Blurry Family

Skip James

The record ending is a piece of paper crumbled up and eaten.

It reminds me of bugs dying on light bulbs. It reminds me of brown curled leaf-ends. I wrote a letter and then I stopped. My hair crisped from a shooting flame, it felt like a record ending. The dirt has been dry, the roots have been aching over how to feed the leaves. I have a folder full of letters that I'll never send.

Distance pt. 4

It is not written that he beat against the side of the mount or collapsed to tear at the earth: Moses standing on Mount Pisgah, overlooking the land of Israel, exiled by God. It is not written that his skin cracked in the heat like desert floor, that his lips split like the seas.

There are many who stand at borders, exiled behind walls or fences, stuck between checkpoints. Their trunks twist like olive trees, their eyes pain with want, their arms reach to the sky in peace-prayers and guns point at them like long, terrified fingers.

There is violence in borders, in the invisible lines that separate countries. There is violence in the refusal to travel language. There is violence in the refusal to stand at the mount with the exiled.

Mornings

Open stage, windless instruments.
That early-morning alone with
wintry boughs cracking.

My knees are heaped around my ankles.
There is a crushed pretzel, its grains caught
between the rug loops, sticking, static.
Shadows are ideas from the windows: Muted traffic,
Church bells, someone searching for "Michael!"

The joints in my fingers have crumbled.
My hands lay beside me like empty plastic cups,
sideways and left behind.

Everything has happened already.
Elephants have fought here -
There are moon craters
where our feet danced,
there are mosaics
where we smashed bottles.
A discarded t-shirt flowers and molds in the corner.

Free Write 3/22 (Receipt)

Time is walking like a crook:
We lived for years
in a tent under the interstate -
blue highway, blue tent,
pools in our ears -
We slept for years
in a refrigerator box on the rooftop
sucking asphalt and sun.

On fourth and lombard
all the people talking like typewriters -
"How could she hate her life, she lives
in Florida?" Long range planning backward
goals, the calendar is a little woman who tempts us
to commit the sin of plastic.

Yesterday the whole front of the bus squished together for a man in a wheelchair who told us not to smoke this is what it had done to him for fourty-seven years like an ex-wife pulling at his veins like reigns. A woman told him "that's proof that the lord loves you, he could have chosen to take you away." He said: "Any smokers on this bus you better quit or you'll end up like me." Today on the train a seventy-six year old homeless man preached: "You are my audience, between this stop and the next you cannot move, you are captive, you will listen to me beg and grovel and guilt your eyes until your pockets find change!"

Tallis, Weave, Scarves (Title?!)

Six hundred and thirteen knots
hung around my head like mosquitoes,
a veil marking holiness, with blessings
sewn in blue thread: Blessed are you, universe,
blessed are your braids, that hang down a back
in shades of brown (coffee, caramel,
timberland boot tan) the colors found
in ironed streaks to be woven
into tender heads. The colors
tied in a cast down the arms of women:
"Scarves for sale", feathers for sale
from these migrant birds,
soft and heavy on their wings
that spread wide in display
until police come and they run like pigeons
from the foot of a child,
fringes scattering around the corner.

Philadelphian Cynicism

Street Vendor Woman is holding a Hillary for President sign.
Construction Worker: She's a crook.
Street Vendor Woman: Everybody's a crook.

Seashell

The washed bone of your spine
curls fetal, it is sun streaked – a shingle
of pail toenail, egg hip. Cream of crusts,
of ends, of palms.

You sleep, displaced, in dry meditation.
Your pulse is a memory of the tide, the bloated
belly of its swell, the soft pull like seaweed
round an ankle. How the water moved without direction,
turned you wet vagabond.

Your arms bend away in a bow,
low, in brown – the eldest orange, father
of sunset, born burnt. Like you,
it once traveled to blue.

Frida 3

She places the gray rectangle of shadow
above her chin, delicately as a name card
at a dinner setting. It is a simple truth -
that the sun's angle would darken this patten -
a math that she calculates steadily, the way
she pulls silver through her earlobes.

This face invents her
as she sits potted
before the mirror, painting
the endless Mexican desert
behind her pupils, unlit. Pursing
the red tin of her lips.

She recalls sitting in a toilet stall, head sobbing between her bare knees. She recalls sitting on a stoop to call long distance, hesitating on the last digit, and no one answering after five brave rings. She recalls curling fetal on her floor, surrounded by piles of colors, clothes, ideas, straining over which costume to bear.

She mixes these recollections
into a dark rouge
for her cheeks.