hyperbolating

I. WE SIT, and we nudge, “spill your fruits unto the world!” and you split, a story, your arteries a map for pointing fingers to follow and trust. there is no blinder cartographer than grey in the air. and hands trace, firm, the flow of your blood and being, the same hands that yesterday traced the outline of clouds and the wiggle of ribs under hair— all shoeless and shirtless; heaving bodies of color and sweat and laughing. II. all together, WE SIT, and spin this map, to discover in it our own travels. quiet, each one reads their future in the veins marked then and here and now. and on stools our knees curl into

my feet clench at the feeling out of adventure, or the trepidation in open doors, but in the style of Whitman, I sound my barbaric yawp, and it echoes loud from the rooftop, across floors— a swimming sigh of self (the crash of bed-sheets to the floor, slap of feet on wet pavement) I am skin and sun and sand penned on paper, and the world from here looks like the haze of morning and the roll of clouds over trees. I can see the fading sum of summer— it’s pavement sizzling with heat and lazy, languid strides, alight with dreams of possibility and probability. my mouth is turned at the corners and often I tryst with

It’s not the dirt, it’s the heat that sticks to me when I wake with the windows open and follows me when I toil up hills and my spokes are singing of something better, like the spill of their whir down to the edge of the street. Yeah, I guess it’s alright to feel inhuman; they say; we’re beautiful in our painted metal way, carbon-cinched memory is more potent than the leftover indents from fingers on your flesh. I’d rather not be the marker for someone else’s page; you can’t drink me for breakfast. My knees are always burning because I can’t stay up straight.

evergreen sifts through open windows, clear-aired and heady with the promise of mountains; mixed with the slow drawl of clouds and carwheels and light hitting the dashboard. and in this wood-grain scene of tree-tipped timber, my fingers tap the measured breaths of my parents. there’s string and air stretched taught over every precipice— they vibrate with the mass of mountains. each breath breathes—one, two— the unpredictability of emotion and movement. and I am good at words and water, stumble with brushes and bills— my tongue loosed is fast and fire, evades capture by a meandering mind. mouths mout

She is content with the quiet acquiescing to her womanhood over tables of bounty. Watches as the widening spheres of hard and silver stretch her bridges; fray tendons, knee-strings. At night, she pulls weight in silent battle; marks her victories in subtle celebration in the bathroom where she has taken up. It smells of country soap and thyme, time, repose, conceding in steady rhythm to the tearing of her resistance. In the morning she is bathed in light—quiet, unassuming. Eyelids swollen, she can but guess at identity; held bounded by touch, olfactions. Her grace is majesty unbounded, imitates childish fingers on quest.

I thought I saw weakness in their hope, in one vision of the cityscape; when what I saw was the iron grid, braced with electric swells; traced across the sky in grime and gleaming. I could also see: the leaping in their eyes, drawn skin, the white of bone, dragging out of muscle, stretching dreams. I couldn’t see:   moving water, light catching the windowpane, knotted strength in calves, possibility.

When it turns warm, we load the car with dirt-crusted shovels and dented jugs of water, a plastic bag of saplings. I wear my mother’s wide brimmed hat, tired sandals. Planting in parks, we let the dirt collect under our fingernails, wave grubs as temptation for slow careening birds, leaving them to shrivel on packed ground. I leave room in the ground for earthworms and imagine my body as moist as theirs in dry earth. My hands have cracked with clay, fools’ gold coats my knuckles. I lick the saltiness from the edges of my lips. Afterwards, when we have left our branches to preen, we feed ourselves; hot, soupy ramen and

FINDING THINGS TO WEAR I. He hopes that his shackled box full of collected beads of prayer will not tomorrow prove an empty catch; hopes never to finger the holes in his net and wonder if a tighter stitch would have held his reaching better. II. His wife finds morning in baskets, pockets herself in deep covets, folds in origami shifts; to brush her hair is to lift bones. When her daughters were born she wrapped them in tissue paper, twisted herself into fences, began hanging curtains like portraits of their leaving. III. When their daughters were gone, he wouldn’t let her shift when she was sleeping, watched h

I am starved for newspapers: one lover who cooks another, Darfur, and elegies in obituaries because I have looked at the world through you, America, and so I can see nothing but your money and your goals and Africa is in the corner of my eye, but I will name ten countries to prove to you that we do care and you should too. America when will you send your eggs to India?  We have kept you preserved in cartons for the fragile and now, I am sorry: you have been exposed but it's okay because maybe that is what's best and maybe you will lick your lips for us and you will let the rest of the world see your best side for false comf

For Oil and Soap On the days when you are trapped in the heat, my fingers morph into whales.  My knuckles, once sharp, are wax and curve like your wrists or seaweed. My opposable thumbs have mouths now which fix those fly-aways with such precision that I wish you did not own a comb, that you were here for me to fix yours. If those bristles ever melt in that heat, let me know so I can groom you, so I can use teeth as plastic.