Who batters the faces gone out to shadow? Who plucked the good and spoiled it? Whose creation was it? You, large moon, large silent man? A man like my father who taught me how to kill rabbits? A blow behind the head and a puff of fur on a wire hanger, that's all. And if you'd hit them hard enough they'd bleed through their nose. The width of their heads fit inside of a grape. The dark-gold eyes, mashed-up, are like a pile of black marbles. Their heads are so black they are purple.

That hard place of yours - and all those small wrecks - hanging onto you like a hostage of earth. A hard pile of dreams they are, their bones fighting their wars outside of you, their faces cold and electric. The becomings of something violent.

Destroyer

It is the light that annihilates orchids.
In the madness of the light, the violet membranes of butterflies are liquefied.
There is no difference between the light and ourselves.
Sometimes we are also afraid of becoming violent, afraid of throwing ourselves
from a bridge into the ocean to become as white as a crane,
afraid of becoming something that we already are – dark fugitives.
We take refuge in the massive shoulders of the buffalo.
If they search for us tomorrow, they’ll find us in the wounds of the sun,
forging dead lilacs.

A Moon Love Story

In the fourth grade, my mother would kill lice
with her thumbnails.
She would find purpose in their deaths.
My grandmother would sit across from us with a book on her lap,
but she did not know if it was a book of poems or The Bible.

The Great Fall

That morning in San Francisco
your mother broke her forehead on the asphalt
and hummingbirds spilled from it like small hurricanes.

Finally writing again

Some Dark Trees

For Frankie Jay

Now that you have sound
open your radiant lungs
to the moon.
Bees rise from your chest
and become the color of light.
The lemon branches turn butterflies
into death,
and the ants fulfill their destiny
to become the coldness of the sun.

Life will be hard.
Sometimes you will be humiliated
by elephants with bleached foreheads.
Because you are discolored by the moon.
Because your brilliant shadow covers your flesh.

You watch our theatrical faces.
I long for their fondness. Their kindness.
They belong to everyone.
I understand their hard beauty.
The wounds that become them are
human creations
like wind or earthquakes.
I have already seen this in you –
that you will outlive mosquitoes.

New Poem

29

They’re cutting the flesh of the whale, the diminutive fins, the blood.
They bludgeon, without mercy, their dark torsos –
their flesh jumping like the powdered flesh of butterflies.

You used to be an animal like me,
as big as a jaguar’s left lung or a child’s palm.

Laurrèn.
How will I ever feel alive again if you have divided
the wind between your teeth;
if you have tormented the bees to suicide;
if you have taken the bronze shadows out of my mouth.
And love?
What condition does it find itself in –
like a lizard in the early evening.