_______
i step out of my shoes
barefoot to yank weeds
turn earth
transplant home-started lavender and peppers
plus farmers-market sweetgrass
to later dry, braid and burn
(a smell that will always take me to the haunted quarters
of the top floor hobbit perch
of a care-took plot of
botanical gardens
a mile and a half into waipi’o valley)

_______

one of the ways i think death works
i say
is to bring us closer to those that are still alive

_______

corinne tells me about the brilliance
of art’s letter-writing project
and i realize i’ve never given a shout-out to art (far as i know)
on the detail collector
so this one’s for you, force of brilliance

_______

corinne says
it’s a rough place to be a radical subversive dynamic person
speaking of san diego / grad school

and she mentions compartmentilzation (you see it. you name it. you move on.)
in terms of receiving news/information in the u.s. today
what you do in your work is to interrupt this, so that people become witness.
you allow people to emotively respond, rather than to shut down
and by this time, i am emotively responding myself
the punch, the power of being seen
your work is earnest
she says
being earnest in academia is a tough road to walk
because people disparage emotion in academia
where the emphasis is on intelligence (which couldn’t possibly include emotion.)

and then
she talks about my grounding in poetry
my history
how i have been a poet/
teaching/putting work out there
in so many communities
across so much time
within and beyond various structures
which is the hugest offering of contradiction
to my deep seeded belief
that i’ve just been some kind of sub-poet
this entire time
(not enough published
not enough readings
not widely enough known/recognized
doesn’t take self seriously so why should others
writing invisible/inconsequential work
trying but not quite there and never will achieve arrival)
teed, i don’t call you wingman for nothing

_______

things lester, joshua, 217 and i chart on the ngram viewer
include but are not limited to:
dr. seuss and shel silverstein
oral sex and anal sex
cunnilingus and fellatio
whom
while joshua digs into an icecream drumstick
disappointed at the cone’s
chewy softness

_______

we have become good
at walking each other
half-way home
we have become better
at leaning in

_______

ayla emails
says i need this
and she is perfectly
100%
bang-on
correct

_______

woman walking dog
layered up for the gray
a bit of dazzle passed and forth between us
smiles travel a tin can wire

_______

a plate of oatmeal cookies
a birthday balloon tied to a back of a chair between the front door
and the kitchen
one of the first recordings from the late 1800s/early 1900s (i forget his name)
crackly and playing instruments that sound almost like music boxes
at some point i look out
and the clouds have turned pink/gray and are patched across the sky
_______

217 pours me lemonade
217 serves me soup
217 asks if i am cold on our walk home and i forget to sky-scan for moon

_______

at first i think the piet mondiraned riddle
has something to do with arizona
then mirrors
we are always with our shadows

_______

every restaurant should have one of those
i tell 217 as we walk out of tam’s thai down adams ave
and by one of those i mean
the guy who apologized for not wearing a suit
while he took our orders
the guy who asked if he thought he should wear a cape
the guy who laughed and we laughed back when he said
i’m just here helping tam out
i don’t really know what i’m doing

_______

sometimes we pick up stones
carry them in hoodie pockets
for so long we can’t remember
where they came from

_______

we find the words
curled on the white couch
do you feel safe
she asks

_______

every _____ is a form of missing

i have been reluctant to write.
perhaps you have noticed.

perhaps you have noticed that even when i’m writing, i’m not really writing. i’m not really there.
i mean, i am there, but the writing is not really there.
or, the words are there, but they are husks.

i think it has something to do with it being the 8th week (of a 10 week quarter. not any quarter, but spring quarter. the last of the academic year. my second year of grad school. my second year on a campus where it seems there is literally no place to get comfortable. except for some patches of grass sometimes. but even then, they are usually damp from the excessive waterings.)

yesterday, when i could barely drag my ass to school [how is it that moving my body from point A to point B can sometimes seem like the impossiblest thing?], instead of telling my students how tired i was, i congratulated them for showing up. consistently. i said you should give yourselves a round of applause for showing up. which is always a funny gesture. awkward. patting yourself on the back. giving yourself a hand. (i’m not a fan of these phrases. but i am a fan of the kind of gesture that says hey, badass self, i’m gonna celebrate  you right now for being here and being who you are.) and so they clapped. wearily. maybe even half-heartedly. or awkwardly. perhaps  they feel just as awkward about that phrase, give yourself a hand, as i do. but i took heart. hearing them laugh uninhibitedly later. feeling the presence and energy they always bring into the room. presence and energy which breaks through even the thickest of mondays. that presence is louder than any half hearted clap.

