it is the version of me fading in photos that I most wish to dance with. just once before the coughing black makes a ghost of him. no one askes me to smile these days & so here is my moth, again a straight line. border between an ocean and thirst. I thumb the edges of the picture frame & consider the wood – what tree had to fall in order for this younger & smiling version of myself to have a home. It is killing season again. All of the flowers drag the crowns of their heads along the snow & die with a prayer of softer ground on their lips. I wish this type of betrayal on no one: being born out of that which will be your undoing. Imagine, instead: the place where you have a bed of your own & a table to sit across from someone who laughs thick & echoing at your smallest joys as an open palm & then

the fingers close.

The kind which whitens the earth
and the kind which widens it—

If the winter were precious
for its whiteness If whiteness

were a pearl sown in the under-ash
of my maternal line strung out

along its daughters’ white thread—
the queer grey hazel rooting

in our new country a new
Kuşköy, an American Giresun

If winter were the opal
film across grandmother’s hazel

eyes—If winter were precious
for her blindness If I were

precious were the pearl were the
You who could subsist in the ice

of this country, mother, walk it whole
in whiteness, the You dilute

enough for West Virginia widened
If winter were a gift you

fashioned from my father’s bones
If your daughter were precious

with his whiteness If whiteness
let her speak your mother’s tongue

uncleaved If winter widened
in the timbers of our house come

frost—If it cast roof tiles through the white
Appalachian birch
like tinsel

I would instill the hazel
fissures of your face in mine

would still gather up your hair, laid
dark and precious in the earth.

After Xandria Phillips

as is tradition for the women / of my blood, / I shop too much. will sacrifice / a paycheck like a lamb for the chance to conjure up / a fresh silhouette. & i am supposed to hate / this about us. the nerve: to wrap our bodies in myths / we can’t afford. but i want to / make peace with this. i want to make peace with my grandmother’s gentle back / -room dedicated solely to the choir / of her hatboxes, quiet revelations / lining each wall. all day, she darts between the news & the home shopping network, unsure / whether to spend her pension or her prayer. once, she fled / a country ribboned by war / as if it were a dressing room. practiced walking in america / -n shoes until balance became her. to this day, she nests / for her daughters until there is nothing left / on the racks. stores enough patent-leather & lace to clothe every ghost / she left in Honduras. & who could call such a selfless love / a waste? still, my mother say grandma got too much / space in her heart. too many shelves inside of her she can’t wait to fill. / we have this in common. on weeknights, I midnight / scroll across landscapes of pixelated fabric / without direction. check for sales like my life / depends on it. desire a beauty / aimless as light. each morning, I wake wanting / to script a new creation story / across my skin. dare the day to reinvent itself until / everything that’s hurt me is a stain / washed clean. sometimes, the mirror is the only place / I decide what happens / to my body. here, i sketch myself into a velvet miracle / no one dare touch. the night / the thief undresses me, every drawer in my chest lay empty / as a scream. how to replace what is stolen / when it is the body / itself? officer asks what / I wore that night & i think of my grandma’s urgent gaze / in macy’s. here is its root: we shop to find the look that might finally keep us / safe. if there is always a danger to outrun, praise the choice / of heels for the chase. praise the good shoe & the stature / it lends me tonight. praise the pomp & circumstance of ripping the tag off / a brand-new skin. my grandmother & I dressed ourselves out / of deaths already tailored to fit. if this is a sin, / I’ll take one in every color. so bless every tattered thread / of this love. bless the thousand shopping carts I’ve filled & emptied / communion of fabric gathered / at my feet. after we leave the mall, grandma asks me to say grace over dinner. I take bread, / & break it. say: / this is my body, taken back. I do this in remembrance / of me.

