It’s easy to get lost here—with nothing
but wide open a person can wander
for weeks without finding shelter.
Men have plowed and planted, hoed
and harvested, been nurtured
and broken by this land—it’s not always
my fault but if a farmer doesn’t learn
grief early he’ll never make it.

Because that would at least give me something
to write about. But I think of all the reasons I shouldn’t:
I’d have to wear something other than yoga pants,
have to go somewhere other than the grocery store
or the park because despite romantic comedies, I’m not
meeting anyone there.

The overgrown weeds
                    and wilting wisteria
Defy the winter
                    by daring not to die—
Their seedlings spread,
                    spring, into a mess.

I would not call myself a Nazi sympathizer—
        What does that word even mean, sympathizer?
But ever since that time in the 4th grade
When my arch nemesis Maureen
Invited me to her birthday party,
I realized I needed to give more people a chance.
You’re probably thinking, well she’s not a Nazi.

My baby brandishes a wooden knife
meant to halve a wooden shallot
as he hollers his newest word. Knife.
Look at my son, flashing
his dagger, jamming it into plush
animals. Knife, knife. Look at him,
oblivious to the weapons
littering his lineage or, God forbid,
possessed by them.

The rest of us,
trembling among our mothers’
bargain trench coats, waited
for Narnia. There, we dreamed
we were the children
of lions. Heirs to our own beds.

Bags of ice drip from the back of a small bike
in Vietnam. The exhaust pipe rumbles. The man
sweats. My tongue melts. We are lucky we are not tiny
starving polar bears slipping off the last refuge
of ice into the black asphalt. The open
ocean. Or I should say we are lucky
the coming flood is incremental.

A hangover is a kind of prayer in which your last drink is the blood of the Lord, which is you, which is not a sustainable method of consumption. A cow can’t drink from its own utter. The body doesn’t move by itself.

No one wanted to do it, no one wanted
to look at a thing so large, helpless
to die or live, not knowing what to ask for itself.
To imagine an after. Even less to change it.

Already, the crops are failing.
The crows shuttling back and forth,
breaking branches, dropping stones.
How easy to read sadness
into the empty room. It is yours.

You’ve come disguised, hair
upswept, eyes two shades
murkier than petroleum,
a face I’ve never seen but know
in-the-gut-of-me…

The gowns and dresses hang
like fleece in their glaring
whiteness, sheepskin-softness,
the ruffled matrimonial love in which the brides-
in-waiting dance around, expectantly,
hummingbirds to tulips. I was dragged here:
David’s Bridal, off the concrete-gray arterial
highways of a naval town.

But in the privacy
of my own home, I stroke my hair
like a hipster who wants wisdom
from his beard. I can’t stop admiring
myself to my husband, who isn’t
as amazed as I am about follicles containing
2 or 3 strands, or the different lengths
of hair like actual grass. My first
female friend with armpit hair was beautiful
and, of course, white, and I lived for a few years
in a town full of organic gardening, armpit hair,
and white feminism.

In childhood, I watched strangers speak in slow motion to my mother in a language she started learning when she was five. I watched their lips—their eyebrows like someone holding a toy out to a child.

O, I won’t write about the corn cob buildings
or Oak Street Beach
beyond sidewalk and trees.
O, instead
let me write about the Lavendaria
on the corner of Armitage Avenue
and Kedzie
where the other day I saw
a little boy
pushing his infant sister
in one of those metal clothes carts on wheels.

Out of poems written by the where and when
Out of everything has become a fever again
Out of dark, light, need for the night
Out of hot, cold, can’t get it right
Out of bargaining for up and down rides
Out of poems and lions standing close to their pride
Out of pomegranates are what one craves
Out of the stomach of fire are the lines seeds pave