What I could trust

I mean from the inside

I was there

Noticing the differences between me

And my enemy

Look, mama, my daughter said, a blue bird

I want to touch it

Right when my mind is about to get off

On establishing categorical distinctions (of which there are many)

Right when I am set to draw the line then cinch it tight

An aberration a.k.a life enters

It’s hard to hate you

When I remember

You have a body

Creamy cheese

Chocolate oat milk pudding

Kale salad with apricots and walnuts

Sweet potato

Trout toast

Avocado

Lemon

The second half of pregnancy

I was turned on all the time

I went in the back room and barely

Got my body down before

I came

Chex mix

Lox

Raspberries

Roasted carrots

Leek and gorgonzola pie

Do you love me

I feel like asking

Just to see what you’ll say

Greek yogurt

Steak cooked in butter

Olive ciabatta

Chocolate marshmallow ice cream

Applesauce

Cashew butter

No, a lot of people want to reply

But won’t

Where I say goodbye to the world

I let go in this incredibly

Peaceful admirable way

The images are surprising

The cadence invigorates even as

The words themselves lull you towards

A real and inevitable end

A full stop

The lines of the poem transcend

Their own capacity to hold you

And kill you simultaneously

So that even as you long for what

Or who you love, you cannot

Lose it, the poem will not

Allow it

Unlike the obliterating leak

That is aliveness

The poem lives fully within

What it knows it cannot

Contain, the poem is humbled,

The poem bows down

It’s ant season

Your skin adjusts to the season

You sleep like a narwhal

Unique and forgotten

The neighbor calls you the wrong name

In the coffee shop

You are perceived

By the trees

As a person in a raincoat

Your daughter is breathing

Putting her small hands into the present

A rainbow begins somewhere

The universe is a slogan

With burnt-out lights

Talk to me like you want to go deeper

You can fake it

I’ll never know

Bees buzz in the butterfly bush

When our dad died it was February and sunny

My dad didn’t know me, really

I walk the park with too-big shoes

Come with me

I’m a turtle egg in the dune of dad grief

All metaphors are co-created

My client and I decide

We sit back in the disappointment of dads

The sun shines on the building we sit inside

I keep dreaming I’m sand

Intricate configurations of maze and escape

When someone dies we, too, want to leave

We consider

Our exits

You can go anytime, I tell my client

You’re free

When I get to the edge of myself

I make a joke

Nobody laughs

But I leave the parking lot

With joy in my chest

I go on a walk

My body holds the loose folds of my daughter’s exit

Everyone I used to love is somewhere

Alive or dead

Mint grows nearby

Plan to lose a lot of people

If you stop drinking or have a baby

Earlier I imagined all the ways

My dad might still disapprove of my life

I try to remember the plants in his house

Water and light

There’s a short mean dog

I keep moving

I’d like to say

If you don’t love my baby I don’t love you

But it’s more complex

My dad died full of longing

It made shadows on the walls

Geese squawked

Can you choose not to enjoy

The labor of someone else’s attention

Can you instead put your hands

On her tiny shirts, her pajamas

Can you touch them

Can you hold on

The one stuck at the cinnamon roll center

My care was often a burden

Why won’t you let me love you

My journals implored

What I could not receive

Held me tightly

Flower of the Universe

I drew her long petals

Why won’t love flow out and back into me

My chin jutted out

What’s “natural”

I was curious and that included my heart

People seemed to need care

There was no explanation offered for the suffering

I saw people go into bathrooms

I saw bugs upside down

No one was tracking

The voided bits

So I did

You’re working too hard

My therapists say

Back off

I go on a walk while my baby sleeps

I fling some care down

I itch my face

The neighborhood cat lolls under an artichoke

I try not caring

Which means not noticing

Whatever, I say to the plants, live or die

I walk the line

That points towards death

I imagine my daughter snoring

Her tiny lungs

Made from my blood

And the blood of cats and flowers

My dead dad rides a rivulet

The bits of him disperse

Within an uncluttered depth of care

And does his eternal transformation

Include me

Does the mud of his body hold me like a baby

Does it vibrate with the words he sang to me

Yesterday a red flower in the yard

Give it water! my daughter demanded

And so I did

I might be off by a margin but never much

I go on a walk while my daughter takes a bath

I bring my new body

Behind me is my life

On which I am the expert

The only authority, I tell my clients,

On you is you

I walk at a pace just this side of joy

I’ve had to build the skill of non-violent curiosity

Alert to the kind of interest that feels like coercion

I’m walking behind someone smoking

White petals rain on us both

I like a question that anticipates a symbolic answer

Most of my exes think I’m still in love with them

I get it

My need to own myself completely

Can linger between us

Smells like sex

But I recognized the love of my life immediately

I looked out from the circle

Expecting to travel a long distance

But he was in the middle

With me

You drove back down the mountain, alone, a shield.

