Metal making love to metal in a
distant but familiar place. The
calling of a feast I was not privy to.

Yet somehow, these echoes persist
in their fragile lives, filling the
empty spaces of this heart
as stuffing does a turkey.

This heart, the organ I think with.

The one that recalls every beating
it took in the name of survival.

The one that always strives to
forgive, but never forgets,
because it is also a muscle.

It remembers.

The last gift I clearly remember my
mother giving my father was a
set of silver handled kitchen knives.

And if I ever found courage to cut the
silence between us with my tongue,
I believe she would say the last
gift my father gave to her was my
youngest sister, who is like one of
a set of silver handled kitchen knives.

Teeth forever showing in my presence,
a serrated smile that slices into me
without causing me to crumble
at the sharpness of her mind, as I
do at the sharpness of intentions
behind the extension of knives as gifts.

Since the day my parents cut
the nostalgia loose from my
childhood like burnt crust, I have
dropped crumbs of myself
everywhere I made travel.

In the ears of women. A bowl of chili
cooked in a nearby soup kitchen. The
palms of a God begging the world for
recognition or a dime of every dollar.

Anywhere except the basket
where I was bred and baked.

Because my left foot always wants to leave,
and my right foot correct turns wrong,
they could never agree to walk in
straight lines, so I lost my way home.

Found myself sitting at a table
full of surrogates who carried
me in closeness for the holiday
like a son of shared blood.

They were unawares to my hemophilia.
Had no knowledge my family was fine
china not to be removed from the curio,
did not recognize my meekness as shock
at seeing meals shared between people.

Supper was a solitary endeavor where
I came from. It was separating the
foods on your plate like parents into
different rooms to protect the taste of each.

It was discussing politics with a television
resting idly on cable news. It was
swallowing your pride because you
had not yet learned to cook.

But time has passed through me like heat.
The yeast within my voice has risen,
and friends have been fed by my words.

I have grown, only to see much
of what was with me, still is.

I still dine with a television. I still avoid
cooking whenever possible since some
pots are better left unstirred. I still
separate my foods with restraining orders.

The shame of it all is that a meal will
never satisfy when one fears becoming
what they eat, and so I am left with this.

A stomach full of holes fit to sheath the
knives my father forgot to take with him.

By habit, I sleep atop my belly at night
and drive them deeper into myself.
My silence, an accessory to the crime.

Not to say there was ever a crime,
just that there were victims.

Not to say I am one of them, just that
I would like to avoid making more.

And so, whenever I find myself in that place,
I take that youngest sister, who is like
one of a set of silver-handled kitchen knives,
and bring her head gently into my gut
where I have fashioned a groove for her.

Tell her to be still in what she is, since
she is a blade, and life cannot always
be trusted with a gift such as hers.

Just look to me as proof.
We came from the same set.
Four forged with the mettle to love.

My toes tip toward the drain
The water streams down into the dark
A place for forgotten things.
We couldn’t forget that dark void,
Though we tried
We all walked around it
But my mother would ask questions of the empty,
Yelling across the space as if she hoped to be an echo
We only heard echoes.
I don’t remember that year,
Only a faint ringing in my ears
My mother would ask questions of the empty
The dips of her skin coupling her mouth making parenthesis to indicate she only asked in a whisper
So that my brothers and I would only think it a lullaby
Or song jumbling through her thoughts
Lining her day with a murmur
I think we knew.

My father would love that he’s become something of a song.
He played instruments like chess
Would pull me into his chest
His bass humming through me
My memory of his voice is a shout out the front door
He had glasses round like a question, tortoise-shelled,
Weeping from slender earpieces.
They were as heavy as I imagine his thoughts to be.
I imagine what his thoughts would be sometimes.
How he would hum his lips while thinking of me.
I only rarely think about the crook of his elbow,
Where my hand would be on a softly lit day,
I in a white dress and
He waist deep in memories.
I only rarely think of that.
I more often think about what his face looked like,
Find that I remember the half-finished drawing I made of him better than his actual face,
The drawing only his round glasses, his brow folded in thought, his eyes not looking at me.

I used to whisper my own questions.
At night in my bed, with my ceiling as a canvas for thought
I knew every dip of shadow,
How the blind-stripes would chase across its surface
As my worries dovetailed with my prayers.
I asked
Let everything work out.
I don’t really know why that’s what I asked for,
When it obviously had not.
Let everything work out.
What did I mean?
My dark ceiling taught me that an entity can be the same even as light and shadow fall across it
And that God will always be listening if you think he is.
I’ve decided now
That if I am ok with how life turns me
Then everything will always work out.

