Meats
There are things we people lack.
Scales. Feathers.
And things for words for people
have but not the words
are for:
Loin.
Flank.
Hindquarters.
Maw.
All for eating.
Maws, too, for eating
animals. (Whose
ever heard of a hum
man with a maw?)
I have
mine. I mean –
– while
bulbous
gaping
hairy
ugly, the maw
is mine
Arboretum
Spring forths its stems.
Earth proves again to weather.
Snow has given way to tenderness:
dirt gently impressed.
All is gleeful dizzy garden-drunk.
The water warms
and so enjoys the act. The whole tide
changes
(well)
like the tide
which brung beauty back against all laws
of grammar.
Spring is all of us
the bougie flowers, damned
communist weeds
pairing with pollen-pregnant bees
and hanging chrysalids.
Joy is a body
whose special halo
sounds the hum of the year’s
first-born sun.
Where have we been
all this time? Who maps the dry cross-
hatching life between our fingers?
Park and pond
and lily-pad and toad
we newly name the countries
made as we feel
countries ought to be: friends
Friends who kiss.
(On occasions such as these)
Aggregation*
(after “Making of” by Franny Choi)
Cyborgs are made out of words.
Cyborgs are made out of things
named cyborgs.
Cyborgs are made out of things only
things if you squint at them,
just like their male and female counterparts.
At midnight, I clasp too
hands across my abdomen, pray
to be so small and vast
the cloud will have me.
My prayers are prayers in drag,
poems
who enumerate in wordless codes
fitted to the human throat
*This poem first appeared in trampset literary magazine.
