The Points on Your Star

I loved you when I was young and when you told me
to “remember this,” I almost always did. The moon's eclipse
at the bottom of Clinton Avenue. We sat on the seawall,
the moon shadows mirrored in the Hudson River.
It was a cliché, but new to me and lovely.
We played checkers on the piano stool that swiveled
so I could make my moves without stretching my six year-old arms.
You waited without visible impatience while I considered
how best to beat you. And you respected me, did not lose on purpose.
Badminton in the yard. We had to avoid the old cherry tree that fell over
of its own accord one peaceful night years after our games were memories.
When Mom suggested there might be money for only one of us to go to college
and it would be a brother because girls can marry men with jobs, I tattled
and you said I would be going to college no matter what. No woman should depend
upon a man's support. You had learned that lesson well, growing up as you did
with a father you would not talk about, a father who was there ‒ and then ‒ not.
You said, A girl should not count on a boy's loyalty but make her own way.
You didn't care that this was not a thing to say in the 1950s. You knew better.

Of course, this was all helpful and useful and good,
and so I accepted your other advice and beliefs without question:
Your family is your greatest ally. Our family sticks together.
Once you step outside this house, you are vulnerable to betrayal
and mischief. Do not trust anyone except a member of this family.

But your father was a secret. Your mother was always sad.
Your aunt threw up her hands while driving
when she saw a snake in the road. Nearly killed us all.

There were cousins I saw only once when I was too young
to remember their names. Two little girls who lived in Brooklyn,
all the cousin families in one building. I envied how easily they
could run down the hallways and into each other's houses without knocking.
Why did we never see those people again? Why did I have to wait
until after you died to begin looking? Why did I feel that finding them
would be disloyal to you? And your father also? Why did we find
a cache of his postcards to you and letters and photographs
tucked into an old wooden chest in the attic, but not until after
Mom had died as well?

I did know when your father died, then your mother, and her effects
came to our garage to be sorted and discarded. I remember Mom holding
up that box of your father's and you saying in a harsh voice I would not
like said to me, “Burn them.” Which she did not do. And how many
years has it taken me to realize that if a fire was so important,
you could have set it yourself?

When I left home, you were still mostly loving and kind.
I tried to forget your rage when I was maybe 7 or 8, had talked back
to Mom, who reported to you. You came home that day after I had
gone to bed. I was asleep when you awakened me with your rapid footsteps
on the stairs, and I went off the far side of the bed and lay in the dust underneath
as you came into the room and bellowed at me to come out. I stayed silent.
You tried to reach me, but you couldn't. And then you left.
And I remembered.

Maybe I was lucky. I was the oldest, and I left home first, stepping out
into a world I did not trust. Now I know the worst was yet to come,
and most of it I wouldn't learn until after one of us grabbed your ashes
and deposited them far out of reach for cemetery visits on the summit
of Cadillac Mountain,an act I failed to understand until the younger ones
confided that in your later years you were angry and mean, said mean things
about me, too, without the benefit of my presence, told others I had taken loans
and never repaid them, trashed my reputation, in fact. Mom intervened
and made everyone know This Did Not Happen, but we were also trained
not to believe her in any dispute with Dad . . .

The worst discovery of all was you were openly, crudely antisemitic. Which I
never heard or knew. And racist also. You, the father who instructed us
about the horrors of slavery and the Civil War the year we lived in Maryland
when I was 9 and 10 ‒ and told us never to speak about it.
What happened to you?

Were you even aware of how ironic this was? You, who were so careful
to instruct us about the tragedies the Jewish refugee children
in our school classes had endured? How important to be kind to them?

Did you know that your own grandfather was the illegitimate son
of a Dutch Jewish mother whose family emigrated to France, and so
you were quite Jewish yourself ‒ although you probably could not
have been officially Jewish unless in a reform congregation
since your Jewish connection was through blood and not also
through culture or religion? And did you know what took me decades
to discover,that while you were telling us about the evils of Hitler
and the crimes that had happened to the children in my second grade class...
your close cousins had been taken to concentration camps
in Poland and Germany, that few of them had escaped?

Grateful for later discovery, I ask you again. What did you mean
by family loyalty? Or perhaps more to the point, What did you mean by family?

The first kayak was red and sleek

I couldn't get out of it by myself.
The Woodcock hides deep in the woods.
(Dreams of children can come at any time.)

Randy, he dances ‒ swirls high in the air.
The second kayak was red and handy.
(Finding the essence of the matter is a challenge for a dull mind.)

The lady he wishes to impress looks away.
I wore urban black for two years afterwards.
(Often, child's play appeals more to adults than children.)