Deer eyes.

An idea forming in regards to home.

Mist in the lungs.

Shield.

The metaphors we wrest from our ancestors are shields.

The symbols we cannot bear to bring forward, also shields.

You, watching me make these moves and imagining my capacity as an artist has something to do with your worth.

You, in the car ahead of mine.

Or behind mine.

Your desire to squash my red flower and my desire to pluck the petals from yours.

None of that is shielded.

A shield moves.

A shield transpires, evaporates, shifts between diffuse and seeable.

The journey is a shield.

Oxygen is a shield.

Trees will die, and crows, the neighborhood will die, the facts of life and death are shields.

No shield in the gunshots I heard last night.

No shield in you needing me to be bad so that you don’t have to feel your badness.

No shield denies its badness.

The naturally soft geyser of protective shame is a shield.

Deep feelings are shields.

Your relationship to yourself is a shield.

What you thought about as you came alive as a child is your shield.

The umbilical sadness contained by the color purple a shield.

Your whole back body a portal to orgasmic longing, untapped, a shield.

I place you in a ruby with infinite edges and shield you.

I hold you up to the river so you can sing.

From my pain

I went back and forth and the euphorbia

Watched, all the trees watched and the crows, too,

As I marched on weak legs into the spring

Of my life, which is our life.

I made you a list

Containing every “experience” my body has “encountered”

Since my dad died and I had a baby soon after

But I had to be so specific that I soon got confused

About where I was and the birds were cawing

I couldn’t get a grip on the purpose

Other than for you to know how intricately and profoundly

I’ve suffered, how the very moment

I’d come up for air the hard crush of what was next would take me

Under, my god I’ve been so deep in it

Have you missed me? Were you there too?

When I go down and touch the place it’s not so far away

But today there are petals

My daughter slept through the night

I had a dream my house was open

To the neighborhood and we all ate soup on the steps

A dog with a white chest

Tried to get my attention, it wanted me to move, to get up,

To bring my life out and onto the path

And of course the dog is my dad

And you’re here, aren’t you, I’m so sorry for what

We don’t know about each other

But I know you’re there

I know you know this but

You don’t have to save me from your pain

In the woods

After work

Under your armpit

The dream castle

The worm you were before birth

Cackling and unbroken

Kicking at the whale

How you made room for yourself

Amidst the velvet void

And now on the freeway

You move at an angle to mystery

You are mysterious to me

I behold you

Rainbow in skin form

I bow to you

You who are just like me

Unnamed by the sky

And free

No one is failing

No one got it wrong

The sun is a big bright egg

It’s enough

No one is anything

What’s lost can come back

The moon hangs in her secrets

The moon shines light on the field

No one has to feel bad

The field that is love

Pillow milk

Milk bird

Bird in the reeds

Heart beasts

You can throw out your old underwear

You don’t have to explain where you were

Why you did what you did

We understand

You are a paintbrush dipped in gold

Love is why

You don’t have to apologize

I get out her sticker book and stick

A whale to an eagle

The ocean is our friend

We say when she balls up her body

In fear of waves (?)

The empty fair on the pier was scary, too,

A big yellow cartoon

A famous sculpture curved blue

Bye-bye she yelled and kicked her legs

At night I wonder why

I brought her here

I read a book about someone who can

Control real events with their dreams

The water tastes like a river

Not much bothers me but that’s not

Virtuous, it’s fatigue

When my dad died

I thought, Well, that’s it

For my childhood, it’s over, which actually meant

Joy, that’s it for me and joy

The deep quake of happiness

Is no longer mine

My dad is dead and I have fallen

From the arms of the beloved

And in the maze one enters

When they enter grief I believed

My dad would come back

Once he was done dying

And then,

I had a baby

The rock is our friend

The gecko is our friend

The ancient petals of my heart deepen

Their colors each hour I sit with my family

The overhead fan is way up

On the ceiling but it’s our friend

We’re so glad you’re here

Thank you for making cool air

Thank you for taking care of us

It’s okay to be scared

Birds emerged

The next day I could see better

But it’s true what she said

That some agency had fled and was

Possibly returning

Talking to most people feels

Like a misunderstanding

I wear leopard pants to the poetry

Reading, I read a long poem

About moms and all the kids who happen

To be there listen. This year

Is hell for most people. This year

Has opened into a flower with

Shit petals. Before I had my baby and when

She grew in my body I lived on the glossy

Page of what my life had so far been.

But now

Come here to me

They say in Ireland so you’ll listen

You know when you first had that thought

I could jump

But you knew you wouldn’t (boat, canyon, building)

Birth was the reverse

It was me or her

Come here to me

I don’t like telling you

I would have chosen her

Now who will protect symbol and image?

Who will speak directly to the truth

As it lives in our racialized bodies?