I am standing in the bathtub
Crying.
And If I don’t say anything, nothing will echo.
If I don’t talk in the morning, my words won’t settle
Around my feet
And If I don’t speak his name, then it will never fall like the leaves have been recently.

Because I come from a winding road of women
who still collect the tragedies of love in their hands
like the doorknobs they’ve turned upon one another,

You are still the children of your mothers,
On bad days, you are your best friend’s anonymous hero. On good ones, you are your own.
You are descendants of explorers who once cupped moondust in their palms
and felt a pulse louder than their own.
You are ancestors of future prodigies who will save this world from what we are doing to it.
They will forgive us for our crimes and ask more of their own children.

You are who you were before you stopped wanting to be.
Before you settled for less than what you deserved
but told yourself it was the best you could get.
Remember the way you spoke your name when you were still proud of the person it labeled.
Remember your second grade birthday cake, and ask yourself why everything nowadays is tasteless.
Find the colors of your dreams before they greyed in the dustbowls of your eyes.
Find your first heart, the one you grew a couple sizes too good for,
and put it back on your sleeve where it’s meant to be.

Because you are beautiful, beauty yet to behold itself,
like the first ring of “middle c” in a deaf man’s ear after signing his last breath,
like the hallelujah chorus of a godless but holy nation
who doesn’t need a heaven to tell it right from wrong.
Perhaps forgiveness for our enemies grows inside bombs and crumbled buildings.
Perhaps every man’s secret is stored in the chest of a woman he loves,
because our secrets are the same.

So let us praise each other’s deepest shames,
Let the sunlight slap your scars in the face and remind them
that nothing on your body is undeserving of warmth.
Your body is a miracle waiting to change someone’s life.
You have the backbone of Demeter,
the heel of Achilles that doesn’t cover itself with armour,
but lets vulnerability breathe properly.
You have the eyes of God herself
and the palms of an Empire who knows its future because it knows its history.

So get excited for Monday mornings.
Spin proudly, across broad street in red heels and a rippling yellow dress.
Rush hour will forget why it was ever in a hurry.
The 65 year old man on the corner will ask you where you’ve been all his life.
and you will say – “I’ve been busy asking myself what I’m doing with my life.”
Your life is a handpicked continuation of someone else’s that didn’t make it this far.

So take a moment, feel the patch of skin behind your ear,
inside your forearm, between your first and second toe —
Yes, there are tender places where we have all been spared of callouses
from walking too far, too late at night with people who wanted too much from us.

We are young in all the same parts —
untouchable, infinite,
our palms are still pink as the sidewalk chalk we used to spell our names backwards with
And there were once days we didn’t mind so much the backwards —
when you still believed that if you cut a doll’s hair, it would grow back
that if you ate too many sunflower seeds, they would blossom in your belly.

That was before everyone started asking each other
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Who says we ever stop growing?
And why must we be something besides what we are now?

I’ve come to the conclusion that my best days are reincarnations of my childhood.
When I decided I wanted to be a teacher, waitress, professional sumo wrestler
and President of the United States between the beginning and end of recess.
When I was forgetful enough never to run out of first times.
And there are second chances everywhere, so there will always be first times.

My mom never understood why.
Sometimes, she’d flip the switch on the wall to “help me out.”
And I’d scream, “No, Mom! The colors!”
Orbs of glowing colors appeared on the insides of my eyelids.
I formed them into shapes. Most often, Jesus.
Like that optical illusion where you stare at the four dots, then close your eyes and stare at something bright, then Jesus’ face appears.

Also, ghosts.
I knew they were evil because they spelled out ‘Booooo’ in Comic Sans.
With Helvetica, they might’ve stood a chance.
But with this as my nightly routine, I certainly never did.

So, I’m a little strange.
I don’t like drawing attention to myself,
but don’t mind telling secrets to 600 of my closest friends.

Like how I often woke up home alone when I was little.
I feared everyone went to heaven without me.
I still fear being left behind, but I’d rather be right than happy.

II.
It is always brooding males who understand this.
Introspective loners who view life through a lens and write how things could be.

I’ve always admired the minds of men brave enough to create stories.
The type of men who only know conversation as character development.
The type of men who fall in love with Manic Pixie Dream Girls.

Manic—the A-side of self-loathing.
Pixie—delicate, yet supernatural.
Dream—Altered consciousness has never felt so real.
Girl—The only explicit thing about her.