reader, maybe i am here tonight to tell you about my students. they are brilliant. and i am so proud of them. and then i do things that feel like a parenting moment where, later, i kinda hate  how i chose to respond in a certain moment. (like my frustration at the class when half of them didn’t bring in a print of their graphic novel cover designs for the midterm even though it was clearly stated in three thousand places. i felt bad for allowing them to see the disappointment in my slack face, my dropped shoulders. i felt bad for thinking pull your shit together, people! it was not a very empathetic thought. i felt bad for laying down the law. so bad that five minutes later i said i still like ya’ll. but this is serious-time…. deadlines… follow through. and the same part of me that doesn’t believe in grades wonders why i care so much about them doing what they are asked/required to do. perhaps because those things are also a form of showing up? and what do i want more in the world than for people to show up. whatever it is they’re doing. i want them to engage/be engaged. i recognize this can look all sorts of ways. and in fact, maybe they were so engaged in whatever they were doing over the weekend/before class that they forgot about the deadlines and requirements. maybe they just spent the past hour laying under a tree staring up at the shape of the branches against the blue blue sky and occasional cloud strands unraveling. maybe they were making out with their dates. maybe they were sleeping in. maybe they too were weighed down by death this week. the demands of college are often so inhuman because they require the devaluing, the dismissing of the importance of such moments. so maybe next time half of the class shows up without their work, we can do a go around aboutwhat they were doing instead of printing out their homework. so at least we can delight in the other forms of presence they were engaging in.

this quarter i’ve struggled with not being able to plan for section until i am on the shuttlebus hurtling towards the great sprawl of an institution named ucsd. the procrastination has become that bad. but momentum/motion/movement lends itself to thinking. and i show up with a usually well-constructed map for us to follow or take apart. even if it was only 30 minutes of planning while sitting over the wheelwell with the amtrack tracks to my right and mission bay throwing the sun back to sky on my left. i still brought myself. i still brought my ideas. my work. i bring it. and apparently i consider bringing it part of an interdependent model. my bringing it depends on their bringing it and vice versa.

i lost it when, after preparing my students to pair up and offer feedback  about each other’s work (with sample questions posted on the screen at the front of the classroom), x [who spent most of that time chatting with the classmate next to her] asked what are we doing when it came time for her to choose her partner.  in this case, losing it looked like giving an exasperated raised eyebrow and waiting for her to look around and find the details that would help her answer her own question.

i also lost it when, last week, we were talking about how edward curtis would make his indian subjects more vanishy by instructing them to shave or  handing them a headdress (or other items from his costume kit) to wear for his photos. x said, well i doubt curtis actually did that. to which i sparred back were you in lecture [when wayne elaborated on this exact point]? to which x said no. this kid, who is usually in the position of putting people in their place needed that kind of check. that kind of humbling. here, losing it was a kind of gloating. a kind of hah! a kind of touché  for a kid who is very perceptive but always thinks he’s right and doesn’t need to go to lecture because he doesn’t see how it’s related to the reading material.

readers, i also want to tell you how good it feels to laugh with them. all at once. big. loud. i want to tell you how we build the space together and how much it means to me that i feel comfortable throwing jokes out there. how amazing it is that there is space for me (that they’ve built) for me to be myself.

dear readers, i’d like to share an email from my poetry workshop professor:

subject: assignments

Dear 202 Students,
Going through my bag, I found that I have new poems from only four people: L, E, H, and
K. And I am missing two anthologies, H’s and B’s. You will need to get these things to me before the next class.

