Five Poems

I am the Holy Ghost! You are Entangled!
 
Mostly embarrassed of my dead father,
I was below the fig,
looking up,
 
open-mouthed,
following the bees 
feasting
the fruit to ruin, slogging        
through the funk lifting from the floor
from what had fallen; it was
 
the ugly summer beginning to rot,
receding from  a touch of gold
in the distance, and me
 
sometimes bending
to despair, my own heart slowing
to ruin,         	a theory, 
waiting beneath 
what was blooming, the dead
floating above me, looking
for a dance; I was trying to remember
this child I carry inside me, this child
waking in a black apartment
dripping with want.  	I left
 
with the bees still eating sugar,
looping in a drowsy orbit,
swallowed by each thought
I was avoiding—
 
the hospital, the bills,
those dark eyes I loved
dying in a hilled city.
 
Tell me, how to kneel
to both—
 
this headless fox glimmering
dead on the road,
 
and the screaming life
beginning to sprout
out the body

***

ame/Rican sonnet
 
there was a dead tree splitting the current.
goldenrod beginning to bloom—
those bits of gold folded 
in the green. my dead
taking my body to smoke
touch the earth        	laugh
at how my head wraps around                     	time.
 the river’s dead color.
the dead summer ending with bees
emptying sugar out the carrot blooms;
the bees’ slow deaths
in the creeping autumn’s short light;
i was already dead looking back—
my hand       	moving a flame to my mouth

***

ame/Rican sonnet
  
 
sadness was my inheritance;                         	my heirloom was sadness
my sadness was recorded;                            	my archive of sadness;
  	sadness as shale streaked with a shimmer;         	sadness as being told to shut the fuck up;
my sadness was a grotto;                                          	my sadness, an underground river;
a vehicle;                  	moving me with blueness through a kind of life;
some sadness wasn’t my own;          	i was a container; that child weeping with the dead;
women flickering across the water’s surface;            	each father shoveling a cave in the earth;
my sadness was a kind of plastic;                             	almost outside of physics;
   	undead and everywhere; my sadness;    	  	a circle; my sadness; walking through the door
with a father’s dead heart;                                        	with a mother’s digestive tract;            
blood lit by the dense noon; my sadness;                 	to burn a full body to ash; my sadness;           
	my sadness likes a joint on the porch;    	    the color dim light brings to a glass of congac;
sugar, fat, and salt; i feed my sadness;                      	shining beneath the waist; i feed my sadness;
a feast of money; i feed my sadness;                        	it was only asking to be held


***

ame/Rican sonnet
 
 
came back​​​ to the home halved
with a pine​
 
​​     	a child 
crawling out​      a   window
 
distance: my wealth      /     distance: my grief. (girmay);
 
​came back ​​​and found
our mothers as girls again
 hovering 
    above 
the bloomed grass …
​​              	barefoot in a cotton dress
 
made again…we came back made again
 
i came back
and found out​
puerto ricans can’t die;​​
 
nine thousand shoes​ levitating
​​​off
​​​​   the 
​​​marble;
​​​a girl drifting out
a grave ​​;​ laughing with
 
​​​ 	each cancer​ in reverse;​​
 
​​        	how his teeth grew back
       ​​            	beneath the weeping spruce ;
​​
​
​​hand on the hilt​
​
pulling​​ a blade out the belly​
 
and finding a song

***

ame/Rican sonnet
 
i was folding clothes in a store, kissing ass and convincing people to open credit cards.
yeah, shame is a dog you learn to live with. let it on the couch once and it’s over. late summer
found my body beneath umbrella trees, the fuchsia blooms piercing out the crown. i was in miami.
beauty rained through the city; i watched from the window with my mouth open. a hole in my tooth.
i paid for the room i rented with cash. i liked the weight of hundreds in my hands.
my landlord told me his daughter wanted to be a filmmaker, so i was alone
looking up grainy peruvian films; films buzzing with green landscapes. i wanted
to be a film person. the future was shouting for me. i went. i was opened
beneath a hospital light, awoken in a small room with a shape in my hands,
soft as fruit soaked with too much time, too much light, too much sugar breeding the rot. 
if my body was different, time could be different, but time passed the way i was.
i undressed to become something else, returning to the brown bank of the river.
but even when i moved, i moved in place. i wasn’t dead yet. i was in washington.
it was winter and the green was dying.