we averted our eyes from the blown-out tire
by animal instinct, though it was not flesh,
its singed inverted fibers waving invertebrate
in the blackened wind. at the horse-themed
mexican restaurant, i took 1 photo of my body
in the mirror and my phone died. body my house my
STORMIN PROUD PAPA my HANDFUL OF PEARLS
body my $75,000 purse and that’s in aughts money
before the recession hit. o throat that triple a called ma’am
again, o babyface that the tire place, full of mercy,
failed to gender at all. at lunch the next day i kept locking eyes
with a mural of a tom at the movies, a HOT BUTTERED LOSTCAT,
though the sun glided into my eye like boiling oil for
galaktoboureko and octopus and chickpeas and beets,
grease that wept from the eggplant when squeezed
just like my shoulders do. yet i still sat dazzled by dappled
spectres of jockeys, the only boy-shape whose door
i fit through. what is someone like me good for?
speed, mud-splattered harlequin, and you saying
my beautiful boy, and slamming the gas on this thing
as hard as possible before it runs itself into the ground.

The dark brown doors to the playground are heavy behind our early arms. Without windows.
We are used to holding small hands, so, once and a while, a teacher will help us push. To find.
If we hide then maybe there is someone counting with their face in their hands / excited
to see us. Here, we are all in the grade where we just can’t miss school. Parents have dropped
off all the happy and so much warranted expectation. If we wake then maybe there is someone
who sings our heads heavy. To the moon. Someone who lives for the cute confusion all over
our faces. We must still be waking up.

We arrive on a bus and the bus driver is our mom. We check to see if there is anyone who fell
asleep in the back. Who forgot their backpack? In the hall there is a party with empty hooks
where we hang our heroes before we enter. We are ready for anything but stillness. Do you hear
the bells of chocolate milk? Stomachs are floating and we’re tugging on the rainbow pinwheel parachute / all the early arms pulling each other and creating clouds. (If I had a crayon
for every time I felt like I was going to die at school, I wouldn’t have many colors. And counting
my valentines cards does not count. And getting jumped in the bathroom does not count.
And getting sent to the office definitely does not count.)

We came longing for a sticker. It would say GOOD JOB and we will have only practiced
our sweetness. It would say EXCELLENT and we will have only professed our favorite species
of wild horse. It would say WINNER and we will have only recited the process in which honey
is made. It’s like a golden beam of heaven in your chest. Early arms.

Outside the heavy brown doors is a playground etched in painted circles, homeroom gathering
spots, and an outfield that at one point became eternity. The bright beyond the heavy door,
the recess, how the light screams like a friend telling you        run        from whoever is           it.
Wince with all the noise of laughter. The concrete smells like mom’s hair. The wood chips
are drying rain. The door is open. All the kids pour out onto the brilliant playground
and are scraping their knees on the blinding sky. Early pick-up. All of us, picked up
that afternoon by our parents. Our teachers. Picked up. Lifted high into the air.

– after Nancy Reddy

I’ve never longed for a longer winter, for those ghosts that bed
down with geraniums, then float loose, like early pollen.

My father and I flip pennies heads-up when they glisten
in our paths to give others better luck. Everywhere, violets.

Violets on the sofa, violets in the neighbor’s yard, violets
suffusing the vodka, the oils, childhood’s velvety ditches.

Yellow-crowned night herons coast past, chevrons
on a loose wind. One stalked the yard and flipped my heart.

Thirst breaks each of us and roots are the best telepaths.
Rain-soaked, we dream of wearing our pronouns like blue rings.

Dogwoods balance their yellow saucers, dazzling waitresses.
Another spring cheers on the ephemerals, those pop divas:

ragwort, trout lily, trillium. I have a thickness of names
about me, like a grief coat. My cousin chewed ice

as we walked down a country road. My cousin caught
a grasshopper and named it Fred. My brother knew

all the hawks were named Steven. I’m glad, for this.
Spring is a piano lesson and a treasure map.

I’ve said its name so often it sprints past me. This thirst
will break us like soil. First, we spread the marigold seeds,

those black-flecked splinters, then sunflowers from nowhere
open their umbrellas above the strawberries, weaving their nets.

She contained innumerable bodies. For ages, she had swallowed our deceased
so neatly. With woven roots and grasses, she’d mended shut the million mouths
we’d cut and dug into her skin. She’d rebirthed our departed into night-blooming
jasmine, cats, avocado trees, snow, razor clams, and delicate blue moths. But hers

was the kind of body with which nothing elegant could be done: we couldn’t bury
Earth in herself. She was a corpse we carried on a titanium trailer bed twenty-five
thousand miles long, joined to a ship six times her size. We towed her as we flew
into the luminous, grieving nebulae. Clusters bowed and winked. Some stars split

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

To hold your breath for weeks, is to reverence

the ancestors who survived the middle

passage. And the ones whose souls were left in

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine.]