readers, i want to tell you how i don’t want to write that fucking poem. they are living far from me (the poems) right now. i don’t give a fuck about my poems existing in that (workshop) space. i don’t give a fuck about turning something in just to fulfill a requirement when i have been doing so every week and each one amounting to some form of failing. can’t i just have a free bingo square on this? especially after i did turn in this week: an imitation poem, reading a presenting on a poem from the book we read for the week, a 70 page anthology i compiled and 10 feedbacked poems for my classmates? is that not enough? you weren’t supposed to notice the absence of my shitty work. you weren’t supposed to make any effort to want to read another unfunctioning piece. did i mention that the only poem of mine you liked was the imitation piece i wrote last week when you disclosed that you were on vicodin for back pain which was making us all sound smarter to you. so how about this. here’s my poem for this week:

these battles. they are good. but they are tiring.

dear readers,
there are other things that today was made of
like saltsweat on my face, at my neck-nape in the garden. yanking weeds and hauling bricks.
like the sunflowers finally opening. petals yellow tongues licking sky.
like rainmist on my bikeride home after a studio visit. a studio/work space i might share with my melinda starting in the fall.
like the story of a twitching eye that may just have to do with muscles or a neurological disorder/situation that i am orbiting around trying to get closer to on each pass.
like chocolate cookies delivered by the bakery fairie.
like the story of avocado on toast with tomato slices for breakfast.
like how i didn’t want to ride my bike down that same old street (the street where i have to fight at at least three points to take over an entire lane so the cars don’t kill me) in order to sign something at the bank for our house account, so i got a ride with rachel and then we went for yogurt.
like how i get to looking up arizona boys ranch (a place someone i know spent time at) and learn of the death of nicholaus contreraz how i wrap him up and carry him
like how perhaps since the day i arrived in san diego, today is the first time i really recognize myself in the mirror.
[dear reader, if you have made it this far, a shower of gold star stickers spilling upon you that you may post on your charts of achievement for the day.]

_______

we’re wired for metaphor
rae says
it’s deep
it’s in every language

and when she says
read your best poems from this quarter
about our end-of-the-quarter reading
it’s not a self-depricating thing
when i think about all the poems i’ve turned in this quarter
because all but one
feels like a lie
or like the poem that comes before the real poem
a never-quite-arriving
and on one hand
i at least have shown up
even now
i’d rather sing this song
than lay these letters down

_______

chopping clean salad greens
there is word
of people in chicago’s streets
and ruthless police
in honor of NATO’s 2012 summit

_______

william in the kitchen kneading bread at the flour-covered table

_______

running poems through a photocopier
(mine or others
as long as i love them)
is one way to tap into the magic

that part of her hurt and trauma
wayne says of emmett till’s mother
is also part of her strength
in the work you’re doing
your job is to see
how pain and trauma isn’t just pain and trauma

whereupon i question
whether i have allowed my grandma
complex personhood
(whether she allowed herself
complex personhood)

at 7:20 wayne tells the lecture hall they can go
if they want to since class is officially over
but his story isn’t
the magic:
no slamming of desks
no shuffling of backpacks
no rushing for the exit

the rest of the magic:
first the mention of the annular eclipse
and then wayne breaks down julio lópez-maldonado and his revelations involving stingless bees, armadillos mistaken for aardvarks, the complexities of mayan writing systems (how the bees built the language. in a sense. and how there are no possessive pronouns in mayan. no his or her.)
two thousand twelve
he says
it’s not the end of the world
it’s the end of a cycle
there’s a new world coming
he breaks down how we started exporting our crappy u.s. corn
to central america
undercutting folks who had to leave their farms
and are now working here
in our crappy yellow gmo corn fields
where the bees spin overworked and mindmixed
not knowing what to do
for the first time in 2000 years
(since they were recorded in the madrid codex)
he says
it is the end of the age of corn

8:30 the sound of men singing
as they move down the sidewalk
some kind of call and response
the word together is involved
navy will tells me
who was drawn to the window by the sound
a group of navy-men
_______

balboa park on a grayish day
only one other runner and i
cross paths

_______

thinking about how the whole foods cashier and i
joked about the coconut-to-chocolate ratio
the other day
while i devour
the bite-size cubes
looking out on
a mostly gray san diego
but sometimes the light
turns the palm frond silver
only on the edges

_______

bare foot
kitchen tile still warm
in the spot where armando was sitting
near melinda
drinking the oddly flavored
chocolate cherry wine
both of them in black

