binary

LIFE

The wind that blows up from the midnight valley is warm and smells of honeysuckle; the stars are glowing pale like pencil shavings. Oh my sweet Carolina, welcome to the velvet times, the ferns and bees, the driving with the windows down, the molasses months of lemonade, the sugared times, the candied hours, crisp and spicy sweet.

Welcome to Graceland; welcome to the battlefield; welcome to the age of innocence and the shedding of guilt. Welcome to the afternoons of keeping secrets and the evenings of sharing them, the mystery of bruises, the reinvention of the balcony and its bars, the smoky blue view.

Come down to the riverside, and welcome it yourself: set down your sword, beat it into a spoon, and eat of the honey tree. The bees are baring their teeth and drawing near only to return home, singing through the cemetery, speaking to the tombstones, this great cloud of witnesses—the ground thrums with their heartbeats, for we will all be changed.

DEATH

When my grandfather died, he died slowly, as his body devoured itself. Grandpa lost his hair to chemotherapy, and he began rearranging the living room of his farmhouse every night like an auditorium, preparing to deliver lectures and speeches to empty rooms. Every day he seemed less like himself, as if parts of him were being shed like yellow leaves falling from a tree as winter arrives. Death does not occur on one single day, but across weeks or months. It’s the slow fading of a life, a grey walk toward surrender. And after death, the memories live on; the mind forgets, loses its place in time. Our landlady in our last house in Kosovo kept all her dead husband’s things in my bedroom: his shoes under my bed, his starched Yugoslav army uniforms crowded into my closet, his papers and passports and even a half-drunk cup of tea, sugared over and thick in the desk drawer. I felt like I was sleeping in a tomb, but now, looking back, I understand the haunting. Even three months after my father’s death, I dream that he is alive, and when I wake up and remember myself, he dies again. I lose him again every morning.

When I was a child, Dad used to tell me when he shaved off his mustache that he had rolled it up inside his ear, like a striped awning rolled up above a shop. As his mustache grew back, he let me crank an imaginary handle on the side of his head, rolling it back out of his ear. In childhood, things wax and wane with ease, like flowers that bloom in the spring, wither with winter, and blossom again when the sun returns. I would give anything to sit beside those flowers again, beside the sunflowers and poppies in our Ferizaj garden, drinking sweet çaj with lemon, sitting beside my father as he practiced his Albanian on our wrinkled landlords, watching dusk settle in the garden’s corners and curl up like a cat beneath the apricot trees. But those times have faded away, never to flower again.

traum

DREAM 1

I dreamed last night that I was racing through the woods with my mother, brothers, and sister. We were sitting behind horses on a wooden cart like the ones that carried prisoners to the guillotine in France. A man lay unconscious in the back in revolutionary dress, bright reds and blues and a plumed hat. He bled from the chest.

As we rumbled through the forest, running away, he turned paler and paler. We stopped beneath some white apple trees and watched him die. We stared around, wondering where to bury the man we had rescued in vain.

As we stared, windswept and stunned, our mother began to have a miscarriage. The baby passed quickly and quietly, and my youngest brother turned to me and said, "We must give up our children as well." He took pincers, forced them down my throat, and pulled out a tiny fetus the size of a finger. I began to bleed. It looked like a gumdrop. He set it in a tuft of daffodils beneath an apple tree in full blossom, and then I woke up, a piercing pain in my throat.

DREAM 2

Last night I dreamed that my brothers were dragged into the ocean by a rogue tide. I raced down the surf, screaming and panting, plunging my hand in to pull them out. I found a tin can and a little girl with rosy gauze wings. As I stood knee deep in the waves, the sea became a dark green rug. I knelt and ran my fingers up and down its rough wool, searching for my brothers like lost pennies. 

fireworks

nightmares, little girls with rosy heads blasting off
into the night sky, smoking fireworks like a fat man
smokes a cigar, exploding like white dandelions

rosy, blooming out like roses, a century and half later,
when hong kong came back to china,
its prodigal daughter.

chicago, red white blue
flag coloured
the boy next to me whispered,
"it's just like war"
deafened by their anthem

the pounding and ringing and smoke drifting
pale against the night, kosovo's war dimmed,
but the soldiers wandered the streets.
we ushered in the new year with guns
pointed high and proud,
listening from out balcony
(piled high with wood my mother chopped
to heat our home)
the celebrations: shouting and crackles of gunpowder
machine guns spitting,
rising like the hum of a bee hive
and hovering in the air,
coating the city in honey.

