Cold Moors

Ice crusted over

Together with you in tow

Moor me to your ports

¡Yo Grito!

They never cared about us! The band aid is despondent,

a $465 filing fee, a manilla envelope full of medical records,

report cards, bills, a B-2, before when my friends got their licenses,

before when water was more than sacred, before when they crossed la frontera.

The protesters never cared about the boy in my wife’s classroom,

anxious and sobbing, will his parents still be home, will his sister know

what is happening, will I bury my head in the kitchen as the blues

take my father away? The elected took too many steps to the right.

I am anxious and sleeping in a glass case like a monument to Vladimir Lenin

for every turista to visit my trauma and check a box on a list on a tax return

labeled “I volunteered.” I am anxious and hurting you again, out of the words

to tell you the screens hate me, out of the cradle and into a 2:00 AM panic attack,

into a bombing in Aleppo where a boy is barely breathing, I can’t settle on a position,

the hospital was hit with chlorine gas and retweets to save his life, my notifications

are bright like our bank account. Someday my privilege will be gone again

and I will prove to the woman from Argentina that our fight is for everyone,

not just los jovenes in $40,000 Jeeps, not just the policy blankets that protect

those who fit so perfectly into a box. A friend told me it is important we make art

and I want to find the holy space where we travel slowly through time,

where my anger turned to words turned to action tempered to anger

again guarantees safety from the wolves that now gnaw at all of our feet.

I’m 6 years old

my fiancee got a tattoo in the gulch

this is the richest part of Nashville

where celebrities live in high rise

condos there was a sign advertising

shopping, food, culture and free parking

and just a few blocks away a man is selling

me a paper to buy just one dollar but

the paper only gives him copies once

every four weeks and his only marks

are tourists I thought of the scene from

The Great Gatsby where the billboard

looked  over the outskirts of the city,

the eyes, the guilt, the fear in a handful of dust

I am afraid that I will feel guilty when we

move to Nashville next year and the city

pushes the poor farther away so I can

drink horchata in Germantown so

I’m glad my daughter worries about money

when she picks out the gummis she wants

at the Kroger even if I tell her she doesn’t

have to worry about that with us but I

appreciate it that she does and I am watching

her grow up when I offer the cart with the red car

in the front she is six years old and she should

never be too old to stop feeling and caring about

people and holding back tears in a tattoo parlor

while reading the Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Three Weeks in The Factory

I’m working at a factory now,

but not the kind that produces

discount cigarettes but technological

innovations that span the southeast

like a digital poster for Bonnaroo

or a Magic the Gathering tournament in Charlotte.

I get a little inspiration every time I go to the bathroom

from high income retirees and kids

who don’t know how good they have it

to grow up in Franklin, Tennessee.

It’s funny seeing so many regular consumers in

the factory go exploring the second floor.

There are no shops on the second floor,

so they must wonder what is behind the foggy glass doors

of our labs or the other office down the hall full of bright-eyed,

start up seasoned veterans of Hackpad documents and Vine loops.

Sometimes they even confusedly poke their heads in

and then go back to being hapless mall walkers,

feasting on their eight dollar organic juices,

manufactured bluegrass, and designer antiques.

We grow up…

…and think of everything we should have been,

of all the multiple degrees and sustainable internships,

fast caffeine in a swirled glass with the milk frothed

just right, just behind a pair of tweezers to keep your eyes

from drooping, your face from looking so mechanical.

I wonder if the model is as glamorous as her Instagram account,

or if she walks through New York hungry for art, hungry

for a hot dog like the rest of the walkers, the ones making

nine dollars an hour, the ones making it on expired bread

and half gallons of milk. I should have double-majored

in psychology and advertsing so that I would have

too much to live, have so much want that I drown in stories

about rockets and bombs, have so much that I attend the

charity luncheons and the elbows off the table and the

versace over again. So much for thinking that we

should decide the adult life we want before we can drive,

before we can buy a cigarette, drink in public, or understand

the nine to five, the slow caffeine, the frothed milk comes

in an organic mason jar. You have to peel the fat off the top,

drop it in your cup, drop in a chair in the dark and hear

the rain hit the cars in the parking lot..

We grow up and want to be everything but ourselves,

but at the end of the day all I want is to be here, with you.