TODAY the wind is crazy
and the river is insane.
Today I will sit
in the grass and smell
the sunlight. I will leave
the pills in their bottles,
I will leave the bottles
by my bed. I will walk
to the insane river. I will let
the crazy wind cut and curve
around me. I will close
my eyes and dream of medical sewage
poisoning the river a hundred
miles upstream. And somewhere in all
that trash there is a little hit
of morphine. I will think
if nothing ever leaves then the wind
is full of all the smoke I ever blew.
And if nothing ever leaves does that mean
I’m still dope-sick at fourteen, telling
my parents the flu is going around?
If I am then so what.
I am also walking through the cemetery at dawn,
friends on both sides of me—our little
drunken army marching out of the night.
If I am then so what. I am also
lying in my bed at twenty-two, utterly
fucked and utterly euphoric, feeling
so beautiful that I don’t notice
the vacant light lessening then
leaving entirely. I don’t notice
when the night climbs into my bed
like a terrified brother and the wind
slams the door.

Here’s a small story about the sky. It’s yours,
if you want it. I’ll leave it right here. It’s the
size of a 2016 Toyota Corolla windshield and
begins with a song on the radio, the name of
which I forgot to write down. I was too busy
being someone better in my mind. It was
summer there. A river, a raft. Excuse me for
making this story about myself. This isn’t
what I’d planned. Through the windshield,
clouds formed over the prairie and chopped
the song into static. Bits of gray-black clung
to the air. The song ended and I turned down
the radio. Clouds so dark and heavy with rain,
it seemed a task for the them to hover. They
resisted, like eyelids, to stay awake.
I know a man who’ll never begin his novel
because he hasn’t gathered enough data. He
obsesses over weather. He asks me how
much I trust the rain. With his fists, he shows
me what a cloud is willing to do. How it will
reject its weight. All of it. And suddenly. It
has no choice, really. And the wind?—has
nowhere to go but with the water it carries.
It’ll take trees with it. Kids’ bicycles, your
shadow, if you’re not careful.Imagine: an
Olympic-sized pool coming down on you. It
can take a commercial jet, he says, right from
the sky. Ground barns. His list of feeble
objects takes days to say. It’s as if he’s sure
I’ll forget once I walk away.
Only I don’t. I remember each item and plan
to build a bomb shelter, a suit of armor. I want
to live longer. I stop eating red meat. I call
my father and tell him I love him and say I’m
sorry, though not for what. I buy a golden
retriever, research how to stimulate neurons.
Anything to keep me from ruining. Because
I wanted to age with grace, I became
a poet. It made sense. Truly. I could not see
myself age into, say, boxing: stepping into

the ring, weak and sleepy. With a cane. But
in poetry, I saw a casket to ease my failing
bones into.
At a Halloween party my first
year in Minnesota, I walked into a house
where people I did not know chatted away in
small circles. I walked, dressed in the gauze
it took me an hour to wrap myself in. I wanted
to be invisible or unliving. Or both. I met a
woman and told her about California. When
I mentioned my homies, she laughed. I stared.
She stopped and said, Oh, you’re serious.
Later, a shirtless man in a mask held up a
Styrofoam sword and asked if me and my
homie/white friend were a couple. Through
his eyeholes, he followed my tired arm over
Brad’s shoulders. I paused. My mind circled
the room and reported back that I was the
only brown man there. I said We’re just a
couple. Of guys. Drinking beers. He laughed.
I did too. But it was more exhale than elation.
His Styrofoam sword shook as he walked
away into a cloud of his own laughter, which
hovered over me.
Laughter fell across our shoulders like rain.
The sort of which you can’t move through.
An Olympic-sized pool of funny. A thicket of
drunken bodies swayed. They watched me. I
tried to go on unnoticed and American. Beer
pong and bad jokes. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that a
way to disappear? But they did not know who
I was, where I was from, or what brought me
here. I had to explain what they were seeing.
They pinched and picked at my bandages. I
came loose and held a heap of gauze guts, put
it to my nose. To remember who I was. They
laughed. Then a laugh track played
throughout the house and I knew everyone
was watching. I bundled my bandages and
found the door. It was that simple. At least I
believed it to be, and so, for a while, it was.
Onstage, I tell the audience where I grew up,
what that means. I point to my chest. That’s
what poets do. Somehow, we end up at Love.
Every time. How it fails, how it saves. How

it belongs to us, after all. When it’s over,
someone approaches and thanks me for my
story. There is nothing to say to that so they
continue with how glad they are

I turned out alright, growing up the way I did.
This is how you become an artifact with ears.
This is what I’ve come to warn you about.
I’m just a poet who knew he couldn’t

put the gloves on forever, who knew, one
day, he’d be too tired to lace up and would
only want to ease his body into a small,
closed-off space. I walked home

from that Halloween unraveled. Leaking
gauze that led back to the party.
Under every streetlight, I did not talk to my
shadow. I did not ask how it was doing.
Please don’t mind this suffering. There’s not
much to see here, anyway. But if you must, if
you absolutely must look, please do so in an
orderly fashion. The line starts right over
there. Keep your voices to a whisper.
Whoever gets used to this sadness first, wins.