brooklyn winters and nights

in new york, a big black woman flanked by

two men who looked miniature beside her

pointed her pocket at me and said,

"stick 'em up, white girl, and gimme that coat!"

it was a massive coat, down to my knees,

fur collar and muff, a jewish coat, jenna's coat.

she stared me down for a moment and then 

broke out into cackles, walking past the liquor store.

i walked home, stepping around boys drinking

out of paper bags on our stoop, to find

jenna sitting on the barstools around our kitchen

table, wearing the same pale blue long johns 

she had been wearing for weeks, sitting

on the same stool she had occupied for weeks.

i turned on our oven (electric) and stuck 

my head inside, thawing the frozen parts of my hair

as rats skittered about our walls and ceiling.

jenna looked away from the autobiography she was reading

and intoned, "fail fast, erin. fail fast."

she picked up a pen and began to draw in the margins of her book,

tucking her long underwear into her socks.

- age 19, bed stuy, new york.

in jenna's words, they told us to go big or go home,

and we left that summer. fail fast

i'm fending off your auroch, but you gotta get up off the ground

the white dog haunts me around the corner,
my solid stolid saint
through the yellow streets that fluttered,
the trees and their leaves clattering together,
gold and cracked grey
syringes under the bridge,
crunching underfoot.

he eats his luck for dinner
pale bear at my shoulder.
my father sits on the floor at home,
the roof slanting into his bed,
drinking apricot liquor, humming in his throat.

i was baptized in creased white,
gauze like bandages
that float away and take your arms with them.

our truck's wheels baptized each time we crossed the border,
driving through the furrows of water and bleach,
wiping out serbian disease
sterile like john the baptist, each place past cleansed
from our soles,
if he had lived in the black mountains.

the lake was green and femi spoke the father's name
in another tongue (& the son & the spirit)
lay me down in the jade water
and ripped me out again.

the apricot tree blooms in the spring
ripe golden peach white
swallowing our satellite
shutting out the rays and news and the world off our peninsula
fragmentary peninsula

the fifty list: growing out toward spring

it's been a long time, because i've been storing up words
with a purpose, putting them away for the day when i
need a whole host of words at once,
like joseph,
preparing for egypt's drought:

1. (423) 838-4727: sip dreams
2. gypsies and preaching shoes, lifted like fish on a line
3. the green cats, caught, spayed, and sprayed
4. imaginary friends with my joy: amelia, moses, and elizabeth
5. lift back the shell of your walnut mind
6. boys who threw coins at my window, littering the balcony with gold. there are no stones in the city.
7. taking the stones we could have cast and building a safehouse
8. the egg lady across the way, sweating and sagging
9. nameless rwandan children
10. harrison bergeron and seeing that the ballerina on the fire station had her left arm crooked up over her head.
11. dreaming about missing trains
12. men on the street corners, a murmur in their mouths, buzzing like bees until your back is to them, then breaking into shouts and howls
13. demon gots my engine
14. functioning in a world of doorknobs
15. truly missing trains, homesick for trains
16. orange robes draped over the whale length of gold and mother of pearl: buddha man
17. my arabic fruit vendor & two points of cherries
18. that day visiting kosovo and its barbed wire churches, sneaking into the macedonian opera and drinking mojitos by the river of sofas
19. hallie's rose cake and toothlessness
20. swinging between cars in the thai train
21. who is my audience?
22. BERLIN
23. no complete knowledge of anywhere but a fractional knowledge of everywhere
24. gay hunters
25. i dreamed the christians came on the heels of a flood, canoeing with bows over their backs to hunt the godless. they paddled through my window and dragged away the painter who lived upstairs. my past came, like a vicious dog, snapping at my heels. i took a kick at it, but it followed me around, snarling. i spent a lot of time kicking that damn dog, that mangy dog, but i couldn't shake it. there were no swedish soldiers to kill it, no one to paint it green so i could see it from a distance and run
26. i'm bed stuy's cunt
27. the anatomy of ________
28. it was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn and lilac and mauve and chocolate and gold and cream and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and grey and purple and white and pink and orange and blue
29. nine years & no letters
30. my sun and my shield and things that claw me in the dark
31. i dream about my brothers drowning in the flood. i dream about the ocean snatching them from the shore and then becoming a green rug that i kneel on, searching for the lumps beneath the carpet, as if my brothers were two lost pennies. the floods take them, gangs of dogs surround them, and the soldiers shoot at what moves.
32. i dream that a baby is falling from a balcony and i am up high in a building across the way, watching.
33. how would i title pictures of my father: post hoc ergo propter hoc or we're going on a bear hunt.
34. faces on the fence outside NATO's headquarters, tank tracks on my street, poppies, sunflowers, red peppers, walnuts, and baking bread
35. muldavin's pseudonym
36. from scattered gems to stratagems
37. men: venus fly traps snapping at whatever is nearest
38. is there a genre called "snippets of things that fit in the palm of your hand"?
39. the humble buzz of the bumblebee: HONEY
40. when jesus was human in my high school years, he looked like my father, scowling at his body, glaring if you asked about his headache, impatient with humanity and weakness.
41. sixth grade jail, turned away from the windows
42. my favourite transvestites: ellie and davia
43. i lose books between my sheets, bees also get caught in my hair, and, once, a sparrow.
44. allow
45. rosy fireworks when hong kong returned to china
46. in australia, the spiders cover the ground in snow
47. in malaysia, caging the white things as aunt jean drowned their ruby eyes
48. a collection of postcards i'll never send: i hate you for harvesting my secrets.
49. in china, the crowds followed me like a prophet or alien, pulling my hair
50. LANDMINES, a thousand times over.

