Poetry

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,

When I was a kid, I dreamt of being a goddess
atop a white piano, wearing angel wings straight out
of the Victoria’s Secret catalog of my childhood
imagination,

All there is to do is to say it
confused, say it ugly to not-there-ness,
because that’s what I need sometimes:

There are rhythms and there are rhythms. Some are cock’s crow tomorrows like tomorrow sure to come.

Imagine an azimuth in an imagined way. Imagine a line and let it be bent, a silverstring kink in a showman’s rope strung from two petals of a compass rose.

To be driven by—aside, even before physical
hunger; to be driven—above all, perhaps—by a force
more basic and fierce: the need, as tidal

Kataleya, the word of the day the day
you were born was inveigle, in case you ever
want to know. You can pronounce it vay-guhl

I remember the land less brutal, less
crowned in shotgun shells,