I was water, and then I was a girl.
I called to my mother

in a register only she
could hear. In secret,

she poured the contents of her diaphragm
back into her body, and for years

my father thought I was an accident.
But I was subterfuge,

a code, a spell hiding, invisible ink
under black light.

Did you know there are two
versions of the world’s

beginning in the Book of Genesis,
placed one after the other

with no explanation, no comment,
just two stories that cannot both

be true? I carry my own, one in each hand.
Here, an apple. Here, a rotting core.

The taghairm, a spiritual echo or shout, was a prognostication rite used during feudal and medieval Ireland and Scotland by way of summoning the devil or demons. A curious participant would clothe themselves in in an ox hide, sit under a waterfall for days, and eventually emerge having seen a vision of the future. The fortuneteller would then share their premonition with the community during a ceremonial roasting of cats, chants, and feasts. If the prediction proved to be incorrect, the clairvoyant would be beaten to death with sticks by their clan.

These poems serve as a resurfacing thread throughout my larger manuscript. The narrator, initially studying the ritual of the taghairm from an academic distance, becomes increasingly unhinged as his personal life crumbles and the stitching of American society devolves into chaos. Soon, he begins to consider the prophetic benefits of the taghairm may outweigh the costs and gradually dabbles in the mystical service.

Taghairm #47 (The Church)

Each day at 3pm I began to question
if I was the protagonist of the story.
When I finally decided to build a beach
I drove to the coast and collected sand,
one pebble at a time,
placed it in my sock and brought it home.
I’d drop it in my backyard, not like a seed,
but a solid day’s work for a long scheme.
I began praying to fill the other gaps
in the day, and collected lumber
for a small church. Soon, stray townspeople
joined my flock, their dogs lay out on leashes
locked to the assembly room door as I blessed
the community. We’d close the clerical gates
during the peak of winter, for lack of show,
and sometimes I’d hold the sermon
by CB. I sprayed the town with local
radio waves and asked for prayers
with my broadcast tongue. I sensed
more than my congregate listening.
There were others tuning in
and soon spring would come.
I’d have to build an addition
or pay for a public channel.
There was something slowly forming
those days. It had the vigor of just becoming
assignment. It had the solemn caducity
of tomorrow.

Taghairm #11 (The Ox)

AC on the fritz,
so the big orange ox of summer
sits down in my driveway,
large lids dropping over
the stolid jellies of its eyes.
In the perfectly concerned system
of my body I feel my blood heat
bargain with my skin. On and on
the old negotiation goes:

Lube the yoke and sand the goad—
It’s time to move this beast along.
Armed in slippers, clad in robe
I waddle down to talk some sense
into those low-lying ears.
Useless—the brute sleeps through
my begging and my beating.
I skin the beast its apathy.
I saw off a leg.
I summon another identity;
assign the failure
there.

Self Portrait as If, Then

Yes, I am new sharpened
am on edge but
if I just
hold my arm right here
my legs just so, if I just
keep my face exactly, exactly
as it is—

There, you see, I'm
fine. I'm just exactly fine.

Self-Portrait as Device for Flying With 4

The only way out was to step to an edge and see—
To step past an edge

Amazing Grace

I was a girl when I learned I was a woman. I sang
hymns in the women's chapel, a wretch of mustard shag

carpet & rows of pews. Shoulder to shoulder. Soul-soldier.
I hit the notes perfectly, back then. Perfect practice makes perfect

work. Labored to open my body & give what you hunger for: tend
children, feed open mouths, bake the bread we break before

cleaning the plate in front of us. Couldn't even pray for help without
a man saying amen. How sweet the sound of sisterhood, Sunday thinning

around us. Our Father Who Art in Heaven. Our fathers, who held heaven
in their hands, passed the communion plates before, who held us

body & blood. Our better angels. I took bite after bite. Crossed
my knees. I wanted to be amazing. Given hands: what holds & what

enters. Once, I didn't know how to hold a man with anything but
my teeth. For ten thousand years, I waited for the hunger to end.

No, that’s not my real name.
That’s why I’m calling. My
real name is—

Ma’am, it says—

I am not a ma’am.

Oh. Uh. Sorry...sir. It—

I am not a sir can you please
just call me—

Your legal name is [REDACTED]?

Please stop saying—

[REDACTED]. It says here when I open your account,
it says [REDACTED].

I know what it says but I’m telling you
it’s wrong. Listen,
I did all the things.
I went to court. The DMV. I checked the boxes
and filled out the forms. I uploaded the forms
to the portal. I stepped through the portal
and shook the hand of the sentient robot
that snorts lines of zeros and ones from the server
through a rolled up dollar bill. Dollar
bills are nostalgic here on the other side
of the portal and the robot is very nostalgic.
It can hear but cannot feel the whoosh of code
go up its nose-like appendage, cannot feel
the burn of numbers that are words drip down
the back of its metallic throat-like tube.
But it gets a wistful pang and rattle in its chest-
like cavity at the thought of all our trying, all
the ways we destroy ourselves with boxes and forms
and binary code which is so basic, so small,
so human.