_______

have i said this one already?
the unnamed phenomenon of
how space holds history
which is what allowed that poet
joshua marie wilkinson
to write a book
that so successfully captured egon  schiele’s work
(since he did so
writing sleeping in rooms that schiele stayed in
riding the trains that schiele rode
seeing the countryside shiele saw)

_______

i offer armando the concept of progress-artist
(progress musician, in his case)
which seems to suit his approach to the piano
(building stories with sound
that take seven years to become something
and they are not notated
just muscle memory)

_______

drapes scarf over kitchen chair
shares the image of community college graduates
in their fire-fighter uniforms
helps herself to
mason glass of water
offers to assist with dishes
understands when i request the dirty ones
stay where they are because of how
ever since the vita cafe
i cannot have people pile up dishes next to the sink
without a simple rage
building in me

_______

dear readers
i will be at this symposium over the weekend
a road trip along the 8 from san diego to tucson
with two of my program-mates (hanna and mandy)
[it is now 1:50am and they will be swooping by to pick me up in 7 and a half hours]
which is to say
i may not be posting while i am there
which makes me wonder
why i feel the need to let ya’ll know whenever i leave my post?
(is it because i feel responsible because i made the commitment to do this every day
and you all are the ones holding me accountable?
so in turn i have to take on accountability towards ya’ll
like letting ya’ll know when i’m climbing down from my post?
(i imagine my post as a fire lookout tower.
lots of metal ladder to descend
from above the canopy
down into it
and then at root/ground level
just like that fire tower in gordon wisconsin
down the road from the cabin in tbirds family
which i can’t remember if it had a name
but i do remember fish-shaped pillows
for night stories and photo shoots
i do remember the call of the loons across the lake
i do remember
the dock giving way as we posed for a group photo)
did i mention
i am ready for the 6 hour movie
of california turning coastal desert to mountain to inland desert
to arizona out the frame of the backseat window
i am ready to meet you, southwest
border choppers overhead
not checkpoints but
border choppers and satellite speed cameras and
we will be watched
and i will be watching
there are lines on the map
where the 8 jags almost into mexico
and i wonder if i will see what the border wall is made of there
and i wonder if i will see desert blooms
do you know, desert, how hard i’ve been trying
to get to you?

_______

arizona is someone’s home
where someone’s grandma is buried in a wall
arizona  was gentrified by air conditioning
arizona is someone’s last name

_______

dear gaston,
it’s been a year
(which we always preface by saying
it’s difficult to believe, which is usually true
time is difficult to believe)
i remember how surprised i was
at how many tears there were
when i wrote that note on that porch on that table with the whiskey and shot glasses to honor you
into a book that was going to be cremated with your body
i wonder how long the bridge takes to cross
and if you are still ferrying yourself over

alex’s glitterblue nail polish
across the desk from me i ask
what are you listening to?
212 by azealia
he replies
which we both respond to by freaking out about
how good that song is
i tell my stupid story about how i started writing poetry
and ask if he’s ever been to the san diego poetry slam
because i think he’ll love it
and then several other amazing things ensue
including
how he tells me that his rap in class was a toned down version
that he normally performs in drag
and not long after
john, who recently came out
walks up to say
i didn’t mean to be nosy but
i overheard what you were talking about and i just want to say
keep doing what you’re doing
john, who doesn’t even give a fuck about passing
in a bright green dress with white polka dots and a pink poof of hair

_______

wherein kiik mentions
the article from early march where
a south korean couple’s baby died of malnutrition
because the parents were too absorbed in
their 12 hour days at an internet cafe
raising their virtual daughter in an online role-playing game

_______

i’ve seen what you do to those things
i tell ben
as i reclaim my paperclip
from his fingers

________

mixed cd, red rose petal and color-slide
tucked into page 111 of 217′s copy of
gloria anzaldúa’s borderlands/la frontera

________

gnarles barkley song/video
playing as i descend the
ledden auditorium steps
for monday night lecture
and i cannot
look away
from the screen

