Race & Ethnicity

O lord, he said, Japanese women,
real women, they have not forgotten,
bowing and smiling
closing the wounds men have made;
but American women will kill you like they
tear a lampshade,
American women care less than a dime,
they’ ve gotten derailed,
they’ re too nervous to make good:
always scowling, belly-aching,
disillusioned, overwrought;
but oh lord, say, the Japanese women:
there was this one,
I came home and the door was locked
and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife

Because she died where the ravine falls into water.

Because they dragged her down to the creek.

In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt.

Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.

Because I turned the log with my foot.

Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.

Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.

Because she lived without our mother.

Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land.

She was carrying his offspring.

What did the Old Doctor do
in a cattle car
riding to Treblinka on the 5th of August
over a few hours of   blood flow
over the dirty river of time

I do not know

What did Charon the volunteer do
ferryman without an oar
did he give the children the remains
of   his breath
and leave for himself
just the shiver in the bones

I do not know

Did he lie to them for instance
in small numbing
doses
picking from their sweaty heads
the skittish lice of   fear

I do not know

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

There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can’ t see
what the world sees seeing him.
They know an image of him they themselves created.
He knows his own: fine-lined from foot to finger,
each limb adjusted, because it’ s had to,
to achieve finally flight —

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

She does not know
her beauty,
she thinks her brown body
has no glory.

If she could dance
naked
under palm trees
and see her image in the river,
she would know.

But there are no palm trees
on the street,
and dish water gives back
no images.

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

Bubblegum lip gloss kissed, Our lifelines, our mirrors,

I was never a singkil princess These are Luminous Mysteries —

Knuckle cracking, polished toes, Our notebooks, our language,

I was never a Santacruzan queen To witness, to make way,

Black eyeliner, push up bra Our thirst and our wedding bands —

I was never a curtsying debutante To fill stone jars with water, to wed,

My master/father sent me up from South
Carolina to Boston as a nine-year-old.
My mother's illiterate silence has been a death.
I wonder if she still labors in his fields.
His sister, dutiful but cold as snow,
gave me a little room in her house, below
the stairs with the Irish servants, who hated me
for the fatal flaw in my genealogy.
For the first time in my life I am at home
in this bevy of scholars, my first family.
Here, the wallpapers welcome me into every room,
and the mirrors see me, not my pedigree.