RHODE ISLAND

I come out of the stroke but. The room of my mother is a room in waiting. Inside my mother there is vanilla and gloss. Floral, heptic. She turns a certain hue towards burden. She cracks her teeth on malice. She sits in the room and sleeps in the room. She sews herself together to rooms and walls. The overcoat is burning. The thread is latching sea. This isn’t an umbilical cord, she says, what have I been waiting for the sun, the sun, lightness without a name. I will take the blind angle of history. I will sit on an epoch to know its name. I see the mars of children. People scream at me and in me. They think, holy, holy, you’re a ghost without a name. I know my father do you. I know my mother do you. I know how the sun’s apogee relates to your internal turmoil do you. I know the foggy skin came purple do you. I know what lightning bursts do you. I know the wooden cradle do you. I know the burning memory do you. I know the skulls in cartography do you. I know the blood in my toenails do you. I know the scars of my grandfather do you. I know the guns in my pelvis do you. I know the mandates of men do you. I know the greed of tigers do you. I know the red slipping do you. I know the screaming in the veil do you. I know the mists of our past do you. I know wildlife in his arm do you. I know the rattling of caged butterflies do you. I know the simple dirt do you. I know the rolling fields of guilt do you. I know the tree and its magic do you. I know the horror without the face do you. I know the limb without bone do you. I know the limb without the stick do you. I know the limb without the cloth do you. I know the limb, I know the limb, do you, do you. I know do you. I know, do you. I know a stupa once stood high and mighty and effervescent.

SOUTH CAROLINA

When I come home to my father who is a dead father in making. I have not removed his boots or trench. The stink of him is glistening. I cannot dust up his echoes, nifilden his cuticles. There are traces and traces which cannot simply be emptied out. I cannot divest my dishes or cutlery. A knife is a knife that will always carry his name. The blood of a stag is in me. The fur of its cuff peeled off and seared. I am the running mast. My father he has raped me without touching. He sits in a place immovable without weight. I refuse to concede ghostlier. I refuse that he is dead the moment of my being. I have known harsher children. When we burned him his corpse was not his corpse but a tincture of rock and rot. My mother not my mother in bewilderment that there are people who practice the burial of the dead. I would rather flay him and tarnish, my mother speaks through me, settle down, settle down, its mesmer calls us back.