________

and then, there’s this song too
and what is it about this version of it
that always makes me want to cry?
like it’s attached to a memory
that was never mine
but i still carry it like it is
i think it goes way back to saturday mornings
mom running errands and dad at home working on stuff
i think it goes back to a place i was taken from
even though it wasn’t me that was taken
it was janina’s first kid
and janina herself
i think it goes back to
a brightness
and the sharp edge that slices it open
in this song
someone has died
in this song someone
is crossing over
in this song
there is that laughter that somewhere along the line
morphs into crying
(or vice versa)
but either way
i think what it is about this version of this song
is that it comes from the place
where grief and joy reside
and when they are of such an intensity
one can’t tell which is which

________
and then an hour into it
wayne delivers the gold:
to refuse historical amnesia
is to refuse to forget
it’s to make the ghosts come back
it is to decide to live with them
because we refuse to forget
how (our) people died

(which makes me think of that one anthology
against forgetting: twentieth century poetry of witness)

_______

twice i miss my usual turnoffs
which is weird because i feel like i’m quite present/paying attention
and the second time
four blocks from my house
i realize it’s because i needed to hear the patches of crickets
gathered and singing along in the front yards
along the length of the unlit block

non-consensual collaboration
is one way of naming
the borrowed/stolen phrase

_______

in the dream
three of us in a car
unsure who the us was but clear on the understanding that
we were outlaws
and i getting tired of the running
the dusty air
how on the roadside
i wanted to pick through old photos
tossed in the dry grass
and fallen-apart machines
but when one is being chased
there is no time for such things

_______

houndstooth backpack
brim-filled
with two kinds of oranges
et cetera
and i cannot offer enough
gratitude
for this gesture

_______

was it tapatia, valentina or cholula hot sauce you asked for?
i can’t remember
but now i know
your secret  guacamole ingredient

_______

salud
we glassclink
cold mint limeaid in our cups
avocados halved
on the cutting board

_______

first sunflower bloom
yellow petals unfurled
lifeburst
enough for me to interrupt
mid-sentence

_______

sunday studysesison
lester crosslegged on the floor
217 with computer on the small couch
me at the desk, pen in hand
soundtrack:
horsefeathers
fever ray
i’m gonna probably in a couple minutes
crack my neck
lester says

_______

gold plated toilet
alex suggests at the house meeting
which might be the hardest we’ve laughed
all day

_______

i’m looking for the language
to write about 49 corpses
found by the roadside near monterrey
outside of mexico city
how the article said
it will be difficult to identify them
because their hands and heads have been cut off
cutting:
isn’t that what we do with fabric?
paper?
grass?
not limbs
there is no language
and i understand what the official is doing
when he emphasizes
that this was drug gang/cartel related
and not an attack on random civilians
which i think is an important distinction
to keep people far from fear
but at the same time
what does that do
to our perceptions of the dead?
(we can dismiss the deaths because they don’t really affect us
they are something other than human?
we can dismiss them because they were no good anyway?)
and while the focus is on the bodies in the white bags
i cannot help but think of
those who perpetrated this violence
how they are already a kind of brutalized and dead too

_______

infinitely sexy
i offer
about one of a kazillion inherent human qualities
(our sexiness goes on forever)

_______

brian at breaktime
crowbar in hand
worries apart young coconuts
we pass around the mason jar glass of
sweet water

_______

at demo-time
i summon the renegade spirit
replay your
give em hell
mantra

_______

an appreciation
for how we all worked together
to create this
really safe space
and a shared sense of wonder
at the fact that
we could construct something like this
in the city of san diego
and the universe’s gifantic-est contradiction
a sea of raised hands saying yes

_______

i didn’t realize how small you are
linh says
as we hang on
in a hug
i’m not
i joke into her shoulder
you just can’t see the top three feet of me

_______

a block and a half down the street
collecting landscapes for my dad
i tell my neighbors
your flowers are beautiful
which i question
a block and a half later
wondering
if people in san diego
really say things like that since
it is a city always opening its petals
against its six-lane strip-mall background

_______

i return home
left pocket full of red
(smaller and deeper than pink)
peppercorns

_______

when 217 offers farmers market stand-in
everything all of a sudden
feels possible
i don’t even know how to name this
when i offer
my gratitude