My Darling Izzie,

This city is so different from the West,

where the land tints

and weathers the people.

Or rather, everyone here is shaped

by a land somewhere else.

In that sense, I resemble the New Yorkers.

I start to view Nebraska

differently. The faces I grew up with

begin to soften and meld

into characters.

Wrecked on opium, Thomas DeQuincey

sees Coleridge’s foot as a goldfish

in an aquarium missing its walls.

The young Alfred de Musset is touching

George Sand’s left nipple

with a sable watercolor brush.

“Tu m’aimes?” he asks her.

“Et toi?” She turns her head

and blows cigar smoke in the face

of the Paris dawn.

The woman in the house across the street decides to leave. A man walks out of a bar and disappears. In California, half a million people all look up at the sky, and find that there is nothing out of the ordinary.

On the shoulder of a highway two brothers kiss in the back of a car while their father sleeps in the front seat. Another man in another car, going forty miles an hour in a one hundred-mile zone, shakes his head at something said on the radio. A house in the middle of nowhere, recently foreclosed: the wallpaper in the living room slowly peels away.

We have school tomorrow, Kyle.

I’m sorry to take you back to Wichita

from your family in Chicago. I made Emmalie

take a picture of you and Agnes sleeping

in the backseat. I’ve just smashed a monarch

on 36 highway, and the Sun is fleeting.

1.

abe, it’s been a century and a half

since we last talked. how the heck are ya?

my mom got rid of the bunk beds

when i was 10. i didn’t marry that girl

i liked in the first grade. feelin’ okay.

I’ve been to the Lincoln Memorial quite a few times with the childish, stubborn understanding that Abe was buried there, that a memorial required an actual corpse to be complete, something to mourn beyond a field of marble embossments, but it came to my attention, really through a logical progression where I first noted the openness of the space, my pure and complete map of every portico, every chamber and the severity of its molding, like a mausoleum, a place designed to eventually fall into disrepair, to fall in ruin against the summer sun, heavy rain threatening the indifference of its tennessee marble;

When I was a girl, my grandmother told me a Devi saved her life during a four-story suicide leap the year China went Red. Me on her lap, she told how she toed the building ledge, staring out over the network of alleyways smothered in smoke and screams.

Watching birds crisscross the solemn sun

Quivered in the reflection of gentled waves.

Far away cobalt mountains stood hushed and frozen.

Mellow ivy, cool grass, beneath the feet, wet sand.

Everything around me shimmered

through my irises—lights, colors, a dun sky

seamlessly curved into the earth, neon attires

strewn on wet tracks, outlines

of shadows scudding across faces, but if

some faces reminded of other faces

I would awake, suddenly discovering myself

against the immense expanse

of a city I could escape only with my soul.

The fountains are quiet, gardens brown,

concubines choreograph the palace

and are directed by eunuchs.

The best go off on pilgrimage

while the arcades cough up

cobwebs instead of silks in every color.

How many levels of nostalgia are you on?

I know, counting seems to take the fun out of it,

Yet, there are limits and there are levels,

Again, how high and how wide

Is your painful longing for the past right now?

I’m so sorry your celestial minds

Were deemed unworthy of the spotlight we’ve dedicated to the man who would

Never been known if you were not the first bloom

And stories written by

Ivory powders

And male egotism,

Half-hearted “I love my wife when she obeys me” sagas--arrogance and bigotry

And a son. We know he loved his mother.

Mourned her in the myths where he caused her death.

Cherished her in the ones where she didn’t die.

Heard her when she called out Siddhartha, Siddhartha,

come sit next to me and listen to my voice. Siddhartha,

love is everything. You must love. You must love

your mother tells you to drench yourself in every piece of clothing you own and you do not want

to be a jungli so you wrap your torso in kurtas and salwar kameezes and layer your long legs in

tight churidars and you want to bring your ghagras but they are too heavy to run in so you leave

90 Days

to flee from

the gunshots,

the crimes,

the threats.

Phoebe, having finished her stockings, started on her husband’s shirts and then, with Rose, tackled the vegetable garden while Rose told her stories about her brother’s exploits at Salamanca, which sounded like a lark, at least in her telling. Phoebe held the wholly unfounded belief that she might have made a good soldier, which she voiced as she pulled a doll-sized radish out of the earth and shook it firmly. Laughing, Rose shielded herself from the spray of dirt.

wǒmen—or to say—we

are waiting by the sea, & i watch

my mother confess to receding

shorelines. there is only plurality

in her stories, only wǒmen, only

because that’s all i wanted to be.

a girl left nameless—rendered whole

& baptized in all things holy.

please. this is a eulogy for girls

born untitled. we can be more than the syllables

clenched between yellowing teeth.

How do you come back normal

from Deliverance Day

Milo: …women so beautiful they don’t seem like they exist.

Father Rogers: It only seems that way because you’re young. (cigarette) Or actually—you’ll stop caring eventually. Time has a way of levelling it all out.

(speaking on Naya)

Milo: It’s the voice that goes before the laugh. I’m thinking of getting myself hypnotized because she’s still there completely if I have a dream or something. It’s not my fault, the impression, you know, the somatic thing…starts to fade. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s time…

Rogers: Leveling it all out, taking care of it all…

Milo: I don’t want that—like this. (beat)