Meet Me In 811

Ode to Donor Gametes

I was not thinking of Russia
or the Holocaust or eugenics
when I picked the donor
from an online catalog like
I was ordering a new pair of shoes.
I don’t mean to sound blasé.
It was more complicated than that.
But by the time spring came
and the third failed IVF, I didn’t care
about SAT scores or eye color;
I wanted any embryo that latched
to my uterine wall and grew.
The German philosophy major,
the filmmaker from California, even
the one whose favorite food was pork.
What did genes matter? I already knew
I’d name my second child for dead relatives
from the old country, the ones
who made it out before the camps.
My uterus washed with grief, empty
kiddush cup after the seder.
That was the only time I really prayed.
That day when I paced outside,
waiting for a call from my doctor
with good news, eggs and sperm
married in a petri dish, an offering
from a Midwestern girl
with ovarian abundance and kind eyes
who knew to look away.

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Come. And Be My Baby

The highway is full of big cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that’ll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you’re going to turn.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we’ve got a week or two
The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror
And you sit wondering
What you’re gonna do.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

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We Lived Happily During the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

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Cold Sweat

Drenched in sweat.
I can see the stars
through a bullet hole in the ceiling.
I run my hands through my hair.
My damp trousers
are sticking to my legs.

I hear a noise.
I look around.
There’s no one else in the room.
I cannot feel my body.
I look in the mirror.
It was the chatter of my teeth.

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The Serving Girl

The calabash wherein she served my food
Was smooth and polished as sandalwood;
Fish, as white as the foam of the sea,
Peppered, and golden fried for me.
She brought palm wine that carelessly slips
From the sleeping palm tree’s honeyed lips.
But who can guess, or even surmise,
The countless things she served with her eyes?

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Everything is Exactly the Same as it Was the Day Before

mama says: long noodles, long life,
so I slurp them loud, drink gingery
broth—polka-dot beads of sweat
forming as my nose hovers over
the soup’s steam. circles for luck.

circles on my dress. papa says:
make a lot of noise! so the children
bang on pots & pans to hush
yesterday’s demons. later, in the cold,

the family plods up the hill to wonder
at the fireworks, sky like a warzone lit
with spraying flames from Roman Candles—
fire on the ground from Watusi whips snaking
& coiling, sizzling our feet.

I feel it all in my chest—
a drumming,
a warning, a spell.

back in the yard, granny doles out rice
& meat, pineapple liquor, glass bottles
of Sprite. but I am snoring by midnight,
my sisters & I still swathed in red chiffon.

by morning, I cry because I missed it.
I cry because they say I’m not alone.
I cry because home is a warning,
its pulse a whiff of flint in the dark.

■

If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert

I will swing my lasso of headlights
across your front porch,

let it drop like a rope of knotted light
at your feet.

While I put the car in park,
you will tie and tighten the loop

of light around your waist—
and I will be there with the other end

wrapped three times
around my hips horned with loneliness.

Reel me in across the glow-throbbing sea
of greenthread, bluestem prickly poppy,

the white inflorescence of yucca bells,
up the dust-lit stairs into your arms.

If you say to me, This is not your new house
but I am your new home,

I will enter the door of your throat,
hang my last lariat in the hallway,

build my altar of best books on your bedside table,
turn the lamp on and off, on and off, on and off.

I will lie down in you.
Eat my meals at the red table of your heart.

Each steaming bowl will be, Just right.
I will eat it all up,

break your chairs to pieces.
If I try running off into the deep-purpling scrub brush,

you will remind me,
There is nowhere to go if you are already here,

and pat your hand on your lap lighted
by the topazion lux of the moon through the window,

say, Here, Love, sit here—when I do,
I will say, And here I still am.

Until then, Where are you? What is your address?
I am hurting. I am riding the night

on a full tank of gas and my headlights
are reaching out for something.

■

That’s So Lame

He says when the bus is late, when the TV
show is canceled, when a fascist is elected,
when the WiFi’s bad. That’s so lame! I say
rubbernecking my own body in the bath
-room mirror. See, every time lame comes
out a mouth it doesn’t belong in, my cane
hand itches, my bum knee cracks, my tongue’s
limp gets worse. Some days it’s so bedridden
in the bottom of my jaw, it can’t stand up
for itself. Fumbles a fuck you, trips over its
own etymology, when all I want to ask is, Why
do you keep dragging my body into this? When
I want to ask, Did you know how this slur
feathered its way into language? By way of lame
duck, whose own wings sever it from the flock
& make it perfect prey. I want to ask, How long
have you been naming us by our dead? Baby
-booked your broken from the textbooks of our
anatomy? A car limped along the freeway,
a child crippled by their mother’s baleful stare.
Before I could accept this body’s fractures,
I had to unlearn lame as the first breath of
lament. I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak
me into a funeral, an elegy in orthodox slang.
My dad used to tell me this old riddle: What
value is there in a lame horse that cannot gallop?

A bullet & whatever a butcher can make of it.

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