of surprise, my children awaiting my return like Christmas,
my office chair awaiting my shape, my car awaiting my key,
my lips in search of a seven-letter word that rhymes with why.
The Furrier
His years and days and hours are threaded
and wound round the spool into the seam
of the joined hide, pressed there, eyed, sewed up
in a scarf or coat with a fur trim at the neckline.
He says, with a gentleman’s wink,
“This will look so wonderful on you, wear it.”
And his customers oblige him for hats, scarves,
coats of opossum, otter or the shine of mink.
The sewing machine, branded Never Stop.
His one hand over the next stitching
until the bifocaled seams of perfection
are set exquisitely in their proper place.
Anachronistic. Patient. Hopeful.
The spells of time and law are against his ways.
No apprentice now, not even his son
will learn the trade he learned in Istanbul.
“Take a candy,” he says, and feeling more bold,
“I will make you a scarf!” He picks off the floor
scraps of farm-raised mink and bends to his task
revived, unashamed, deliberate, and old.
Confidence
You know it
when you have it in hand.
The world. And you can become,
without it, so small
as to fit between
the letters of a single word
like if or why.
With it, you can lean casually
upon a capital I. Too much
and you grow so
infinite you believe you can balance
the Milky Way
on the back of your fingernail.
Without any at all,
you will grasp
like a child for an open hand
and fail.
Riverbank
Come, walk with me along the riverbank
with an old man & his stick, a shadow,
and a boy whistling into an empty bottle
that he found stuck in the soft mud.
The river never looks the same way twice.
The rusted barges float past full of coal.
It is late summer rising into fall. The river is life,
is earth, is the ground note of an ancient song
if you listen for it. Heraclitus once said:
You cannot step into the same river twice.
Let it move you by boat, by raft, by canoe,
by whatever means available to your luck.
Let it carry you away, purify you, inebriate you
with the intoxicating notes of frogs & crickets.
No one ever crosses the same river twice.
The river is daughter & sister, life giver
and lover of sky & bird & fish.
The river is the blood of condensation, of fog,
redeemer of lost ways, collector of light, a thief.
You can never cross the same river twice.
Henry, how long since you’ve crossed a river?
Artery of disarray, spare parts, rusted cans,
of sandstone, storm-tossed limbs, driftwood,
marshes and grasses, cache of wildflowers: this river
never says my name the same way twice.
Alma Eppchez
At the Back of the Road Atlas
All text in quotes was found scrawled on the last page of a Rand McNally road atlas.
Chicago to Las Vegas dates unknown.
Eavesdropping on someone else’s road trip.
It was America, is America, it will be America.
“I guess we solved The Free-will Question. (No)”
Hypothetical disillusionment—the Freeway makes monks out of men.
It’s good, when it’s good to be wrong.
“Tiny bladder”
16oz every meal—It became an issue.
Stiff joints, playing Fight Club in the Super 8 sleep.
“What’s the closest airport?”
There is a fairground, and a strip
Where planes take off to spray the patchwork quilt.
“Little fuckers over in What Cheer, Iowa.”
Exit 201 begged to be taken. Population: 678.
Some towns have only known hard times. What did you expect?
“Yes, but at least we’d never have a reason to see her again.”
Women get easy to resent out here. Mile 937—don’t look
At the burning crash. Forget to call on your mother’s Birthday.
“Oh I’d say another two or three miles.”
Tiny bladder. The country hangs along
Interstate 80, a cheap charm bracelet.
“What would Jesse do?”
In Bountiful, Utah did you piss in Salt Lake?
Take off your clothes but don’t want to get wet.
“I’m still a guy.”
Comfort in the 3am silence—it’s not about passing.
Nod to the U-Haul speeding in the right lane.
“What is cold and wet down the back of my shorts?”
Tiny bladder. Crazy straws and watered down whiskey.
Barely any rest stops past Des Moines.
“Tie the kids to the back of the limousine.”
What would you name them?
One night stands with funny labels.
“Gunpowder and lead (lace)”
And leather. Every station is The Best Country Music.
They love it in South Africa too—something about the slide guitar.
“Boomtime.”
Will you father miss his police scanner?
Roll down the windows so the smoke falls out.
“The Virgin River: because it runs just fast enough”
Utah, Arizona, Nevada. Into the Colorado
Where it slows. What did you gain in these mountains?
“Your family and their fucking gum”
All these fat and shiny memories. Deep fried things.
Gum sticks, but you’re growing up, moving on. You found the road.
“Next time we know how to have fun on a trip,
We just go to a restaurant then hangout
In the parking lot taking Boomtime pictures.”
Citizenship from Below
Mimi Sheller
The conquerors
keep easy
kinds of records—
that make it easy
for history to stay on the surface
just scratching at the paper trail.
I take solace in archeology.
As children
The conquerors—they
went to see the fossilized
dinosaurs foot prints on the banks
of the ancient river. It left such an impression.
And so they stomp heavy
dumbly fearing immortality.
Hoping to evade it
like the dinosaurs.
I take solace in extinction.
In their last will and testament
they request tall headstones,
afraid of their shadows
disappearing when they do.
I take solace in electric lights of citizenship shining up from below.