She’ll ease your pain, tell you to be spontaneous,
to frolic through Ikea, to change your life with mediocre indie pop.
Through her quirks, you’ll become well-adjusted.
You’ll filter your troubles through her like she’s a pair of rose-colored glasses,
which makes sense because she’s always been a spectacle.

You’ll claim you can see through her, unaware that reflection is her pastime.
And past times love shifting shapes.
She’s as long as everything and as widespread as goodness,
but still there’s little depth.

She is a fantasy, who assigns herself your peace of mind,
but no one cares about her story.
She is easy to miss.

III.
I am easy to miss.
Even on Broad Street in a gold “Shakespeare is my homeboy” T-shirt
and a neon coral sweater.
I never said I was nondescript,
Just that you’ll aim for me, but never quite get me.

I am easy to miss.
Because somewhere in your mind, the idea of me will complete you.
You’ve scripted me as your foil, written me as what you’re not
instead of what I am.

I am not your Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
I have struggles of my own, and it’s not my job to charm away your fears.
It’s funny that you think of me as a character, but refuse to acknowledge my flaws.
Right now, you’re too wrapped up in your own
to see I’m queuing up the credits from the director’s chair,
and I intend to fall asleep properly.

A girl comes up to my friend saying “you look like you need someone to dance with,”
and with a I just ate a half hour ago look in his eyes he smiles,
“Nah I’m just dancing with my boys.”

That night we were dancing
like there were shot clocks on our ankles
and pop rocks in our socks.
I felt the same way about my moves
as I did about my hand jobs—
no girl in the world could do them better!

And we could care less that there less girls on the dancefloor
than at a no-shave-november convention
cuz fuck girls, we just wanted to dance!
So unike most my other nights
and all my other poems
this one was for the fellas.

And to the few ladies who’ve
I’ve had the pleasure of showing
my, well yano.
You prolly wish it was longer…
but if it grows at the same rate its grown for the last 10 years
I’m gonna die with a penis at least three feet long.

Now we’re back on the dancefloor
And CeeLo Green comes on
And even the most stubborn wallflower
starts dancing cuz that piano intro is happier
than golden arches for a big mac junkie.
More middle fingers infiltrate the air than when Sarah Palin visited San Francisco.
And all us on the dancefloor could care less about
the fact the sprinkler and the shopping cart stopped being cool about 10 years ago.

Becuase for all my life,
I’ve had the same 3 man wolfpack.
This Italian Jew, a Pizza Bagel if you will,
with guy who used to have me over for thanksgiving dinner on my right
and the guy that taught me how to masturbate on my left.
We danced until the morning
and we couldn’t be happier stumbling home to our parent’s houses
cause we had reached our full bro-tencial.

So at that cheesburgers and regret point in the late evening,
we decided right then and then that when we’re older we’ll get
tattoos across our shafts that read “my penis is beautiful.”
And hopefully I’ll get it when I’m hard,
so when I’m soft it’ll read “my pen is full.”
And that’s really all I need.
Cuz with a full pen
and a full heart
the girls might come,
but even if they don’t come around any more
I still got my boys on the dance floor!

Part of me wants to blame you,
But the other part knows it’s disrespectful to keep poking through the ashes
So I watch, content to keep the people a page-length distance away.
I still identify as a people person,
Even though I don’t like people much these days.
I trace the skyline with slender fingers just to feel like I own this sprawling chaos.
I’ve always loved chaos.

I want to wake up without remembering what you looked like in the morning,
But you’ve always had a coffee ground body and a way of marking everything I do,
Tonight, the truth sounds like discord
It echoes in my ear drums, and wells up behind my eyes.
I’ve got clumsy hands and shallow tear ducts;
I try to at least keep my fingers occupied, but they only settle down when
I let them remember how they felt on your skin.

I’d lend you my perspective,
But in the end you’d still see what you wanted to see.
I would draw you a diagram, but that wouldn’t make you walk back to me,
You never followed directions.

I woke up this morning with your taste on my tongue.
You had a mouth like a cherry blossom blooming three months too late,
We kissed like the sea and the sky,
our tongues were horizon lines,
you couldn’t tell where wet ended and heaven started,
we just knew for a few blessed moments that we held both between us.

But our love was nothing more than a sunset,
A cliché in the worst sort of way,
It didn’t last so long.
Our love was the second hand on a time bomb,
We bloomed in a field already slotted to become a parking lot.
You told me I was your hero,
So I tied myself to the train track with ropes fashioned from bed sheets,
I admit, I made a lousy martyr.

Tonight I tie-up my blankets like epilogues and stretch them from the balcony,
As if they could reach six-stories,
As if they could tie up our story,
But I never troubled myself with practicalities,
And these days, you don’t seem to trouble yourself with me,
so in a way, this tableaux feels like it’s meant to be.