Barnacle

I’m your headache, the telephone-

shaped rock in the wild. I would make

deals with martyred men just so that I could

afford my twenty four months of

I don’t have to think about it.

I wish I could believe you when

You said it meant nothing, stuck to me,

him between you for 6 weeks.

Barnacle, barnacle, you’ve never been

to the ocean, to the sandy reefs and dolphin

calls and iPads floating over the side of a boat.

The other day the cat was staring at the ceiling,

meowing, telling the phantoms on the

roof to stop watching Netflix so loudly

I want to fuck like you sing, naked, embarrassed,

smiling in C sharp. I want to forgive you

 for everything but I am the red clay

in Kentucky, you are the cotton in Tennessee,

the cheese in Wisconsin, the letters in the

snow, the lakes full of  cars and sewage.  

The worms mock the bird’s alarm clock,

the jellyfish form a subterranean society,

complete with universal healthcare,

blockbuster movies about Martian

colonies, and traffic police.

O’Neil cylinders spin into the ocean,

and barnacle you still have been,

outside of me, beyond the higgs boson

collider and the backrooms, and the

don’t look at my phone when I am talking to him.

I can’t get over the way gases collide into stars,

and caves swallow cars whole where the

 jellyfish build museums and parking meters.

We pass the event horizon every day.

I feel safe in your sheets, wonder if your voice

will always groan in the morning.

One night is not enough to ignore

your rusted hinges, my empty oil cans.

61 Percent Majority Vote

The first time I told her was

in a letter, after being fired from

the first job I could call real.

 

Writers are okay with secondhand

And I was okay with giving her a

secondhand account as to why I could

not get a license, get a date, get a job,

get carded to go drinking, buy a place to

call my own. Months later I forced

my story to her over a phone call.

 

Maybe I could blame my father for my

failure to be honest with the people I cared

about, to live in a fast food kitchen, and drown

in debt for a degree, and mess up relationships

with the admission that I am an undocumented immigrant.

 

For years I felt the shame of admitting it to myself.

 

I felt overlooked when we were defeated by 4 votes in 2010.

I felt invisible when we marched our American flags

in San Antonio, in Oakland, in Maricopa County

during the deportation proceedings for a six year old girl.

 

Every twenty-four months I can hide the shame long

enough to buy a credit score, buy a career, buy the love

of a country that would rather have us in handcuffs.

 

I am still marching with my American flag,

my love for the sound of a trumpet, my native English,

and my dream of a 61 percent majority vote.

Grocery List (3/16/14)

• What a great idea for a poem!
• ·         Laundry detergent for one
• Beer
• Dishwasher detergent
• A new vacuum – to wash away the puke stains
• After shave (read: TRIM)
• Paper towels (?) – how do they work?
• ·         Cliff bars – chocolate protein, don’t get the peanut butter protein get the processed stuff
• Jr. Cliff bars – so we don’t feel as guilty when we eat two
• ·         Organic Shit
• Frozen Organic Shit – sodium is okay if its free range
• Gluten (read: GUILT) free Organic Shit
• Toothbrushes – to wash away last night
• Toothpaste – to keep my gums from bleeding
• A fourth placemat
• Instagram filters
• Hand soap –out of a squeeze bottle everyone has to touch
• More beer
• Those magazines you like
• The smell of subliminal advertising – in a red bottle
• The words that bring you back
• The poem that pushes me farther away

Conditional Love

The only way to be with you

is between your thighs,

and I should be happy

for the chance to stay close

to the ceiling, to the phone,

to the couch-

 

where we rebuilt the Berlin wall,

complete with graffiti, and mines,

and paparazzo, and concrete fences.

 

I sit in circles in my head thinking

about all the times you stopped

trusting me to come home on time,

or go ice skating, or meet a snake

in the desert who knew the names

of all our loved ones, and could recite

the reciprocated malice that we held

for TV dinner marathons

and pints of chocolate ice cream.

 

I climbed a mountain with no top

and dragged you back to the bottom.

You dug a hole around me made of

pickaxes and shovels, and sandy tongues,

mouth full of nothing-

 

nothing but the knowledge

that you could not love me without trust,

and could love another without me.

I Don’t Believe In God & I Don’t Believe In Russia, But I Do Believe In Love