Um... So it says—

I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. There’s an echo here
and oceans and so much fresh bread. The robots
love good bread and have asked me to translate
the smell into poems and pictures, so I’m a bit busy.
But, if you can believe it, the mail still comes,
and it still makes me want to scream when I see
the wrong name through that little plastic window.
(They love the crinkle of that little plastic window,
the tear of a real paper envelope. Very nostalgic.)
So, listen. I have to go, but I need you to do something
for me. OK? I need you to delete six letters. You got this.
Hit save. Upload the form to the portal. And come join us.
There’s singing here and swimming and whatever words
you call out loudly will come back to you. I promise.

An amateur archeologist once stuck
monkey teeth in a small, deformed
skull and claimed he found the missing
link of human evolution. In a dream, I played
voicemail tag with his wife who feigned

ignorance of the incident, suffered
minor annoyance and almost-apathy. The crackle
of silence or disappointment between her
words made it real: under this

mask she needed to knock
her husband out with a brick and write
poetry that made people cry, maybe
in hopes of finally dousing that flame
he lit in the corner, the one that’s still

climbing. I knew it from her voice, the way
it crawled up her throat and lurched
through the line. All she said was I don’t
know anything. I don’t know
anything.

The week before he was transferred
from skilled nursing to hospice,
my father wanted to go car shopping.
Wanted me to sign him out
so we could trade in his aging
black Mustang with its slippery transmission,
its dinged fender, and its leaky tire
requiring an infusion of compressed air
every three weeks, for something
sensible, something low maintenance
and automatic; he was thinking
Honda Civic. You know, nothing
overly sporty. Nothing with a clutch
or a performance engine. Just a plain
old sedan, maybe in cement gray
or pearl blue. How about Milano
red, I said, holding up my phone,
showing him the inventory of the local
dealership. That could work, he said,
glancing over, then fixing his gaze
on the ceiling once more, his skinny
arms folded into a sort of hammock
that cradled his skull. Pretty soon,
he went on, as the monitor tolled
softly overhead, we won’t have that
old car to worry about, anymore.

A woman passed in her car, screaming. It’s bad
breakup morning that almost looked like singing along
with the radio a second. Actually, no. It didn’t.
But thinking back a month later, I can imagine it
that way, a kind of opera. She’s holding the phone
a foot in front of her like a microphone, like breaker 10-4,
and she’s screaming. The-windows-are-up-and-we-can-still-hear
level of screaming. There’s a lot of YOU FUCKING
ASSHOLE and details I’ll not go into, because
I don’t remember them, while I was getting coffee and a donut
with friends, thinking, yeah, I get it, sometimes
you just have to scream it, and I don’t think I’ve ever
screamed it. Maybe that’s a problem, and I should give it a try.
We should probably all be screaming right now, in fact.

*

Because how many times can we let it go, until
whatever trench we’re tossing it into gets full, and what beasts
from the other side walk across? Like this intersection
in Kansas City at eight in the morning
while some people are ten feet away on the corner, coffee
in one hand and a donut in the other, pretending
not to look at you. Donuts are always at least OK,
because no matter what, they’re still donuts.
They’re like pizza. And being alive, too,
though not everyone gets sprinkles, which is simply to say
life isn’t just or orderly, so we crave atmosphere,
where we can think about anything else, gray sky
shattered with streaks of blue. The aria breaks, the aria
picks up again. The theater erupts in tickertape.

The Touching

The women were touching the baby’s soft spot. They knew
about fragility. The women were touching their own
leaking bodies, the baby part of them, part of the leakage. The world
needed to be linked together, the breakage
was tender, needed tending. The women knew how to crawl
away from danger, knew the angle and speed of the moon
as it crawled across the night. But the women knew not to follow
the moon, nor the ghost of it emerging from the undergrowth,
nor the soft indentations made by creatures
that came out with the hush time, the shadow time, the cool
and beckoning quiet.

The women were familiar
with lulls and lullabies and the surge they felt inside them,
they let it urge them forward
toward an unknown that felt well known, known inside them.
The women brought draw knives
and seed packets and gemstones and compasses
and went looking for places to plant things but mostly themselves,
their stories, their undergrowth and overtime.

The baby
already knew how to watch them, watched them well, waved
its stubby arms and legs and opened its eyes wide
and wider. The world widened too, as the soft spot
slowly shrank, the soft bones hardening and linking up,
touching the untouched edges.

Combustion

Sound of her struck match,
sound of her smoking.
Silence in the living room

where my brother and I sat

during our father’s weekly
half-hour visit. He’d ask
about school and we knew

our mother, sitting alone

in the kitchen, could hear
our answers and would ask,
after he left, how he looked.

Where should my loyalty lie

was not a question I asked myself
but it occupied me
and muted me

when I wanted to say more

to ease the clumsy scene—
which way to lean, as a daughter,
which parent to appease? There’s still

no answer, though the parents

have turned into trees, been
cut down, split into firewood,
and burned.

