After

Over treasure and land some texts will say it had

Little to do with slavery or the newly

Discovered yellow planet

Few men watched the glaciers recede

From shuttles they had built

During the hemorrhage years

When they’d gathered all the genes down from the ledges

I’ll be a fig or a sycamore tree

Or without hands

By then doctors and poets

Would have found a cure for prayer

•

Or have you shoved the door shut

In the face of the dark?

Have you body and light the trap

Of retribution doing unto you

What it does to others? You protest

In the streets and papers and I leave

For a faraway land

Where with pill and scalpel

And a distant reckoning

If he should lick his lips

Or clench his fist I shall find his second left toe

Infected puffy

From a bump

I’ll lance it and squeeze

Out the pus and offer

Him an antibiotic

I can’t refuse therefore I am

•

The first time I saw you it was hot I was fed up

The second time your wife gave birth to a macerated boy

I had nothing to tell you

About letting go of the dying

In the morning you were gone

Had carried your father back to your house

His cracked skull

I didn’t know that was your wife

When I raised my voice

To those who were praying

From behind the wall to keep it down

I was trying to listen to your baby’s heartbeat

With a gadget a century old

•

Anemic

From so much loss giving birth

If you give blood in the desert you won’t

Get it back not your iron pills or magic hat

I put your thin

Hemoglobin up to the light and called out

To the donors Donors

If you want to know your blood type

And it’s a match

You must donate

Few came some indifferent to my condition

Not having heard of it

And willing anyhow

•

And the world is south

The night a bandit with gasoline

And I’m your dancing lizard mirth

I put my one arm up

And bring my one foot down on a hot zinc top

The nearest hospital was the dawn

She didn’t know her daughter on her back was

The entry wound and she the exit

She ran a brothel so

The officer said

Where the rebels came and went

And ran into the government boys

Her girl’s femur the size of the bullet

•

He was from the other side rumors

Had a bullet through his left arm

Or had it bitten off by a camel

A camel elephant of the desert never forgets what you are

If you aren’t kind to it

When I met him his bladder was the size

Of a watermelon his prostate a cantaloupe

You cannot catheterize

A man forever

Every hour on the hour his left arm stump

Hanging his good arm holding

His penis his buttocks in deep squeeze

A charge from the rear without spillage

This poor murderous thief desperately single-

Handedly began slapping his own ass

As if he were dashing a stallion in a raid

On some unarmed village

•

The mind in the field

The brine in the field

Whether I

Is a diphthong codependent on

What isn’t there to stay in the field

The good you act is equal

To the good you doubt

Most have lost many

You are either prosperous

Or veteran in the field

•

A mother offers not necessarily

Sells her one-eyed son

For an education if you’ll bring him back

And stone dust for one

With congenital illness

And little boy with malaria

Same old gas

Money mixed with blood

Transfusion the doctor’s perfect record broken

Nobility of taking

A life you

Who must walk to and from your house

The jeep’s upkeep

The donkey-cart ambulance

•

One boot left behind

The one-boot photo I wanted

On a book military black the quad a clinic’s

Special Forces spun

By his dangling heels from

The pickup truck rushed

To a central town altered combative

With two scalp lacerations and blood

In his auditory canal

I was a lover of loss I tossed

The boot in the capital of suffering

Source: Alight (Copper Canyon Press, 2013)