Poetry

In last night’s dream, I collected my dead mother in my arms. Sky overhead, where whole weather systems bruised & healed, bruised & healed. A

Seagulls of Cardiff, small gods of the unravel,
trash-blusterers, street screechers, chimney-pot clouds
sweeping yourselves away to sky

About attribution, they were apparently
often wrong, the art curators, so they’ve made a game

called Find the Real Bosch: ten fantastical canvases
grouped on a wall: the strange and ordinary equally

For example: breath. For example: a father.
Or dawn chewing up fireflies, raking the stars

down to campfire ash. The child you’ll spend longer
grieving than raising, the sea’s

I know the hinges give me away. To be this open
requires doors. Night-sealed, dead bolted, rusted,
shedding blood-colored dust. Roughly the size of

Not far from the cabin where you were born,
where you first learned to reach

with your soles, no bigger than wood frogs,
and feel the lining

Here the crows are old snow
with black feet. The Americans watch
from their cottage

as the beaks puzzle

I surface aspirate-blue, the mother-of-pearl edging on a button blanket, cedar strips steamed then bound, a bentwood box cupping tidal foods:

I stay with my mother in the waiting room
of the Juneau Public Health Center

to see about an abortion. The last night
they made love, my father anchored

his fingers in the sable-thick
of my mother’s hair and made me,

At a bar in Kowloon, Hong Kong, 2011,
a boy in a business suit asks me,
“What’s your citizenship?” and I wonder
if this is the pick-up line of the moment,