How to Destroy Everything and Still Feel Good About Yourself.
Gather sage from behind the farmhouse in your imagination,
the one you go to when you're daydreaming
about having enough money.
Bring the water to a frolicking boil,
like your best friend on a bad night
turned raging drunk.
Pour it out into the soil in the garden,
blank dark brown like an open sore.
Nothing seems to be growing. But
Nothing is still something, right?
Chuckle to yourself at your own cleverness.
Next, take two memories of kindness
and one of the soft, too-intimate touch
of a stranger's skin
and fuck them at three hundred degrees
until the eyeholes are golden crisp.
Glance twice at a police officer
kneeling on top of a figure in the distance.
Keep driving.
Don't answer when your neighbor
knocks on your door
looking for someone,
anyone.
Protect your heart
always
like a tiny glass ornament
wrapped in tissue paper
Until you are nothing else.
I am all these things, and yet-
Her father was born in China, or Singapore,
Brother lost at eight --
The story wears down
mountains.
Sip coffee, think about the next sip
of coffee.
She is watching the garbage men
Like she is studying for an exam
Like someone who has read the same book over and over
because everything new
is just too much.
She is not beautiful,
Not in the traditional sense. Not lush and pulsing
with life. She is pale stallions writhing in pain at the finish line,
The chance of a falling match striking a vein of coal.
Her face is smeared
with oil and sweat, her hair tangled
and her white dress
just barely holding on. She is
a used paperback novel,
both familiar and terrifying,
like sleeping with a childhood friend
seeing all the ways in which the world
has eaten you both.
This is her finger inside the hem of my sleeve, saying
Feel how rough I am. Feel how the years have worked through me
like a worm through an apple. Tell me I’m ugly and fuck me
like long division.
I’m blind and bleeding in traffic,
I’m naked in the middle of the street,
I’m walking out on coals,
To meet you.
Now we’re downtown. Now
we’re in the top of your apartment building
with the lights on.
Now we’re getting ready to go out.
Now we’re in our underwear.
Now the curtain blows.
Lower Manhattan
Wooden tables and a dark staircase. The jazz man
lets out a caterwaul coming off the E-train,
bone-metal jaw clenching hard tactics
in the bowery of dishonor.
Tonight,
Every language tied up in your blood
is sticky wet thread slipping through my fingertips,
Thick candle-lit smoke,
A thousand pictures of the sky next to my heart.
All these lonely songbirds in our throats
Ready to splinter.
Someone’s sister keeps running away,
Arms reaching out for the softer parts
A breast, a thigh
Mangoes and fruits
Luxury. You said
seven tables and coughed a lungfish onto your plate.
I was playing it fast and loose,
But that ends on the sidewalk outside.
The milk-tailored men cleaned us out,
Roughed us up, made us
Taste concrete through our hair.
We were probably made of rooftops and bowling pins
Like how the atmosphere changes
When you hesitate,
Sink down on your knees
And let twelve-and-a-half dogs
Fall like rainwater around you.
A Busker at the Farmer’s Market
There’s a shit-show market south of here where
Old men selling raspas push carts
Through stalled crowds and cars
Brush against buskers on their way
Out for a Sunday in the country.
There was a man there,
Played fiddle like he was trying to kill a cat.
Eyes like watery nettles, always carried a bible.
People said he was crazy, used to fight Russians and win.
You'd never know it from looking at him.
Heard he stole a bunch of old rag songs,
Songs like tearing the throat out
from your dead mother's photographs.
Moved down to Florida
Only plays now when he has to.
1.
Plague.
Rivers run true,
Bury themselves in the earth.
The animals,
Insects blaze out. Keep me close here,
Sweat pressed up against your eyelids,
Round this next curve.
We learn to fight
and make dirt
Taste good. We remember cheeseburgers,
Fuck like grease.
This hollow
Sound in my chest,
This wind that doesn’t come.
Jenna, when was the last time I thought
About you.
5.
“I told you not to come this way,”
All menace and bone fragments.
We say run
But our throat has filled with dust,
And she can’t run, couldn’t ever.
When cats fall,
They land flat, like pancakes.
They say this is the best way for humans to land, too,
If you’re ever falling off a building.
Pray for that kind of faith,
pray not to flinch or look away.
Realize a second before the bat swings
that faith has nothing to do with it.
She runs.
6.
Smell metal ringing inside of you,
Taste teeth. Hair. Blood.
The world tilts sideways.
Concrete. Feels like home.
There are five, maybe six people in this world you love.
Try to think of them. Remember their names.
Think.
He swings the bat again, but this time
he gives you just a moment too long to recover.
To know you’re going to kill a person.
To be absolutely certain.