Mamá, you left me.   Papá, you left me.

Abuelos, I left you.   Tías, I left you.

Cousins, I’m here.   Cousins, I left you.

Tías, welcome.   Abuelos, we’ll be back soon.

Mamá, let’s return.   Papá ¿por qué?

Mamá, marry for papers.   Papá, marry for papers.

Tías, abuelos, cousins, be careful.

I won’t marry for papers.   I might marry for papers.

I won’t be back soon.   I can’t vote anywhere,

I will etch visas on toilet paper and throw them from a lighthouse.

People dust themselves. One by one, we stand. I dust myself. Look at the pinholes in the sky’s dark blanket. Stars twinkling. ¿Why do they blink like that? ¿Can they see the dirt under our feet? Like old newspapers. Crinkle. Crunch. Like walking on eggshells. Crack. The gallons of water in people’s hands. Slosh. We’re walking again.

Mice or bunnies sometimes cross our paths. Bats overhead. If I see them, I say they’re my pets. I do the same with the strangers: we’re all a family. Dad in front of me. Mom and Sister in front of him. The Six are my immediate family. I have so many faceless cousins, uncles, and aunts. Uncle #22 drifts off to the side to take a piss in the bushes. Aunt #6 steps to the side to take a sip of water. We push forward like a snake.

In the middle of that desert that didn’t look like sand

     and sand only,

in the middle of those acacias, whiptails, and coyotes, someone yelled

    “¡La Migra!” and everyone ran.

In that dried creek where forty of us slept, we turned to each other,

    and you flew from my side in the dirt.

Black-throated sparrows and dawn

    hitting the tops of mesquites.

Against the herd of legs,

    you sprinted back toward me,

I jumped on your shoulders,

    and we ran from the white trucks, then their guns.

I said, “freeze, Chino, ¡pará por favor!”

    So I wouldn’t touch their legs that kicked you,

you pushed me under your chest,

    and I’ve never thanked you.

If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.

If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.

If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.

If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.

If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.

O, Death. Your singular eye. My mother speaks the King’s English. Makes quiche. Makes clove pomanders in winter. Pawned her flute. Cleaned my elementary school classroom. What is hers? Brillant song, my mother, sotto voce, in her chair asking for touch. It is drowning she means, not freedom. I swam fine. Don’t you get it, O Death, my mother is elegant alive, entering the blue hole of evening, alone. You could reach into the frame, pull her out. O Death, I’ve been crueler— I’ve watched.

I’ve picked up the hammer everyday

and forgiven myself. There is a new

language I’m learning by speaking it.

I’m a blind cartographer, I know the way

fearing the distance. O New Day,

there isn’t a part of you I don’t love

to fear. I’m holding hands with

the poet speaking of light, saying I made it up

I made it up.

Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin

      flames, one black, one a gauzy red,

only to learn the title is Boats at Sea. It's like how

      sometimes I forget you're gone.

But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world

      similes carry us nowhere.

And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries

a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—

Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother.

      Listen to me

plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're

      already dead.

How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was

      Priam's ever?

I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.

He drives too fast, as always, braking hard when he finally

     arrives

at the meadow my car slid into before it slid

into an oak
 

where a whitetail hangs, strung

by its hind legs to drain the slit throat.

It takes more time than I expected

for death to be over,

I tell my brother. And he, a hunter, says, Yeah,

in the tone that means, Of course.

And years later I have the same voice

when he calls at 4:17 a.m. and I knock the phone off the bed,

answering almost upside-down, stretched toward him.

His pain then, I lived for it, I realize now.

Not for its existence, but to quiet with my words.

I had left so long ago. I had left.

A trampled carnation, or the red jacket sleeve

blurred on that girl quickening

after the ball

draws my mind

to the ship that I am told

is coming, preparing to anchor.

I am turned toward the sea.

It pauses at the bay’s red mouth

When everyone seems so happy, why does it delay?

Last year, Simone had been voted “Most Christ-Like” of the Domremy Catholic High School Freshman Class. 
            Privately, she hoped that she did have God’s grace to thank for her ease in the world. Something about grace, even though one need not do anything to receive it, denoted heroism. It was heroism in the sense of being singled out and chosen—an idea that accounted for and made tolerable the ways in which Simone felt entirely alone.
            Nothing, she knew, had been easy for Joan—nothing except talking to God. “If you want God to talk to you, you have to be silent,” Simone knew from one of Joan’s videos. She had attempted silence in every form she could fathom but even her attempts felt loud. How to empty herself of her self, she wondered.

FATHER JOE 
I don’t think Joan is…crazy 

           JOAN 
           Why would God choose a crazy person to be 
           Their messenger?

CAMPAIGN MANAGER 
Why do you keep talking about God in the plural??? 

CHARLES VII 
That certainly sounds
polytheistic to me 

           JOAN 
           There is only one God
           and we are all Their children 

           ANGEL 2 
           “Therefore we have Joan
           who is photogenic 
           and will die for 
           our emission sins” 

                      ANGEL 3 
                      We need the people to understand 
                      Their always imminent closeness 

ANGEL 1 
In the spirit of apocalyptic times, 
God is working with a logic of immediacy 

           ANGEL 2 
           The pixels of Their image must 
           illuminate the photons out in the world! 

                      ANGEL 3 
                      Your low-resolution self, Joan 
                      allows room for concept 

The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking

brushes the air between us like a wet mark

stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead

twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.