Because I am
a poet, I carry a notepad in my back pocket
for when I am alone or because I’m sure to
forget. Once, back in California, my homie

saw me pull the pad out, and called me the
Sensitive Poet. Thus, I was. It doesn’t
surprise me now, how easily I come apart.

But around the guys, he traced a tear down
his cheek. My homies chuckled with their
chests, all muscle tee and tattoo. I did not

mind. Not for a long time. For years, maybe.
A cloud is only a room that fills and fills.
Then a door opens, everything barreling out.
I never retrieved the gauze. I’ve made maps
like this all over the country.
I have a confession to make. I am more
mummy than I thought, something gone, a
ghost perhaps. Something you find in a room
gone dark. Are you there, wind?—it’s me,
Michael. What I mean is, sometimes I don’t
have to be my homie’s homie. I can be no one
to those foos. I am so far away, here, in
Minnesota, so small and unraveled
nowadays. I am not how they remember. I see
it in their eyeholes. Somehow, I am less. And
when I say homies, I’m talking about those
south-side-Pomona homies; right-by-the-60-
freeway homies; down-the-block-from-
Tom’s-burger-and-across-the-street-from-
where-Nacho-Moreno-got-hit-by-a-car-on-
his-way-to-8th-grade-one-morning homies.
By where Nacho’s shoes flew off. And we
joked about size 10 Pumas growling through
the intersection. That’s fucked up. Right
there is where I grew up. That driveway and
sidewalk where my homies used to pull up to.
The homies I’m trying to tell you about. I’m
leaning into an apology. Trust me, I’m a poet.
There’s always something to be sad about.

I got this list of people I hate that I don’t
know what to do with. It grows and grows
like a cloud carrying rain and all I have are
their names and my thoughts. I fold those
pages into my back pocket. Right next to my
notepad, where all the unwritten poems
gather when I cannot sleep. I lean to the right
because of these people I hate, because of
these poems I can’t finish. When I sit, I
always think I’m going to fall over but
I don’t. I’m still here.
Fuck your butterflies, your lilacs and sunsets.
Fuck your hillsides, your candlelight of fear.
I’m building my own country. It looks like
my 7-year-old self, rocking a Looney Tunes
Raiders tee and throwing-up the Westside.
My country doesn’t speak Spanish but
it knows when you’re talking shit. My
country fits onto this very page. My national
anthem keeps getting remixed. We’re
working on a website.
This is American-manufactured masculinity
at its finest. And yet, I am responsible

for the raised trumpets, the snapped-into
Slim Jims. I am responsible for the mutation
of the word triumph, for the Igloo cooler
heavy with beer bottles and an ocean of ice.
In the dream, my homies don’t recognize me.
I show them my tattoos, but nothing. I name
the scars on their bodies and I tell them where
we were when it happened, how the plan
went south, and what we learned that day.
Jesse takes the longest to convince.
Remember watching Knight Rider, I say?
After school, every day, for 2 months. Until
the doctors left a grave of staples from where
they pulled the screws?
This morning, thunder woke me and I knew
it was only God. This doubt, it is so
American. Still, I walked outside. Of course,
all the neighbors were there in their bright
parkas. Fools. I wore my armor, ready.
We tilted our heads and kept our eyes open for
the heaviest rain. Grey-black clouds paraded
the sky but did not speak. Far off into the
western distance, where it was still night,
flashes of light showed us the valley’s teeth.
We turned away knowing it was useless. At
the door, I could smell coffee, but knew
it was only my memory of coffee, something
I wrote down once, something I added next to
a list I don’t know how to finish.