Jane

The skirt fits you nicely,

so dance in it with more terror.

I dug a trench in the crook in your hips

and grounded it into shards

I gifted you the powder.

I called them bones.

I powdered your cheeks and watched the industrial acid rain.

I hid the gun in your vertebrae.

You were born my girl so 

no need to try to be a child.

Load up your arms

and your legs.

Lend me your helmet for a little while 

and help me

unzip your skull to fill with it a radio cue.

Push forward! Forward!

Let me make myself a camp in it.

Mary Janes that cannot be a home anymore

so it becomes, like us, rest assured, 

the destroyed and the atomized destruction.

The machete.

My dull razor on dirt-laced stubble

and I shave the hatches off of your fake-leather tanks.

So where are you going 

stomping on Gaea’s porch

when I am the one to reinvent her? 

In this girlhood 

with a ground made more for war than play,

I watch you make more bomb craters

and stuff it with a cold pearl and a pair of wings. 

Maybe it was folded into the shrapnel

that ruptured like a lip before it kisses.

You tell me it is a stalemate

and I say I am winless but 

I gifted you the breakage that still rings in my ears.

Ritual on Stockton Boulevard

A ritual begins with the silent confession that it must be done again.

It is to perform a residual duty. 

The peoplehood is a sun.

They herd in the funeral square.

Mid-June. A parking lot sans the isolated thinking.

Metal folding chairs with Chinese characters, 

spray-painted as-a-matter-of-factly

under the seats, 

made only to be read with implied loudness and haste.

Faced down.

Face the plated concrete intensified by the longest daylight.

Their chants embellishment for a gap

like the dew obsessed with a droughted valley.

A voice and then an unchangeable instrument.

An elder blows a carved horn, arched like a scythe,

outs a slow, wobbly groan.

The old men sing with a strenuous, operatic grace,

each sound cut short and sharp with unfinished existing. 

An instrument is now merely a punctuation, so it is a cue.

It is an order, a scale, a timely cymbal clash evoking another groan

and another Canton hum.

These elders are cloaked like lords in 

golden poppy robes and capes

made of fake red silk and scratchy glitter lace

keystone to unapologetic costumery. 

Attopped with a paper crown.

This is by the barricade of Kikoman soy sauce cans

and post-ambushed frozen squid boxes left in the hot sun to sweat

on the unfurbished sidewalks that lead them, if they want to keep going,

past the past-its-prime community centers and 

apartment stacks with the verdigris water hose,

past the donation boxes with miscellaneous open-toe shoes

and, if they’re lucky, a once-adored New Balance,

past the barbed-wire terrain with no more gold to stake 

that is more sand-like than soil,

past more temples, like this one, with the hubs and the clubs with the phrases

“Friendship Association” or “Benevolent Society,”

through this unwalkable part of the city challenged 

by those who have only known walking,

to their clothesline-and-cactus neighborhood 

that has the other kind of a mid-century homes.

It is evidence of time made daringly intimate

and obliquely personal.

By the afternoon, everyone pours the tea.

Set the cash on fire.

Watch the supernova swell in the trash and the wealth hinder

and take our fingerprints with it to become nothing no longer. 

Gone, so it’s better.

Even right.

Gray exhaust lapses the sight of the temple walls,

the virgin-summer sky without signs of any celebration,

or the people who don’t celebrate.

The gutter reels like a scored limb.

Melts into a scabby grimace with buboes,

its paint shell taking on the form of a charred lymph node.

A ritual is a calling of people,

of clerks and waitresses and plumbers,

of low-level state workers and franchise picker-uppers

and newspaper readers and soap opera watchers,

of Macy’s tote bag and Ranch 99 plastic bag collectors 

and insurance agency T-shirt receivers

and second-round money burners. 

They dance with the ash like under long-awaited rain.

Wear the scrappings of diasporic ode. 

A cigarette-lunged squeal 

from the old grandpa whose voice never breaks

and who breathes the energy of paper gold.

They see the lord’s dress khakis and Sketchers peeking under his red cloak.

Glasses stamped onto his lopsided nose 

like a scorched root.

The complexion inflamed with wrinkles.

The rag wrung, grateful.

From his voice a hymn, the passing of linguistic metallica

scraping the long-corroded face.

Breath loud, certain, 

with no more room in this universe to act lost.

Unwaveringly indulged in the scheme of what is to be sung and then sung again.

Together they roam

with light, synchronous feet 

to a rhythm that was rough

like those children dried out with a purpose 

and the burning of our paper wishes.

Here they have, or what is to be called,

the making of a race of humans 

who turn into people.

Another set of hands depleted so they grab onto more sand 

and more onto children,

heads a grudging bow.

Weeping under the sunken canopies with Opium lungs 

and they sleep to a drum

but they were known more 

for the corners of the world misspent.

Old Hollywood at a Bar in San Francisco

Warning! 

She sips from the mouth of her bottle with

an aimless glance across the counter

or perhaps through a past.

…a chemical known to the State of California

to cause harm to the female productive system.

Today the trolley carries more glances.

The city broadcasts a night of dancing.

She could still smell Chinatown like a nightclub.

Hear the clink of glasses and the washing applause

on that floorshow framed by swirling caterpillar clouds and chandeliers.

Gold paint and an eyelid made tall.

Her brows the curved edge of a coin 

or a shell belonging to the tide.

Show me what you got, girls!

Sing like this choice is yours.

She is beautiful.

Dance like it is a lost opportunity.

She lets the sequined petticoat shine and

flicks the bright, feathered fan 

reaching 

with all its spines like the moment before the bow.

Gives them a leg or a clean fold of clothes for a coin

and be a lipsticked girl for a jazz stage and

have the stockings be found in a part of a closet

from when your mother was a wild thing! 

said again and again.

What was the slew for my girls for the new century?

Sweat and leave it on like a vase’s shine.

Sprawl on a velvet ottoman 

and be shot 

glamorously on the oriental rug.

Dance off the time on her dress with the patrons

and have her hips tell you a labor tale

and when the cigarette on her tongue

makes way for her liquor another

unbeautiful language is born.

The lanterns are cued.

We could expect, at any moment,

the crying doll face to run down the sloped alley 

with her heel straps coming loose.

Protagonistic desperation.

A chip on her cheek.

An eyelash’s worth of reckoning.

A black smudge on the ground of that alley 

or on the bar floor 

cigarette-spat

from the pout of a woman never told to wish.

Civilization Redeemed

We have soup by first sopping it with a rice patty.

The house caves softly until it is gone forever

and the river turns white and sweet.

It is too late to be here living.

I could’ve done it easily. 

I want you to dream further from the ledge.

Be the daughter of the drought that brought the storm

and I will drink its overcast like a slaughtered herb.

You were an architect

and then a botanist who dreamt.

Childhood July

i run past infected wounds to remember

our shared box of cold honeydew, a chilling

plastic somehow incubating 

the joy of nothing but 

a sweetness that itched and became a sugar that stayed when

its acid still scratched a little bit. 

and we ate in stuffy sunlit rooms, sweat coated our necks

when life was nothing but dry, hot must

rubbing soft burns on our nostrils. coarse 

tissue treading across cherry-tinted flesh belonging to

children’s sticky noses. when we stitched clouds, midday and for us. 

the two laughters merged together, overlapping

for long enough so we could be fragments but never-empty,

living as nothing more but stowaways, parts for 

a place where we can remember nothing, for

we can finally be children

like us.