The blinds had been lifted but the shadows from outside the room were still obscuring the meaning of the words which we’d agreed to decipher together. They were projected on the wall. We paused when the clouds in the sky parted, allowing the sun into the room, and the words clarified and it was easier to concentrate. Once in a while I could hear the nearby elevator ding, hear the wind blowing down the elevator shaft. The words were part of a notebook, discovered in a Xerox machine by support staff (Vincent), and in the notebook K (we only knew that the author of the note was K) was saying goodbye, “I say goodbye, as I will walk the yards until such time as I am stung by a bee, and so shall we (fortunately or unfortunately, it is hard to tell) never meet.” Someone in History claimed to see a person (gender indeterminate) in the meadow (where faculty could now park beside the sweetness of flowers in springtime) walking with only a light topcoat on and he (our witness) said the person “folded.” When asked to elaborate our colleague only said that he couldn’t say much more, that the person became only partly visible when it started to rain, as if their torso had “doubled downward.” The words on the wall looked like pillars and tusks, like wheels and rib cages. Hieroglyphics. But translatable with effort. I lived in a converted millhouse back then, and sometimes when I’d get stressed I’d recall the consoling sounds of the old waterwheel turning, the electricity from which I often powered a projector and watched old super 8 movies I’d found in a briefcase in a closet of the original university buildings burning.

This series is excerpted from a longer Pantoublock Crown in progress, utilizing motifs from, and allusions to, The Lotus Sutra and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Speaker is on a quest to find and resurrect their mother from the afterworld, borrowing transcendental powers of the Thus Come One, one of many titles attributed to The Buddha in the Lotus Sutra.The Pantoublock is an invented form in which I merge the pantoum with the prose block, in which each recurrence is almost always transmuted, or changed, when it appears again. The form is not entirely faithful to the base structure of the pantoum, cutting the final stanza. The third line in the first stanza doesn’t always recur in what would be the final stanza in the Pantoublock form. Some Pantoublocks repeat units of language, a series of lines or sentences, rather than one line or sentence. It is a queer form malleable to evolution.

The First Bicycle

was made in 1868 and nicknamed The Bone-shaker

thin iron tires and heavy frame hard to love even in a town heart-stopping as London

Hat shops next to candy shops next to butcheries storefronts mirroring

selves as you’d ride past dirt-manure roads so full of horses the law required

a handlebar bell

But it was the first time a person could travel

mechanically on her very own schedule no steamer train no carriage no ship

anywhere she alone in theory wanted to go legs pumping in bloomers

under her dress evening settling down like a gray silk cape stirring

wheels and maybe as never before dreams

I’m running in mud, I’m uppercutting ballistic
blocks. I’m spitting out teeth. I’m called. Tonight
you’ve called me back to your hospital bedside.

Fluorescent the ceiling, capricious the walls,
whinnying the mare at the window, a dozen cocktail
umbrellas behind her ear. I’ve found that when

a horse shows up in my dream it means a beautiful thing
has broken. There’s glitter in your beard—a fistful
of stars tossed down a well. The room has bowling alley

arcade carpeting. In life there were bouquets
on every surface. Now balloon animals, hundreds
of them, squeak against one another in a language

I have no rosetta stone for. My friend, go on.
I’m listening. I’m here. Tell me anything.

When complexities arise, the rain falls on them, as it falls over queens, railyards, vast
unsailed swathes of ocean, overpriced condominiums, little match girls, abandoned steel
mills, non-uniformed combatants, disenfranchised farmers, the first families of Virginia,
and deserts that respond by blooming so ridiculously they become tourist attractions. In
third grade I learned something about the water-cycle’s mechanics, but its metaphysics
are far more interesting. I take shelter from the rain beneath a closed café’s red-striped
awning; a man stands there beside me. I don’t know who he loves, will put himself out
for. He doesn’t know me from Adam, or a rattlesnake. Cold water spangles our eyebrows.
We look out into the street, strangers whom the rain has joined and made infinitely more
strange.

I AM THE HORSE is an accumulation of prose poems in which a horse speaks rangily on language, art, femaleness, empire, complicity, dreams, and human perception. Horse does not believe in conclusion. Horse does believe in riding off into the sunset.

no part of who I am today
thank goodness would tell
you that for a time I followed
professional wrestling
my father was dead I was 10

but every Monday night
these greeks these boulder
shaped men would peer
through their painted masks
visit the hatred of mighty

opposites upon each other
& try through blood & spectacle
as maybe we all would like
to settle in an hour something
once & for all my favorite

matches were ones between
mankind & the undertaker
those two were always at it
one’s whole thing was that he
could just take so much pain

the other’s was that he was
terrifying & always won
they’d throw one another
into the grave raise them up
by their skull & say jester

gibes so full of dirt the kids
would repeat them in school
for what felt like centuries
it’s shameful I know
but to me it was Hamlet