Parenthood

My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party

When I sat for a moment in the bleachers
of the lower-school gym
to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter’ s kindergarten
climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit,
I remembered my sweet exasperated mother
and those shifting faces of injury
that followed me like an odor to ball games and practices,
playgrounds of monkey bars
and trampolines, those wilted children sprouting daily
in that garden of trauma behind her eyes.

Love Poem to a Butch Woman

This is how it is with me:
so strong, I want to draw the egg
from your womb and nourish it in my own.
I want to mother your child made only
of us, of me, you: no borrowed seed
from any man. I want to re-fashion
the matrix of creation, make a human being
from the human love that passes between
our bodies. Sweetheart, this is how it is:
when you emerge from the bedroom
in a clean cotton shirt, sleeves pushed back
over forearms, scented with cologne
from an amber bottle — I want to open

Aubade

A wound is a blossom
but only to the living.
A May night, birdsong

before the first light pierces,
chirps out of blackness:
My daughter's angry at me

and her mother as I
was once angry at mine.
It's a way of crossing over.

I'm so tired now.
And my core's
all water, flowing

somewhere where the sea
can't find her. And neither
can I. How much longer

till I finally lose her? Where
is the first dawn wet blossom?
Who recalls how I touched

Translation

We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.

I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking

to the sound of machine guns.
His family would spend their morning

spreading a paste over the sores
of the house’ s thick walls.

He tells how he touched
points where bullets entered,

his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,

as if inside there existed a space
where everything from this world could vanish.

By Subtraction

The wind shakes the chimes
into the siding, and the dog shakes too
though he doesn’ t wake you
as I carry you to the bedroom. Small mouth
sipping breath, you are fish-strange,
bejeweled in the dimness of the microwave’ s
nightlight. As I turn my back to the bulb
I make your form in my arms a dark weight
but you are no anchor. Together
we are sloops trailing a tiny wake in the carpet.
In the dark it’ s hard to navigate the furniture
so I count distance — five paces
from the tile to the sofa. From the sofa,

Step Father

He forgets that he used to call me mariconcito-
that I harbored years of hatred toward him
while hoping to find my real father. My
childhood memories of him reminding me
I was my mother's son, not his. I tried
to poison him once and scattered sharp nails
inside the shoes in his closet. By the time one
of his sons died of AIDS I was already lost
in contempt for the man I blamed for everything.
There was the time I was in love and he met my
boyfriend. Now he forgets to go to the bathroom

Drawings: For John Who Said to Write about True Love

“The writer. It’ s a cul-de-sac,” you wrote that
winter of our nation’ s discontent. That first time
I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked
in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small
apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great
named cats you gassed in the move. I couldn’ t keep them.
You explained so I understood. And what cat never loved
your shell-like ways, the claw of your steady fingers, firme
from the rasping of banjos and steady as it goes

Pages