May 13th, 2012

Today America wakes like a toddler,

rubbing the crust of Saturday from its eyes to find

49 decapitated bodies along the road

to Nuevo Leon. Limbs in trash bags. 3 a.m.

sunlight moving into the horizon.

I stand in the yard while a dragonfly

lands on the tip of my car antenna.

            The bloody show begins

again. Your wife is in labor.

There is no song to capture this day.

~

I go alone to water the vine tomatoes.

Heat has hugged the life from the leaves:

            such accidents come from devotion.

One ripe and ruby-hued globe has survived,

hangs, a planet in a field of debris.

            Soon the vines will be dust.

            Summer starts the process

of slow devouring.

~

Everything changes: you tell me

you are transgender, your body and mind are

separate animals that cross paths, but do not touch.

             What can you say to your wife, or to your mother

whose only word is no—

                        the socket of her mouth like a fist of coal,

burning deep inside your throat.

Perhaps you will meet a woman,

you tell me. She might be drunk

after half a glass of wine, laugh

at my jokes, smile with her whole face,

as real as the cracked dirt loaded over graves.

~

            This time next week there will be an eclipse

            like nothing we have seen since childhood.

            The moon will shove its bald head between

            us and the sun, stay lodged there for a lifetime

of breaths, as a secret . . .

And on the phone you’re saying her name:

Denise. The imaginary woman I’ll marry. She’ll tell me

I’m extremely sweet

as the dark ingests the city and I reach for her hand.

Then in the pitch I’ll recall the end of “Happiness” by Robert Hass—

. . . in bed kissing, / our eyes squinched up like bats

and I’ll forget her to remember December,

my mother coming home, Christmas gifts from the church:

trash bags of dismembered doll parts, incomplete card decks,

crayons without names.

~

I will cry,

because even through a pinhole the moon will look like the head of a baby

crowning, the ring of blood like fire, a thing

dangerously fascinating to the eye. The baby will be jaundiced—

drink and cry and drink. I’ll drink and cry just the same.

All that blood, and more . . .

When I call my mother she reminds me

my grandmother has died. My cousin Shirley Mae

has died. Alexandra and Kyliyah Bain are alive, but

motherless, as we all eventually are, but

she has a boyfriend. My mother

no longer goes to bed alone. Though every morning

she calls and I am still her one son.

She limps to work

to push an elderly woman

                                    who can no longer walk.

She limps to the post office, limps

to the mirror and ignores the conflicts of the body:

            what she can no longer produce: hair,

                        teeth.

It was not until my grandmother died that I heard her say

she loved me, that I am still her son,

her only boy.

~

Why does it feel so unnatural to be this—

not a father, not yet . . . not anymore . . .

I say parent and I watch you hold him,

I say Jonathan and I mean the person you used to be.

Already, your son reaches for your breasts

that are rising like heat off the pavement

at noon. You want to feed him. Your jaw is thinning.

People are asking questions, so you hide

like Phoebus on the day of Phaethon’s death.

But the moon slides loose from the clouds—

            a head rolling to the feet of an assassin,

                        smiling at this separation from the body,

this chance to become something new.