there was a remember when the mama was my girl
the mama was in my girl biding to turn
my girl turn mama when what I got turn to girl in her
my girl in my girl make my girl mama
they both mine
all three
I remember a when when I only dreamed dreams
but my dreams are remembers now
they a when
I am walking through water with one of my sisters,
the river banked with tiger lilies, the sun
like having a lemon juiced into your eye, our senile dog
ecstatic behind us,
and I am yammering
about my discovery —
a chest deep pool, sentried by trees
that caterpillars were killing
with their yearly carnival tents.
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’ t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’ t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
What will we do
when there is nobody left
to kill?
*
40,000 gallons of oil gushing into
the ocean
But I
sit on top this mountainside above
the Pacific
checking out the flowers
the California poppies orange
as I meet myself in heat
I’ m wondering
where’ s the Indians?
On the radio this morning: The average woman knows
275 colors — and men know eight. Women say coffee,
mocha, copper, cinnamon, taupe. Men say brown.
Women know an Amazon of colors I might have said
were green, an Antarctica of whites, oceans of colors
I'd stupidly call blue, fields of color, with flowers in them
I would have said were red.
What could have been the big to-do
that caused him to push me aside
on that platform? Was a woman who knew
there must be some good even inside
an ass like him on board that train?
Charity? Frances? His last chance
in a ratty string of last chances? Jane?
Surely in all of us is some good.
Better love thy neighbor, buddy,
lest she shove back. Maybe I should.
It's probably just a cruddy
downtown interview leading to
some cheap-tie, careerist, dull
cul-de-sac he's speeding to.
This is Tarsus, one place like anyplace else.
And this is my circuit, the rodeo, fair.
The farmboys blow through here in pickups, wild
as horses in their oat sacks.
The women wear spurs.
In the trailers the cattle are pounding for air.
When I read about the garden
designed to bloom only white flowers,
I think about the Spanish friar who saw one
of my grandmothers, two hundred years
removed, and fucked her. If you look
at the word colony far enough, you see it
traveling back to the Latin
of inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words
I saw I dreamt
Two men hoisted hung up not American the rope
Not closed on their breathing
But this rope tied them spine to spine somehow
Suspended
From the mood of a tree not American they were
African Ugandan Nigerian
Without a license a right to touch
The sin their touching incites
And I heard their names called out Revision
Or Die and You Must Repent
And Forget the Lie you Lily-Boys you Faggots
Called up from the mob
name appears
everywhere and in dream
body armor removed
what now, legacy, archivum
we female archons preserve of
intensity a durance a hand you recognize
(sounds sound)
assurance as lives on
drank of that
drank of this
almost suffocated, then drowned
downed but never
what only she could only know
as herself living in the brute time
speak of a syntax of rendition?
the politics of Empire chip away
as poetry attests, give it up
