sacred hush. the doors just open. lucky. any belief in danger mostly gone, siphoned away by twenty minutes of barelegged inspection & a shiny car pulling through the driveway to turn around, dismissing the need for my prepared good girl speech with a disinterested wave. no audio-video surveillance. not really. just dirty windows. just awe. all the broken mirror glass.

January 15: I dreamed an animal wanted to get out of the house, standing by the living room sliding glass door. I let it out, and after some hesitation, it was able to safely jump to the ground and hurry away. Another animal, a larger pig, was there also. It very intelligently turned around and held to the side of the porch floor and let itself down feet first.

I was supposed to be a boy. My mother didn’t do an anatomy ultrasound because she was so sure, God had revealed it in a dream. After eight hours of labor, the doctors said It’s a girl. In all my baby pictures, I am wearing blue.

If I owned a gun while I was washing dishes at the sink. You might’ve asked too if on your boyfriend’s kitchen shelf beside The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds you saw a paperback called Guns, which traced gunpowder to a 13th-century monk, catalogued the flared muzzle of the blunderbuss, illustrated Colt’s rotating cylinder, and hallowed the birth of 9mm cartridges and canonical assault rifles.

It was very dark when Stefano and I finally stumbled up the hill and fell upon the benches in front of the house to take out all of the sharp seed heads of all sorts of grasses from the crooks of our jeans, webbing of our socks, and crevices of our boots.

When there’s nowhere else to turn I open the closet. I face my suits, my length and shortness each an adjustment in proportion, flamboyance, reserve. Separates pile up all around me, what people see is the product of my previous doing and current undoing. I own the power to discard, though naked truth is not an option. My history is in there and a history of men and women dressing before me. I consider every tag.

When I first ordered sardines, I was unprepared for the ichthyomorphic jenga tower that arrived on my plate. I was at a café in Sintra, a medieval Portuguese city nestled into a hillside. Tuk-tuks sputtered past my table perched precariously at the edge of the town square. The waitress maneuvered her way along the sidewalk to deliver my lunch.

Pendular praxis
echoplasmic ethos
who I was, am, will be
archaeologic, astrologic
effervestibules, efferventricles

‘Climacteric they’re called’
the fruit seller piped up
at Saturday’s farmers’ market
spelling it out for a woman rapt
(his brawny look likely assisting)

question:
a country, a constellation of Narcissus, is led by leaders stifling
its people through empty bellies, destitution, captivity, carnage,
& anguish.

Blue, blue eyes my Mama had,
Mumchy says, like the sky,
played piano like an angel—
sobbing, adds,
The big flu took her.
Papa died of it in The Great War.

Missing you turns
all sweet things sour.

Your acidic absence
singes the tip of my tongue.

You never did discover what popped the tires of your car. Once, you were young, and sweeter than a peach, not yet ripe with a pit that would crack teeth. You turned into a patch of upturned soil that didn’t have a seed.

I let you tour the university grounds before you had to leave and catch your train for the airport. I had not visited myself yet, though I had been here a month already. The buildings were brick.

but I have to someday, maybe today
or tomorrow or next week or when I'm
100 but it's going to transpire
and sometimes I wish I'd never been born
if all that happens to me in the end

Everything has an inner life:
the leaf twisting within wind;
the ant pacing sidewalk; the barista
burning your latte. To despair, they all curl

I have not been born yet   or conceived   or conceived of but I share my mother’s tale as the weight upon her precludes expression

Yanina. Poland. 1939. Daughter of a prisoner of war.

We made fun of him for decades
because one night after dinner,
he suggested we stay a while
at the table, which had a view
of Kowloon Bay, and the other side

The ordinary became softer
more pink in the clouds
wider open spaces of rolling green

a fine inlay of her fingers
amid mine      palms pressed
together      heartline
to heartline      lifeline

The precursor to the mirror is the mother.

The seer warned my mother of myself,

As an infant, one discovers love or

how the clearest glimpse of watered self

We hid in bamboo forests, thin trunks, boney branches. Translucent leaves caught in our curls. We longed to lose our eight and ten-year-old selves within dense stems, pitch our bullied bodies under leaf litter,

My body offers some companion as a rock in the bay tiderises to foot the black cormorant. Saltwater preys on metal and memory. You talked on strength watching planks bent in the steam box,
would only go wharfway among strangers,

From the ocean’s point of view,
an interruption. On Nantucket
where land costs ten million dollars
per acre, the Atlantic laughs
all winter, pounding at the center.

I still have your chair
positioned across from me
during meals. The chair
is not a token for you
and your absence but it is
where you actually sat

and you used to be a Merry-Go-Round of endless words, the looping of horses a blurred cycle gathering me from the dust of a fallen circle;

She did not mean the kind
stumbled upon in a wood, ringed

with bracken, spring-fed savior
of the lost child or mirror

Dad lived on about 150 acres of what he called heaven. It was only accessible by taking I-67 for about an hour, until you come to the exit with an old truck stop named Pete’s Gas, and continue on a narrow two-lane for another thirty-forty minutes, before the road suddenly turns to gravel.

Bobby always acted weird. In third grade, he sat at a desk next to me. When the street sweeper machine drove down Arrellaga Street on Wednesday mornings, our class would jump up, run to the row of tall windows and wave to its driver – all except Bobby. He would hurry to the opposite side of the classroom and stand in the corner, facing the wall.

My Persian cat is lying in my bed. Let me rephrase. My Persian cat Atossa is lying in my bed impersonating—flawlessly—me. A promising sight. A beautiful thing. 

I, on the other hand, am perched on the windowsill. It’s daybreak. 

The golden waves roll in the wheat fields below as I peer at the blue sky shielded from all hostile satellites. In a most advanced jet born in the most secretive way, I cruise through the air of the last bastion insulated from all known types of infiltration. In less than a minute, I will face the enemy pilot one-on-one.

She opens her eyes, half in the blankets, listening to the passage of heavy feet pass overhead. Rising and moving toward the bathroom, she braces the wall with one hand, passing a scarred wooden dresser. The photos lie flat there, in a half-circle, like playing cards. She stops.

When I turned thirty, I sold my place on the lake and moved to the mountains. To the Upper Engadine, that is, still the swiftest, surest way to Everness. 

My friends and acquaintances were incredulous, my parents crestfallen.

I could see myself in my grandfather’s eyes. We stood on the east side of the Mississippi River, gazing out as the city’s skyline reflected upon the rippling waters. I’d always thought the river was a place that was full of secrets. It harbors them, and then it carries them away.

No one can be sure of when, exactly, the man with the machine was first spotted on his favored park bench (or the circumstances of his arrival, for that matter) because no one can remember. In those days the sun rose and the sun set. The sun set and the sun rose. One day we knew nothing about the man or his machine.