuse.
Yes, he wore his pants looser.
No, he didn’t do crosswords in bed.
No, he didn’t file for Social Security.
Yes, he danced alone in the bathroom mirror,
since younger men expected generosity.
Long ago, his thesis had been described as promising,
“with psychological heat and the consuming
will of nature.” Now he thought, “This then is all.”

On the rooftop, in pale flickering moonlight,
he pondered the annihilated earth.
At the pond, half-a-mile across was not
too far to swim because he seemed to be
going toward something. Yes, the love impulse
had frequently revealed itself in terms of conflict;
but this was an old sound, an austere element.
Yes, he’d been no angel and so what …
Yes, tiny moths emerged from the hall closet.
Yes, the odor of kombucha made him sick.
Yes, he lay for hours pondering the treetops,
the matriarchal clouds, the moon.
Though his spleen collected melancholy trophies,
his imagination was not impeded.