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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.

august's end

my doors rot soft with lichen

peeling and tender

until it is simpler to reach straight 

through the sugared wood and lift the latch

than to turn the handle.

time to change the locks.

we bob for apples and you rise up

dripping from the bucket

with my heart clenched between your teeth.

shove the prongs into the fireplace

and hear the stone chimney cry.

a cattle prod

my grandmother's jeweled pin

the stone cliffs crumble into chalk

as the audience applauds.

antarctica shatters

we seem to have lost 

the gentle inside the fragile.

the tender hearted, brittle as ice,

cracking,

snapping,

frosted like velvet.

though our hearts may condemn us

in this world we will have trouble
but you have overcome the world

cut off from the tree of life by that angel
and his bright sword- but take heart!

you have overcome the world and its labyrinth
and every damn angel.

you are my sword,
my sun,
and my shield.

the auroch, our first enemy,
the first threat to man's life,
other than the snow, which is impossible
to tattoo on skin.

the auroch slew many and made many more
strong, and therefore became beloved by us
as we love the anvil, hammer, and crucible.

by your grace, the auroch is my beloved,
and i shine bright,
sainted,
sanctified.

the summer of my father: july 26

stiff, grey, and without corners
shearing off his hair like a lamb or
my grandfather when his body
ate itself,

he rearranged chairs for his audience
every evening and gave speeches to
empty rooms in the morning.

peeled off the steel of his hair
to give his skull space to grow,
to bloom out like an apple blossom,
like an anemone
like a fern, tendrils opening out
into the sky

tender and pale
skinless
moist
about to tear
bust wide open like a pink scar splits
the way amber glue bubbles out
from between joints of wood
busting out of the seams
and corners of a door frame

as the door squeezes by,
slams, closed doors,
changing the locks.

the panopticon and the grey-eyed fog
my spine is a string you pluck
rattling my neck all the way up into my brain
like a cold ripple in a lake
or the shiver of a cymbal.

turn back to the table,
turn back to your wife, your life
look back to the end of
these train track stitches

where you took that first arctic step
the sour fever
the frost

the rot behind the eyes
cold and eucalyptus

someone blowing cool air against
your sweating forehead
putting out your honey fire
auroch

it's a barbed and weighty thing, his sanity

my father pinned his pains on me,
pinned me like a moth
to a corkboard.

lungs opening and closing,
but not breathing,
clams in my chest
wet and grey
and drowning in the air.

learning to be helpless,
the eldest daughter assumes blame,
the youngest carries the tea,
lemon sweet.

"where have the fathers gone,
broken at the break of dawn."

splitting open like a melon
live honey
like rubies grown on trees,
crisp, ripe, mined from the earth's chest,
ribs glistening like an honour guard.

i'm toasting to life,
scoop out its seeds.
please don't turn your face
away from the table
when my hands are too weak
to bring you back.

picture perfect

am i the stereotype,
the picture plate stamped
into every dictionary,
cameoed and captioned:

girl with literary aspirations.

wears light, ruffled dresses,
charcoal grey stockings,
brown boots,
and carries with her a pen
and a writing tablet.

wears her long curly hair
in a braid hanging
down over one shoulder
and keeps her pale blue
eyes wide.

seldom showers,
but powders her nose,
and whens he drops her leather
satchel, nearly shatters the floor
with the weight of books
within. also, three wooden tops,
crumpled paper, swatches of lace,
and possibly a passport,
just for the glamour of it, or
because she never knows when
she'll have to go.

drinks tea and neglects the
ink stains on her fingers
and the hem of her dress.
red lips, but otherwise pale
with scattered freckles.

flyaway hair betrays that
she has been caught in the rain
and doesn't own an umbrella.

wrapped in her grandmother's cardigan
and drafts a letter or poem,
stirring honey into her tea,
library book number written on her hand,
smudged across her cheek.

i feel like i could be plucked from
a crowd as a magician pulls cards out
of my ear and reads:

girl with literary aspirations.

lookout mountain summer

living inside a cloud of
secondhand flannel and
my own electric hair

longing to curl in like
a fern, like a cat's
soft belly.

the fog descends,
slaying my hopes,
keeping them low:

a fear of heights
and brass.
velvet womb.

mulberry street makes
the others seem so drab
by comparison.

i'm fevered with it,
the dimness.

reaching out for
the maroon burlap
the whale cries
the seashell echoes
the moon smeared
across the lake
the banjo humming
the other brighter world

where no eyes are on
brave me and i
behold all.

sylvia plath: the world is splitting open at my feet

the cardinal is a saint
messenger from god
flying relentlessly
into my window
since february.

i study its wings,
the ruffled feathers,
its cracking beak:

what is he saying?

i keep my window
closed and watch
the bird beat itself
to death against
the glass.

