poke through a cartoon heart and signal:
Valentine. And Valentine, I sing your praises
not because I know you’ll wait for me
like that (though I know you would
if you could), but because you never waver.
I don’t know how you know what direction
to look and how to listen for my return, even
when my call boils from the floor of the darkest
of arctic seas, even if, for now, all we can feel
is a cast of red crabs stretching before our path.
from The Rambutan Notebooks
Remember the archipelago even in shadow-time.
Remember in spite of all the storms, it’s still there,
full of sapodilla and salt. Remember the taste
will be just under your tongue when you rise up
and fight. Barbed wire and a gumbo-limbo tree
call you home, call you teeth and visitor. Each visit
here means a memory spill of your mother.
If a girl is retrieved from clouds, then what
is her throat now, what is her wrist and ear?
Where will she call home now?
I have been studying the word home
as if studying for a quiz, trying to guess
answers to questions before they are asked.
Soon a slight foam appears under a frog,
a promise of leg kick, a pulse toward
shelter even if all she sees now is mud.
I won’t ask the rambutan about its messy hair.
I know you are tired of trying to flatten
your hair into something it is not. When
it is meant to flap and fly in the wind-salted air.
Unplug the iron. Let questions of what is beauty
and what is not-beauty fruit down your back.
Sometimes it is possible to still embrace
the wildness of home, even if the lone window
in your room only blooms snow and more snow.
Two Moths
In Praise of My Manicure
Because I was taught all my life to blend in, I want
my fingernails to blend out: like preschoolers
who stomp their rain boots in a parking lot, like coins
who wink at you from the scatter-bottom of a fountain,
like red starfish who wiggle a finger dance at you,
like green-faced Kathakali dancers who shape
their hands into a bit of hello with an anjali—I tell you
from now on, I and my children and their children
will hold four fingers up—a pallavam, a fresh sprout
with no more shame, no more shrink, and if the bright
colors and glittered stars of my fingernails scare you,
I will shape my fingers into sarpasirassu—my favorite,
a snake—sliding down my wrist and into each finger:
Just look at these colors so marvelous so fabulous
say the two snakes where my brown arms once were.
See that movement near my elbow, now at my wrist?
A snake heart can slide up and down the length of its body
when it needs to. You’ll never be able to catch my pulse, my shine.
End-of-Summer Haibun
To everything, there is a season of parrots. But instead of feathers, we
searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to
find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of
their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild
nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each
other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and
the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot.
You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and
the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and
pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you
when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders.
Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There
are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread
those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left
on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air
the cool night before