I called my friend and we cried

Who can we count on to name

Courageously and with utter love the exactitude

Of living? I don’t believe

The Toni Morrison hole has closed

Wind rips through the trees

Me and my friend aren’t speaking

I saw a picture of the water next to the house

Where she died, the light on the horizon

Seemed to suspend it all

In fog which felt like watching

The hands of God

Stroke a beloved to sleep

Thank you, Toni

I am on your side

I am on my daughter’s side

I am standing next to anyone who wants anything—

You, who woke up and looked out

At the rain, or the subway

Running down the street

And you, with hands and eyes and thighs

In pants or under covers, resting

You are a person who today might arch out of despair

To peek around the corner at

What else might be

And I’m right here, existing

Most likely I’ve got stuff

In my teeth and I’ve already

Flubbed up the day in some way but I am

On your side

I am on your side

Between Freedom and Another

Kind of Life

Binaries are constructed in the night

While we sleep

The demand to Become

Something Better emerges

From a hurt spoke in the ancestral wheel

Fix me! all unheard pain says

But I am a zinnia

Turns out

I’m lingering somewhere

In the Salish Sea

When my daughter feels her first

Great Heartache

I hope to be there

But then I remember

Her eyes on the day she was born

It’s you we said

We lay back into the arms

Of Freedom, again

The shards stayed in the cave

The terrifying circumstances of our lives

May be where we come from

But they are not

Where we are going

In my daughter’s book

She points to it

She knows

From how I linger that something important is happening

Outside the leaves are gold

It’s so cozy!

Say people more fortified against collapse

I’m just sitting here

With no dad

Holding her on my lap

Seeing what she sees

Holding death back

We are lonely together

Glory be to the lonely

To us touching our thighs

To us making rainbows

In bed at summer camp while we are

Supposed to be sleeping

I’m looking to secure some funds

Someone said to me in the baby food section

The moon is full

What is my daughter thinking

When she’s away from me

Birth was the start of my Great Depression

An indent I can’t climb

Outside the world rains a pure pain

On its inhabitants

The doctor agreed with me that

We feel from our hearts

I drive by a cemetery

It seems you must remain hard to me

I imagine us dead together

A big dandelion root

Covers us both

Pigeons enter and exit a heart-shaped hole

In the window of the abandoned house across the street

My daughter’s mind is fireworks

Her mind is lace

Her mind is time

I am leaving you with my body but not my heart

We say to her

She doesn’t get it

Throws a stuffed animal my way

Later someone steals the stroller from our porch

Oh well

I finger the kale but don’t eat it

I can’t stop thinking about the stroller

How it held her body

When she was barely a body

How the moon shone down on it

In all kinds of weather

While the universe breathed

It’s ruining my life

My body ungathered

My dad‘s deadness continues to permeate

On a walk without my baby

I converse with my enemies

It’s not hard to love them

Love is never the problem

All this gorgeous fall shit is happening

My mom puts dead leaves and branches in vases

My mom gets down on the floor

And gives my daughter a crow puppet

Caw, Caw they say and laugh

Nobody in the room is dead

But the dad are near

It’s just how it works

You can love or not

You will be afforded many views

Pain braided with ecstasy

You will look out at the time you have left

You get to choose

Then spent time doing a whole thing to remedy what’s probably not the hugest issue

It really cramped my morning though

I forgot the gluten-free bagels

Mentioning gluten-free in a poem is a peak experience

Outing myself to you about anything a close second

I’m waiting in the park for the roses to die

For the fountain to shut off

Someone trimmed the hedges in perfect cones

All these dogs walking around and around and around, looking at me like

Why do you still give a shit?

I can’t honestly say

I had a baby and birthed myself

Something came to an end, but it wasn’t me or my baby

All day since I burp the rind

You’re so difficult my dad says to me

The day before he died

But now I know he means

It’s hard to hang on to this life

To you, to love

I might be falling off

Forgive me

I got so sad

I mean I was bereft about it, I went around

The kitchen hurt

Why eat this stupid gluten-free focaccia

I thought, god, it’s so embarrassing

To try at anything

To want anything

When people die, dads die, and my friend

Is spending all this time at war when

The backdrop is waves slipping

Over the edge, gently the life

Moves through and out of each of us

And can’t it be a gentler breath

Why can’t what passes between us be kinder

Why does it have to scratch

And then the avocado was black and the skin was cracked

Rotten like my heart

Oh god I was bad I held my dad

So far from me, I felt I had to, it was the only act

That might preserve the childhood we had

Why won’t he dance and leap and sing and grow again

Why did he stop growing

Why does he fear me

Where is the father

Who held my hand and asked me to slowly

Tell my dream

And the blueberries are small

The coffee is gone

The sky is full of smoke

My baby’s nose is running

Which reminds me that she, too,

Is in line to die

And why are we fighting

Why did you turn from me

The field is empty

I am here now

Come back