i built a trap,
a cardboard box
with a mirror within,
hoping the cardinal
would chase itself inside.

but the boys brought
a gun instead,
stashed it in the bushes.

the seraphim have no
feet and fly eternal-
the ground is too holy.
they crash into
polished window panes.

jacob

i wrestled with the will of god,
hungry to name it,
that mighty snake
imperious and elusive,
coiled.
that ladder-stepper.
a scroll on its tongue,
bitter honey wafer.

speak to me!
speak to me!
name yourself!

celebration, tipping all the way down

when the chinese toast,
they drink to the bottom
before setting their glasses down.

greedy for life,
that holy avarice
stored up behind clenched teeth.
confiding- these walls
are so thick, this cloud
so dense.

coffee and the heat it confers,
seeing the cardinals in the fog,
like poe before the heartbeats,
when everything is sharper,
yet soft.

in this crystal white stillness
i reread that story, so beautiful
and yet true, split open by
a herald
eating locusts
and honey in the desert.

communing with the invisible,
we speak of meeting the same christ.

i'm always caught
in that same eddy, turning round
and round, hoping to sight a face,
a shape shifter-

are you in the trees? the children?
the thunder? the breeze?
every earthly thing, seeing what is above
by the shadows it makes on the earth,
like the dark herds of clouds
their shade on the ground.

i would sit at your feet.
this earth is the foot of your throne.

18. zurich

twitchy jewish saint,

corners soft, rabbit-soft

tassles unfurling like a victory

march, fraying down

to touch my knee.

leaping up from his seat,

stuttering that i have made him

unclean

frothing,

wire beard raking the air.

TRAPPED IN BROOKLYN’S WINTER, STUMBLING OVER A LONG SKIRT’S HEM: a montage

no more than a walnut shell missing its tumor of a brain,

like old alarm clocks that refuse to surrender their tickings,

but ring at all the wrong hours,

i dream that i’ve left the baby at the park.

the homeless men raise her as their own.

that shivering girl on every subway platform,

draped in borrowed men’s coats,

swaddled, swathed, and

trailing like lazarus floating from his tomb.

that girl fit in your pocket,

velvet and born already worn around the edges,

a pale moth who should have shone banner-bright.

child who stays

inside for fear of geese and lumps,

trapped inside a linen womb.

prophesy written on the wall

of a mother’s ear canal:

the seams are splitting toward

the golden of april

when i am the prophet.

visions.

trances.

cherubim.

like the men in italy who steer

boats with sticks, and their stargazers

who float. the gondolier:

“sometimes i look at my wife and say,

‘darling, speak to me of love!’

she stammers, as though she were surprised.”

things are growing. each day lends itself to the egg,

cells tear themselves to shreds, and their splitting makes the new thing:

infant spring.

lilac newborn,

i look through your translucent skin

to a lavender mind. it ticks with the seconds.

you dream of the opera, and may’s birthday, when

the factory’s assembly lines roll,

cranking out crates of clay peacocks dressed in buttons

and beads of gold-flecked glass.

cats’ january coats drift away like cottonwood,

sisters visit and the ducks come home. 

20. home

rowboats on napoleon and

josephine’s pond, fancying outselves

to be gondoliers,

standing and buongiorno-ing

red beer on the street corner

amber beneath the cathedral,

gewuerztraminer deep below

the cobblestones

in the devil’s lair.

pascal’s getaway and the beds of

kings, castle ruins in the distance.

jokes carved into the church’s pillars,

on sculptor laughing at another from

the spire, and atlast holding up the roof.

concealed courtyards, the secret gardening

and the glass bottles falling through a pit

into the sidewalk to be ground and reshaped.

the white way, bare branches like an

old woman’s arms in ever doorway.

little brother’s crowing,

leaping at my cursing,

and my mother’s wondering

how much fault we ought to lay

at my father’s door—

how much will sink him.

my child-self calls me my sister’s name

and hands me a bag of almond croissants.

the boys who once loved us give away

diamond rings to other girls.

cappuccinos under a medieval roof

at the nudelhuesli and the whisper

of a coffee cup on the marble counter

of a silent café.

my sister in a blue robe and my

old teachers losing their hair.

my heart has traveled quite a distance

these three years

but there was my honeycomb, every cell

dripping sweet and crisp and golden

riches gathered up by winged labourers.

the words i’ve not spoken in years, accented,

through the gutters, taken from me and examined,

a coin bitten between teeth and found to be true.

the still hills overtaking the paths,

looming labyrinth of the wolfschlucht

ein traum.

the coolness of a rooibos morning

the orchestra unseen over the rooftop,

the italian eis, tart summer.

the train glides away through farmland,

rising mist, graffiti in red and silver,

back to a place that will never arch at my touch,

a fern curling into itself,

tender, pale, gentle, familiar,

ruhig.