There are two people below me, holding hands,
And I am fighting the urge to throw something at them.
I am fighting the urge to scream, “it’s not worth it,”
To scream, “you’ll remember this moment over the glasses of wine you’ll drink alone,”
I never wanted to be the jaded one.

I want to believe that attraction
is more than throwing your lonely in the direction of the nearest empty shell,
But I was once a block of marble waiting for my personal sculptor
To chip me into something beautiful.
One night I handed you a chisel and said, “I’m scared.”
You said, “me too.”

But you turned out to be a Picasso,
you carved me into a rambling abstraction and called it
“paradox”
The critics adore it,
but I look nothing  like a masterpiece.

I sit on the balcony, and wonder how often you think of me.
I look into the windows to the evenings of strangers
and imagine how lovely it might be if we all just turned our lights off for a while.

The people scatter towards nowhere in particular,
and it reminds me of how we used to run in circles at 4 am, before we collapsed.
Then you’d let your fingers run in circles on my abdomen, and we’d laugh.
Chaos, us, and everything else have a lot in common, I guess.
I have always loved chaos,
from a distance.

She tells me that the world has always made her sleepy, that life is just one really long struggle to stay awake. And I tell her not to let it win, but all she does in response is yawn.

She says she wants to live in a house twirling on the axis of night, spin dizzy to the rhythm of turn-table dreams, and put the soundtrack on repeat so the sun could never squeeze in enough playing time to rise and shove her back to square one again.

And so she spends hours, ruthlessly scraping at the edges of her life with sleep, as if it’s some kind of sandpaper, trying to smooth out all the corners.

The upper right hand corner, where she can’t help but feel at home in his blind spot. The upper left hand corner, where her little brother dodges blows along in the ring while she pretends that he’s a good fighter. The bottom right hand corner where she found the road to revolution, only to realize that she was chasing her tail.

And the bottom left hand corner, where God fed his rat the last crumbs of her faith.

She connects the four corners into the frame of her mattress and collapses inside, convinced that sleep will know where all the pieces go, that it will plug in the holes between her indifference and her existence. She expects that by daybreak the stars will have formed a line pointing in the direction of the nearest exit.

I read her lips in the mirror as she mouths the words: If being jaded means that I’m aging, then I’ve been well on my way to dying ever since he left.

So yes, sometimes I fall asleep to fall off the face of the earth, thinking that gravity will turn on its head and lift my soul out of the debris. I strangle my troubles in dreams, shove their necks further into the mud. But try not to think of myself as a murderer. Because I’ve found that troubles never come up for air, but don’t run out of breath either. I think they’re trying to teach me how to breathe again.

So I’m just going to trust them. I’ll scream your name into a canyon until I can’t hear it echoing anymore. Then I’ll know it’s safe to come of limbo. I’ll grow my hair out again. Place my heart next to the fire so its teeth will stop chattering. Maybe I’ll even stay up late from now on.

Because I know that the only reason night crucifies herself, is so the days may come back to life. I will come back to life.

Carve me a new heartbeat from the flesh of my pain. It’ll beat so loud you’ll think I’m knocking at the door. But I closed your door a long time ago.

And now, like a refugee, all I want is to have something to look forward to again.

Tomorrow, the sun will fall to its knees and beg me to stare it in the face. I pray that I won’t be the first to look away.

If autumn is another metaphor, it insists the most lovely
Things in this world are the ones leaving it. Dying.

If my life is another poem, this makes my little
Brother a metaphor. Lovely. Leaving. Dying.

For the sake of aesthetics we can call him November.
It’s fitting flesh. He has reddish brown skin and
Half his heart is in a grave. In plotting his demise
He had forgotten I would be home come December.

Maybe I have been the end of him from the very beginning.
It was assumed we would travel in the same direction.
Even our mother used to dress us in synonym.

He always struggled in his English classes and
I’m sure the results are related. He couldn’t
Define himself outside his relation to me.
No wonder he sees life as a prison sentence.

Those fingerprints on his eyes belong to me. I’ve
Reached out to him during dark hours, but I’m gone
Now. I only see him through telephones these days.

I remember every call vividly.

One in particular, sounded like wrist-slit and ankle-sprain.

The tone tinted maple leaf: red, alarming – my brother
Contracting into himself like an unspoken secret.

A tender laugh caved between his cheeks.
A blush surfacing like smoke. He burns
For the sake of another person’s happiness,
Since he understands you cannot
Be a martyr and die of natural causes.