The family's star does not have to be a man or boy.
The oldest child is often the star of the show.
(I doubt the innocence of a child.)

Does the star have five points or six points?
Black was my favorite color.
(Is black a color or is it almost like white ‒ absence of color.)

Essence tastes mean.
Essence is the core.
The first kayak was red and sleek.






Poem constructed from a prompt by Eileen Myles:
Write a letter to someone who makes you feel deeply uncomfortable, in which you say the most awkward things that you’ve not had the courage to say. Then put 5-6 pieces of paper on the table and write down the name of one pathetic thing/word on each one. Then turn over them over and write 3 sentences/lines each. Then bring them all pellmell together into an assemblage of pain, awkwardness, discomfort, embarrassment.

I used a random number generator for the poem.
https://wordwall.net/resource/4142699/1-18-spinner

A Whim

A whim guides an
optimistic phoenix beside the annoyance
the chickens have escaped
fool afternoon fields

familiar rice mediates
admire equity among
the country status
the flesh a smiling populace

distance solves the flower
night shall pipe
analog method smart
oil thirsts under graveyard mettle

hair up let her in arms
carpet cupid cemetery snake

sad, fallopian aquariums decay in my cyclical anemia,
fibrous and fleshy pumpkins hemorrhage sunny, purple symptoms
the anger of controversial emotions disguised as vulgar poems tied between dirty
slums:
your body, my body
we burn all your precious words
we eat in the poisonous temple satirically,
and let the cautious beggars pass the sweetest nectar within their imperial cages

the air around the sharp funnel captures your laughter,
as the side dish discharges the bitter filling of the final orchards,
slack temples camouflage in the neatness of your cuts

this address is in dire need,
can you tell?

and then-

spraying medical sheets as low-body catacombs, reproaching the attitude of
material flight in comatose 'whys',
daring artificial combustion rests between your thoughts
the covered gauntlet of tangled cadaveric beams sloughs high in sterile surfaces
of lava-like snowstorms

loop freely a healthy relaxation:

she walks around under his brusque torch

she ignites the vintage lights spinning around your somnolent hips

and the position escapes as tightly as wrapped gifts in kettle boiled
tombstones

Invention Of A New Meaning

 Humans are in the wrong place
 , we don’t belong here
 , this is not our home , we must
 disengage from gravity .
 We’ve been tricked into believing
 otherwise
 , we don’t belong here : disengage .
 We are in the wrong place
 : recharge your imagination , let go .
 The truth has been lying to us
 , take comfort in knowing this .
 If we stay here
 we’ll lose our sense of logic .
 The truth has lied
 , we don’t belong here . This is
 not our home .
 We need a new truth : use your
 imagination .
 We need to silence language
 ––use your imagination
: the truth is lying. 

A Lethal Mutation

Intelligence is a lethal mutation,*
Ernst Mayr says, but bird
watching, say I, is soothing
in its certainty. You see it.
You take its picture.

When you look again,
it stays the same.
It does not slither around
like expedient Truth
ready to escape its skin
and don another.

*Ernst Mayr. What Evolution Is.
Interview. http://www.edge.org

from Atlas

About this light: a million dirty moons
in the sweaty air, a thousand cattle in the hills.

Cat shriek, overspill of TV just out of ear-
shot, breakers of traffic in the cool still.

Palms never sleep as buildings roll on ball
bearings, coils thick as twisted torsos sway

like reeds in the dusty breeze of the big one—
—quakes hop-scotch across faults as P waves

rearrange the topography: down suddenly
and sideways: liquefied soil like so many

drunk molecules or strings of energy shifted
into new social circles. Concrete loses to weeds

of rising rents in L.A., of the lifeless air within
this structure, rugs over carpets below stairs

worn in patterns, in pathways, in dark streaks
down the middle of each freeway lane.

Phyllis Webb: The Spit

And spit
give me water for spit.
Then give me
a face.

Solitary Confinement1 ―Phyllis Webb


And spit
broken glass
for shards
to speak

give me water for spit.
Gloss this mal du
doute     … never
was spat out

Then give me
ash in time
to witness
its burn

a face.
To spite
itself
still








 1. This section of Webb’s poem 
starts, “Let my tongue hang out / to 
remember the thirst for life. / Let my 
togue hang out / to deliver itself / of 
the bitter curd. / And spit / …”

garbage bag home to the lemon is the pie of the world

we found the dollar bugs
to beat the egg with the shimple pooh of that trying randall

spaghetti yarn to marble a bacon
to get the rice of the comma

oink never a shield of the tomorrow egg
the cosmic angle of the new day

to be the people of the world
a mite now of bexter

triceratops the king of the ice
the oven is a mirror of the sluppy time to crock