my favourite art form is stained glass and my least favourite music is the relentless march of christine's guilt.

51. i killed milosevic with an angry word. the angels look down on me and cringe
52. the panharmonicon and the panopticon
53. watching cars slide backwards down the hill in prishtine
54. emerson: "fine things, pretty things, wise things- but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no grumbling."
55. my apricot albanian landlady keeping her husband's dead army coat and a full cup of tea in my closet
56. stick 'em up, white girl, and gimme that coat!
57. jenna sitting for days in her long underwear
58. green apples & oklahoma bombing & an ear infection
59. we rotated, all subletting each other's rooms in the same apartment
60. michelle standing on the mantle for months in a white coat, animating the wall with her ocean, stepping down into the asylum
61. militant bomber commie meeting
62. jewish meeting and dancing. lots of accidental meetings
63. persimmons with aiyi on her peach silk bed while mom and dad spoke on the radio
64. harbin ice sculptors and sweet bean dumplings with a pink x on top
65. twenty letters: dear dad, i love you. please don't throw these away, white hair, the hospital.
66. FAIL FAST
67. star and his track suits
68. scott's conspiracies: boiled water, silver, prostitutes, weimar
69. florence's notebook
70. the old hispanic janitor and cornstarch and the homeless man taking me to the bus stop
71. neo futurists and the polar bear plunge after he pulled pieces of his gay play off the broken umbrella, rolling dice at the door
72. heaven's golden grass
73. my eyes: he told me he could see right through my head, my eyes were two holes straight through to the sky. the guatemalan children told me i was a witch
74. the white peacock at the changchun zoo
75. i like poems and my sister likes grocery lists
76. dreams, roots, and death: the three schools of cixous
77. mulberry street and metaphorical memoirs
78. st augustine stole pears and the albanian boys stole apricots
79. i desperately want someone to ask me not to leave, but i'm terrified that when they ask, i won't know how to stay
80. SOCIAL LEPERS
81. when i was a child, when my hair was still golden, i wore my mother's glasses around the house, and a pair of her dove grey pumps. the massive glasses made everything larger than life, and hazier too.  i never took them off
82. "my dad saved 'i love you' for saying goodbye"
83. the city like a heart, throbbing, train tracks running outward like veins, pulsing in and out
84. jellyfish shivering on the sand, we hung out underwear on the fan and clicked it on, shouting, it's snowing! it's snowing! it's winter and we're going home! as the palm trees rustled outside our window

knoxville

somebody stole my sister clean away
leaped over the judge's gavel
with that little girl in a sack over his shoulder.
he oughtta been in that courtroom himself, but he
he came to collect a little girl not even his own,
threw that burlap over her head and carried her off.

your eye is on the sparrow as
he skids around the skies,

but look aways down the tracks
to the ditch where brian sleeps

peel back the shell of my father's
dried-up walnut mind

pinpoint the dark thing hovering
over my waters

strip away her fog as a snake sheds
its scales

is this blasphemy? cos what i'm asking is this:
if you can, why is it just your eye that's on us?

if any is without sin, let him throw the first stone

transgressions marching in the service of the king,
scarlet & brass shining.
the pipe keening & the drum leading
the marching parade
to my doorstep.

the king's army takes my stones one by one
to build a safe house,
a grace house,
a harbour for those the law condemned.
a harbour for the fallen,
the ships come and go.