After Reading Li-Young Lee, I Contemplate
three flies, trailing each other like questions.
And the evening
ahead, a dark bud.
No one knows the fragrance of loneliness like a prophet
or a pastor’s kid at the bottom
of her glass, wine-round and shimmering.
As I write this, the ocean envelopes a column of fire
the color of Satan’s eye.
Every day, I threaten to walk into the sea.
And a rich man and his friends threaten
to launch themselves into the clenched hole
of our galaxy.
Goodbye, Elon. Farewell, Jeff.
The astounding probability of never returning
has never occurred to you. And it has never occurred
to me, searching as I do for the nearest body
of water. There is no sea
close enough for me to enter. Even fewer deep enough.
A handsome man driving the blue truck of my country
approaches me on the porch, where the flies are. Plastic
package in hand, bubbled and happy, he asks if I am Danielle?
Oh to be a Danielle—all brains, and ambition, and legs—
an executive at KeyBank with a highrise loft in the city,
Louboutins for day shoes, two Teslas, and no debt.
Or another Danielle, a personal trainer—all biceps and chest,
cut from the gods—the kind Danielle #1 would fuck
on the side. He asks if I am Danielle.
And though nothing in me desires him,
(not my thighs, not my final frontier)
I almost cry Yes! Yes! I am she! just to see his face
glow luminous, having named one of my many names.
And the arrowed smiles scattered on the package,
cut like the faces of clowns, tell me
it’s only the imminent truth that counts,
the thrill of requesting and receiving.
I deny him my true name but gift him my mouth, pulled wide.
My own sweat—renewable, pearled, crawls without destination.
Imagine! In all of this, like a child, I still desire to please.
This is my new millennium. No one today has died
yet. Like anything here could.
At The End of the Empire
like the child
who knowing
nothing
but the tyranny
of her need
in the pitch
of the long night
bellows
for the arms
that always find
her despite
the wait
I reach for you
Psalm 23 As The Temperance Card
All my readings come like this: pulled
from earth like plumeless thistles
scattered down the sun-seared highway.
The lengths I’ve gone to find you,
Lord, would have me stoned in one life,
burned the next. In this one you have suffered
me to live, a little longer, harder, wilder
than my enemies. You send your angel to me
once again—their face a flash, a woman’s and
a man’s—wings flayed and spread like meat
in open air, hair wreathed in white-
hot coronation. And I, already gazing
out beyond, am led to lie down here in fields of green,
to simply be. O Inconvenient Lord, unsheath
my sword and let me do the thing I know.
Or look to me as one continuous blade.
Tell the angel I’ll be wasted here,
these cups in either hand bright and brimmed
and running over. Give this reprieve
to someone more deserving
of such opulence, opulence—opulent God!
You cause my heart to burst. I always want;
I lust and thirst and there’s no end to it.
O stubborn Lord, the woman I must be
on land, by flowing water, and in need
knows only this: her body’s tempered
swing, the brandish of her flesh.
If I must rest in such a place as here, then lay me down
between the dirt road and the river.
Beside this flowering of yellow iris, make me.