The New Old-Hack
(you remember fighting) (you remember defeat)
Oh god! And you stopped doing
wouldn’t it be like dying? the things you love.
You showed me a minefield And you don’t
and told me how check out books
you walked across it ?
? from the library anymore.
every morning You took a job at McDonald’s,
on your way to doing and you fell off
the things you love. out of the sky.
(you remember fear) (you remember a future)
You had a lover once You tell me
a few steps ahead what the early 2000s
with heartbeat did to us.
like steamroller You tell me a story
and diamond colored dreams, about this paranoia
just as that shattered your bones,
sure—just as about a quiet
sharp. McCarthy era—
And when he was blown unobtrusive
up Secret Service
you grew love letters tapping through
from the dirt your maple bark
under your fingernails and revolution’s sugar
and you cried, flowing out
but did not visit him in jail. on to the ground.
My mother, the professor of childhood, gave a lecture on Snow White
My mother always sounds like she is about to weep.
Her students nod.
Mirrors mirror film.
Spinning
was a metaphor for telling.
She speaks
by jumping off the edge of thinking deeply.
Walt erased all the spinning mothers.
Who does the telling anyway?
Mother,
it’s a man’s world.
We held the apple in our hands and it filled with poison
It is called faulty pedagogy.
You teach about children,
so you know.
I absorb you
—with all your flaws.
You watch.
What is foreshadowing for, now that all the stories have been told?
My brother—
my father—
you
raspberry prologues into my belly.
Hold me like newborn ears,
because the world whispers soft and incessant.
Tell me a new story now.
No place for jealousy.
No motive but love.
Echoes of Tuskegee
some notes on my experience
during the night shift at the Fresno ER
I have a confession:
I wore blue latex gloves,
walked the linoleum hallway from triage and
in the early California morning,
under doctor’s lax direction I
saved a woman’s life.
She was still alive
at least
when my shift ended.
I am not proud;
I am terrified.
of what it means to owe someone
nothing after the night shift turns in.
Of what it means to research amateur
on a stranger’s body
and never to say,
“May I”
or “Thank you.”
Haunting me:
Alabama haunts me
from the thirties to the seventies.
For 40 years The Tuskegee
Institute kept black bodies
in petri dish
share crop quarters
growing cultures of medical atrocity
—growing cultures of “progress.”
Brought to us by:
Racialized front lines.
History has mouthfuls that
I don’t know how to talk about and
when I try to swallow—
I cut up my throat.
I should bleed out lab rats.
I should bleed out syphilitic sores grown on black bodies after science had a cure.
I should bleed out their children; sick by birthright.
I should bleed when surviving means breathing, but does not mean life.
My platelets—my whiteness:
scab over like mercury and
underneath these seamless scars
we have not changed—
growing sores
on black bodies
after science had a cure.
Everything is syphilis,
from night stick, to
achievement gap, prison
bars, dreams unspoken,
fish tank overpass,
dying for my sins
Garner, Brown, Martin.
There is no consent in social experimentation.
So how can I condescend to ask for consent?
I want to apologize:
Woman,
You are probably dead by now.
You were maybe 40.
They said you had overdosed on something.
You were unconscious when they found your body.
Your body
I am sorry.
I know you had a life and
a story and
loved ones who remember you.
I know that your death is not a lesson and
I must learn to be better.
I do not know your name.
I am sorry.
I know how your naked body fell
across the hospital cot
in coma humiliation.
The doctor asked me if I wanted to practice CPR and
I didn’t say, “How is this practice?”
Your breasts spilling
milk over asphalt
away from my fists and
I didn’t cry, but
I should have.
I know how your broken breastbone clicks
in and out as I pump your limping heart.
I know how half opened eyes roll back and
?
? can’t make contact and
what could an apology possibly mean to you now?
If I had said:
“Stay with me now.”
You were never here with me.
Separate lives—separate lessons.
You had learned how to be victimized and
I was learning how to rape.
Woman,
Yes, your heart began to beat again
as I beat your chest.
I do not know how long
you survived after that—
brain dead and pale blue-black
on the cot.
I know there is nothing right
about living or dying
surrounded by white coat
strangers singing “Staying Alive”
by the Bee Gees
in bar room cacophony,
so a scared little white girl
can learn how
to keep the beat
on your still
breaking
heart.
The Tuskegee experiments
—echoes themselves—
echo through the nation a quiet and affecting call—
ignore—violate—ignore—
violate—ignore—violate—
ignore . . .
Jim Burrows
At the Megachurch
Like any prophet, he denies his god
and is his god. These thousands worship him
because they know the soul may be eternal,
but immortality lies in the body,
and even faith cannot escape the flesh.
Tonight the church is full.
The inedible manna of miracles
begins to fall, invisibly. Their throats
are sapped by laughter jolting through their tears.
Limp bodies litter the carpeted stage,
anointed, cauterized, slain by his touch
and the dark water of his voice.
A crutch is tossed aside.
Its owner sprints away.
A blind man shields his eyes
as they fill up with light. A child,
crying, his asthma wheezing through his fear,
comes forward as his mother holds his hand.
Head back, eyes closed, he waits for God