Allori painted you so pale,

lips ajar with words just spoken

or a triumphant cry on air.

…[Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine.]

We made jam in the kitchen,

the windows    flung wide

to let in a non-existent breeze.

…[Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine.]

Spring was barely a fleck on the horizon

when we arrived, our tiny family a beast

asleep. You and I held hands and named the patches

…[Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine.]

The year my father was born
Hart Crane died by suicide while
sailing between Mexico and New York—
Harold Hart Crane of Garrettsville, Ohio
whose body was never recovered since he
leapt overboard into the Gulf of Mexico.

My father would have had nothing to do with
a poet committing suicide after a steamship crew
savagely beat him for being who and what he was.
Horseshit, he’d have called it. Especially the gay-
poet part of it since I wrote and published poems.
I guess I’m afraid, he said once, that you’re gay.

No wonder Hart Crane skreiched Goodbye
and went over the side (and in broad daylight)
with one big, effeminate wave for the shit-world—
Hart Crane whose father invented the Lifesaver
candy, held the patent, and was a businessman.
Crane may not have told his father he was gay.

Just the phrase sucking cock would piss him off,
my father. If he heard it, he’d stop a conversation.
Announce there was no need to be so pornographic.
Wouldn’t let it slide. Not that. Maybe the n-word
but not cock—nothing having to do with cocks
or someone saying he might like to suck one

or take one inside him as an act of love and of
male tenderness for which there is no metaphor
only a past in which homophobia and 1932 were
acquainted. Just that, though: no hand-holding
and no one sucking anyone’s cock, then having
to jump the fuck overboard and be lost at sea.

She contained innumerable bodies. For ages, she had swallowed our deceased
so neatly. With woven roots and grasses, she’d mended shut the million mouths
we’d cut and dug into her skin. She’d rebirthed our departed into night-blooming
jasmine, cats, avocado trees, snow, razor clams, and delicate blue moths. But hers

was the kind of body with which nothing elegant could be done: we couldn’t bury
Earth in herself. She was a corpse we carried on a titanium trailer bed twenty-five
thousand miles long, joined to a ship six times her size. We towed her as we flew
into the luminous, grieving nebulae. Clusters bowed and winked. Some stars split

apart with reverence. A few blue stragglers stretched to touch her, grazed her left
cheek, Egypt, and her right, Hawaii. They’d never glimpsed her up close and she
stunned, like a slightly faded screen goddess. But who suspected she possessed
secret technologies? After a while, she began to regenerate. Fresh forests leafed

out, like the astonishing eyelashes of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes who had been
posthumously displayed behind glass for centuries. Earth’s new foliage gave us
rashes. Her seas teemed with fishes of a species we had never known, all inedibly
emetic. To inhale her wildflower fumes would crimp the valves of our wondering

hearts. Before, so many of her features had existed only to delight, seduce, shelter
and nourish. She’d been our Mary, giving birth to God each day in a kaleidoscopic
array of forms. She’d been our Marilyn, soft, yielding, compliant, her please-just-
love-me smile bubbling in the ocean’s foamy edge, her blue eyes salty, trusting us

not to hurt her in all the ways we did. True, she’d sometimes terrified with her
wild Vesuvian moods, but now she refused to be of any actual use. She fluoresced
with toxic biologies, conceived gorgeous poisons and feathered deaths, so when
we entered her clear enclosure the very air was stinging, and violent with birds, yet

we couldn’t just unhitch her. We came from a race of collectors who had preserved
relics. Our forebears rummaged in junk shops for dented metal lunch pails, shopped
online for antique plates, torn Levi’s and lockets, kept photos beneath the clinging
plastic film of albums, cherished the victrola and the autograph, stored stiff dresses

in cedar. Nostalgia was our nature. So she was worth hauling, evocative as a Coke
can strung to the bumper of an old Chevrolet, rattling on asphalt as Adam and Eve
drive away. We told so many stories about how she used to be, we forgot the weight
of her ripening fury, and failed to predict our abandonment. Somewhere beyond

Andromeda she quaked herself free, rolled off into heaven. There were never any
umbilical cords that we could see. Yet even with all the food on the ship we grow
thin. Our mouths ache when we gaze out toward her, pale blue, already light years
away. And we pine. Our tongues hang for the old flavor of her atmosphere, her rain.