Month: October 2014

At holiday gift exchanges, the doll
in the other child’s box is always more

appealing, with its shiny ponytail and pert
nose, the nip-tucked waist, the cheerleader

outfit and the matching pink plastic Ferrari.
And later, in middle school and high school,

she’ll get to go with some of her class
on the optional field trip to Italy or Paris,

or preselect courses for advanced college credit.
Elsewhere in the world a class of 52 students

shares 1 workbook, 1 makeshift schoolroom
with a dirt floor, 1 box of broken crayons.

I could go on, and I suspect you also could
go on about the argument that states how no one

can be held responsible for what is beyond human
control, since no one chooses the conditions of

one’s birth. At least acknowledge that the field
has never been level: that the work of counting

and ministering to dying bodies is underwritten by prejudice.
Though when you look out the window at the sea, it goes on

as if forever. And in its depths, whole cities have perished,
whole towns have drowned in the wake of tsunamis.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Outskirts.

“…until finally there is only a clean white page”
~ Tony Hoagland, “Poem Written in the Manner of Billy Collins”

Except that the problem with these kinds
of erasures and corrections is that one
never winds up with that clean white page
or that tousle-haired child (let me guess,

blue-eyed) feeding one perfect, pesticide-
free leaf to his well-groomed guinea pig—
which by the way is known more widely
in the Andean highlands as cuy or cuye,

where an estimated 65 million of these
“little sea pigs” are consumed every year
(fried, broiled, grilled, or roasted).
Why a Peruvian child might smack

his lips with gusto at this rodent dish
and why here, only an Andrew Zimmern or
Anthony Bourdain would dare chow down
on a crisp foreleg or thigh, illustrates

not only that one man’s meat is another
one’s cultural taboo, but the whole problem
of late 21st century multinational capitalism.
Because practically everything has become

universally commodified, it becomes easier
to substitute the animal, the child, the gun,
the land mine, the beheading, the execution—
And language, yes even the language of poets

and pundits, can be diluted like those coffee beans
steeping in the paper cone filter, or the nibs
of cocoa gathered by farmers on the Ivory Coast
who have never had a square of chocolate

nor shuddered from the pleasure of its melting
on their tongues. Switch from Chopin to the music
of gamelans, write about both those dying from Ebola
in west Africa, and the panic that closed down schools

in Texas and Ohio. Write about journalists killed
and dumped into mass graves. Write about transgendered
Jenny, whose birth name was Jeffrey, and the US Marine
suspected of her murder in Olongapo City.

The miser hoards his best coins
in a drawstring bag. He hides them

under his mattress, he takes them out
to spit on them and shine them, count

them into piles. But I, I break a few
more hours from the mostly depleted day

to feed to one more bristling task. Where
does it come from, unbending hunger

wanting to be fed, this maw that’s never
satisfied until it sees me nearly spent?

No need to say,
but the saying goes—
enclosed in an oven’s
heated space, you’ll
rise, I’ll rise, we’ll
form a kissing-crust
though everything that
contains us might be
too hot to touch.

 

In response to Webster's Forgotten Words.

Birds reel overhead,
their dark punctuation departing

from the grammar
of rusted roofs— Street signs

point in the only
direction they know, until a wind

or some government decree
uproots them.

On the corner, the shoeshine boy
trades cards for comic books,

and the vegetable vendor is texting her son.
In the park where a man once whispered

Do not pretend you don’t know
what I want, highland girls string

strawflowers on cord.
The sweet, charred odor of roasted corn

precedes dusk: hour of reckoning,
hour of bitterness, of surrender.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Silent drunk.