So, he curves his mouth into moth wings.
Kisses the heat. Swallows his Aderol
Pills with a lava flow of vodka. Monk-like.

He’d been squinting at his prospects long enough to
Make the golden-twine of a noose resemble a halo.

People aren’t leaves despite how easy they fall.
We are foolish to consider suicides stunning.

Awestruck by their cold and colors so neither
Our fingers nor voices can be lifted, as the
Falling petals patty-cake the sidewalks softly
As kindergarten footsteps, until the echo
Disappears like cheer at the end of recess.

I often ponder where voices go once they fall to the ground.

I imagine he’d say they don’t ever reach heaven.
I imagine he’d say he couldn’t find the Lord
Even while he was high. I imagine that’s the
Essence of depression, but he knows it.

Melancholy has more mass than Catholics do.
He is by far the heaviest prayer I’ve ever lifted.

He needs help, but doesn’t
Feel comfortable asking for it. Not from me.

But I understand him, because we’re brothers.

The dread of being burdensome is a bond shared
Between us like blood, and bruises, and blue
Jeans neither one can wear anymore.

We both bow out when bowing down goes awry.
We both draw into ourselves like wrinkles.
We both know telephones aren’t happy places.

I wish he’d see we have more in common than the
Surname chaining our hearts to one another.
I tell him this, but he can’t see a locket through the skin.

I tell him not to fear splinters. I tell him they
Are the price of building beautiful things.

I tell him he has a beautiful spirit. I tell him he is black.
I tell him that his spirit should be skeptical of tree limbs.

I tell him to remember. I tell him to always
Remember: dead leaves; lives behind.

In some parallel universe,
I’m sure we were inseparable,
I would come after church on Sundays,
Dressed in clothes that made me look more like a small penguin than young Christian,
She would bake me apple pie,
Let me eat it before supper,
And never make me finish my broccoli,
While told tales of the old country,
Fables of the handsome prince I would’ve become,
And I would in kind recount these anecdotes to all my friends,
Because everyone loves a good grandma story of simpler times and glory days,

But that never happened,
I arrived here a life too late,
I used to pull the sheets over my head when I was afraid,
Now I’m terrified of what’s beneath them:
A scarecrow crucified on wooden bones and tattered skin,
Her breath sounds like crumpled paper
Two Bright red lanterns wrinkled beneath her breastplates.
She smiles…painfully,
Her lips clawing away from her teeth like soldiers retreating from a two front war, and they just want to smell a home cooked meal again,
Pops says she recognizes me,
He’s always been a clever liar,
She has Alzheimer’s and I haven’t seen her since I could still hold my age in my right and left hands,
Strawman she is,
Her brain is absent as I have been,
How do you cry for a stranger?
Visiting hours for friends and family,
This feels more like hospice care

Once upon a time,
My father dragged me to her convalescent home,
Where I played hide-and-seek with pale faced zombies,
Ravenous for human flesh and anything warm that would touch them,
A hand
A cup of coffee
Or her last memory of the sun,
Years ago the Great Wall of China ran up her spine,
Rumor has it you can see this wonder from the moon,
But that’s just an urban legend,
Trust me, I’ve watched from farther away
From the other side of a casket,
And the front seat of a rental car,
She laid to rest in Monterey,
I can’t say Steinbeck ever walked this cemetery,
But I felt guilty with every sin east of his Eden.

We had the ceremony in a church,
Because that’s what people are supposed to do, The service was me, my father, and a priest paid by the hour,
No procession,
No mass requiem,
No Ave Maria sung by a woman in the only little Black dress she’ll never to want wear again,
Just prayers read off paper sheets folded like fast food menus,
Hands pressed like mantis,
Eyes up,
Ears open,
Hadn’t heard her real name until the undertaker read it in Chinese off the tombstone.
A shotgun funeral,
Fitting for a life that ran from bullets.
Fled a communist revolution with nothing but a suitcase and a first born son,
She put her past behind only for me to forget her until she past.
It’s only now that I realize I should have loved her like the lotus she was,
A flower that blooms from the mud,
But remains unstained.

Grandma I am so sorry,
If I ever have the chance to make it right,
Find myself in the Human province of the Chinese countryside,
I will craft this poem into a fleet of origami boats,
Place a candle in each,
Sail my one-man navy of flames, down the Yangtze river until the ghosts know that my Grandmother’s face launched a thousand ships,
And I intend to bring her back,
This is an Illiad penned on the inside of a paper lantern,
May it illuminate her story into the night,
Amen.