Robyne, who, when someone hurls 

toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.

My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins

I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.

He had an antelope’s face—I could

go on like this. I liked how he led me, almost

a shove, how he kissed me—mercy—how I

kissed him back: my back against the foyer

wall. Sometimes we called to each other

like birds. It wasn’t ritual—how can I

explain—he laced his fingers, made his knees

a ladder. I braced myself on his backward horns.

I climbed him then, into the tree.

We were so desperate then, the two of us, undone

by longing, drawing night from the cracks

inside us, drawing the night out, as long as we could,

until dawn broke like a beat egg and our heartbeats

quieted in private fatigue. I’d be lying if I said I don’t recall

his name. The end of the world has ended, and desire is still

all I crave. Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable.

Over half of me is water, a river spilling into restless limbs,

the rest of me is a scalding heat like the asphalt under my feet.

I

What a lucky beast I am,

when he cleans up nice

and nicks his perfect face.

I get to lick that face,

when he lets me.

In the cut’s opening

I get a taste of him

from the inside

out, which is all I have

ever wanted,

to be cell-close

to him. Praise the razor’s

overzealous arm;

the ease

with which it finds tenderness

in this man.

Tommey, or however you spell your name, I

mean what I say. Like how them white boys think

Whitney or somebody’s going to do The Lady. Nu-uh, I

have to be her in your little poem. Boy, I could almost

smack your face—who do you think you are? Look,

only I have the pipes to speak for The Lady. Good

drag is not just a dress and a wig. You got to put this in

The Lady’s words right. Because she, above anything,

is my livelihood. Chile, I’m a kept woman as long as she lets

me keep this roof I’m under; my pans full of meat. Try

to be her and you will fail. I’ve got years on

you, Sugar Lump. You can’t just go pull something

out of a closet. Only I can make good from all her ugly.

Honey, what would a thinner man know of hunger,
I mean to be forever, for always in hunger.

When my stomach has had enough, when my body goes quiet,
I let my mouth take over. It’s a calling, this hunger

to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself, so I 
practice; the pitch has to be right to sing the hunger

of other lovers, a take on a take, a rendition no one has heard
before, with this voice I wed the lives of others. A hunger

to set the mood—I make them turn the lights off,
turn them on. A gift, this first instrument of hunger;

this tenor. I can feel it in my body, all 300 pounds of me. 
You’re never lonely when you’re a man, who knows hunger

like I do, as big as two men holding on so tight that you would think 
there is only one. There are two of me, both of us hungry

for the stage. Look at how the spotlight searches for me, it can’t keep up. 
They chant my name; want more of me. Who am I to let them starve?

In his office in the attic, in his favorite khaki pants,

the Archivist carefully sets down the glass case

of his body so as not to rattle the exhibit of his mind.

He wears gloves to stroke the name on the envelope,

the name written in a florid hand trained by long-ago

love. To live among the dead, the Archivist thinks.

His eyebrows do a little jig. With fingers strange

to his wife, the Archivist traces the name of the street

in the village that burned. The street wears the name of the flower

the Archivist’s mother tucked behind her ear in a photograph

languishing in a desk drawer. The Archivist carries his mind

into each house. Here, the Cook makes love, his hand

brushing flour against his boyfriend’s nipple. There,

the Tailor’s satisfied song of scissors bisecting

a ream of red. A girl whose mouth makes an O,

around which chocolate makes another mouth, runs

through the road. The road which runs through

the Archivist’s blood. The girl is the Archivist’s grandmother

only in that she is a story the Archivist tells

himself about how he got here. Under an oak tree,

two dogs fucking. The girl’s ice cream is melting.

The Archivist’s mind is sticky with history.

Of course, the village burns again. History is

the only road that survives. Downstairs, the Archivist’s daughter

is hungry. He restores the dead to their folders. To live!

The girls’ wails rise through the house like smoke.

The Censor uses the black crayon

to eradicate sex. On payday, he takes

his wife and son to Shake Shack. Whatever

you want, the Censor says to his wife

when she asks what she should have.

The Censor crosses provide for your family

off of the list he keeps tucked in his billfold. To track

the time, the Censor sings You Are My Sunshine twice

while his son brushes his teeth. The boy shows the glass

his shining mouthstones and growls. He is a bear. No,

he is a boy. In the boy’s drawings, the zebras

are purple and white. His mother hangs

them on the fridge. What beautiful horses,

the Censor says. His wife’s wit trembles, then ebbs.

The children’s nails are clogged with black wax.

The townspeople paste wax apples on the trees, 

glow shyly out their windows as the Dictator 

struts past the monument of his father strutting

past nothing at all. Yesterday, the Dictator dressed 

the Butcher’s boy in the uniform of his own son. 

Today, at the orders of the Dictator, guards shot the boy.

In the town of his childhood, the Curator is a tourist. 

He touches his mother with the language

with which he does not touch his work.

In the painting, bored bored Eve chomps on an apple.

In the tongue of his work, he acquires her.

At the banquet: music wrung from the townspeople’s anguish,

pigs choked with apples.

The meat in the soup is human meat.

The Dictator’s rings are made of gold 

yanked from the teeth of corpses.

The Censor bloats with what he knows.

His sons bloom in neat rows. 

An orchard grows inside his wife.

He prunes her on Sundays.

Under the earth, the Butcher’s boy, laughing, 

eats an apple. The core rises, light with rot.

The Dictator admires the fruit of his land.