Lucas de Lima - These poems lurch from the murky waters of our collective unconscious and side-swipe us with a lyric invocation of the dark forces of... what? Nature? History? The alien life-force that drives planetary evolution? A primal being raises itself from the swamp of human consciousness, animated by the archaic and archetypal Sobek, the Egyptian god in crocodile form

Lucas de Lima, Wet Land, Action Books, 2014.

www.montevidayo.com/author/lucas/

"Lucas de Lima's stunning book affected me so profoundly at all the stages of reading it, encountering it—before it was a book and afterwards, when it was. In the work of this extraordinary writer, the fragment is not an activity of form. It's an activity of evisceration."—Bhanu Kapil

"These poems lurch from the murky waters of our collective unconscious and side-swipe us with a lyric invocation of the dark forces of... what? Nature? History? The alien life-force that drives planetary evolution? A primal being raises itself from the swamp of human consciousness, animated by the archaic and archetypal Sobek, the Egyptian god in crocodile form. The two voices that alternate in this narrative of trauma—the quotidian voice of the poet and a ritual voice of invocation—queer the story in the most profound way. Together with de Lima we call forth the god who will transform the narrative. As queers, we are the incarnation of countless shamans, medicine men, magicians and priests. The poet places himself in this tradition through his invocation."—AA Bronson

“SHE WAS ALREADY THE BIRD I WOULD HAVE TO BECOME”    – from “SOBEK”

When I first started reading poetry seriously in college, I immediately gravitated towards elegies.  This is because I am a very morbid person.  But over time, I have realized that my love for elegies actually has very little to do with death.  Rather, it is the self-absorption, the guilty grief for what the speaker has lost (rather than what the subject loses in death) that appeals to me.  In the end, grief and mourning is incredibly selfish.  We hurt for what and who we lost; we do not grieve because the person who has passed can no longer eat ice cream or read a good book.  We grieve because we can not ever again eat ice cream with them; we can no longer discuss that book.  All grief is inherently selfish, as it should be.
It has been some time since I read a book or poem that was intended as an elegy. There is, of course, my old argument that all poems and books are elegies by their very existence of using language to speak of gone moments.  So while I have read a great deal of “elegies” lately, they were not doing the work of grief that makes elegies themselves a specific genre.  When I heard of Lucas de Lima’s Wet Land, of how it works as an elegy, I knew I needed to check it out.  And I am glad I read it because it asked a lot of me as a reader and writer at a time when I myself was experiencing a profound loss.
I read Wet Land in the week between when my only grandfather, who was a very important part of my life, suffered a massive stroke and when he actually passed away.  While he was in a hospital in Florida, I was stuck in Indiana, teaching and watching my parent’s house and being very, very alone – partly because of circumstance, partly by preference.  All this background is just to say that Wet Land meant very much to me while I read it because it somehow both mirrored my own grief and constantly turned me away from it.  It spurned me and supported me both, and I could not quite get it out of my head after finishing it in only an hour or so between classes on a Tuesday afternoon.

Wet Land is a strange book, hard to describe.  It is based on fact: Lucas de Lima lost his best friend, Ana Maria, after she was attacked by an alligator in Florida (Is it pertinent here for me to mention that even before I lost my grandfather, I’ve long associated Florida with death and the lost?).  This book is de Lima’s elegy for his friend, his love poem, his exploration of the events and the exhumation of his grief.  It is, certainly, an exorcism of a haunting death, but it also revels in that haunt as well.  de Lima possesses the alligator, the swamp birds, bodies, the murky landscape itself.  There is something remarkable here about the way de Lima attempts to work through grief by inhabiting its actual locality.  de Lima was not with his friend when she was attacked, when she died.  Instead, he has to reimagine that event, from many angles and many words, in order to find the truth.  The recreation becomes the most powerful manifestation of mourning here.
There are other books that similarly work to understand tragic events through the reimagining of those events, certainly.  But what makes Wet Land so different from anything else I’ve ever read is the way the speaker makes everyone complicit in the recreation.  Or, maybe, not the recreation but the retelling.  The reader is addressed directly and ends up in a complicated relationship with de Lima/the speaker.   One of my favorite poems from the book, “Ghostlines,” ends with a direct, if softened, accusation of the reader and writer both:

ANA MARIA.
YOUR ADUMBRATION.
I SEE YOUR SPLASH OF WATER FROM THE SKY WETTING THIS BOOK.
MANY READERS ARE GHOSTS
OBSESSED WITH OUR BODIES.

About halfway through the book, de Lima includes a conversation between grant reviewers who critique the very project we are reading.  They criticize the way de Lima presents his grief, the way he fashions his elegy.  “I don’t feel like I know Ana Maria at all,” they say at one point.  And much of their criticism is just that – they feel they should be able to understand this dead woman.  Even more disturbingly, they critique de Lima’s grief itself:

“It’s not just the science that’s lacking, the grief is lacking.  And I think he’s being mastered a bit by his own subject.  Maybe a little bit by ambition, although maybe that’s a dangerous supposition to make, but yeah, let’s hear about this woman, the relationship, and grief, and then you can tell me about alligators.”

Telling the artist the proper way to create an elegy IS dangerous territory.  What makes this brief section of criticism interesting is the way it ties into the critique of the elegy as a whole that boils beneath the book’s surface.  What do we expect from an elegy?  What does it owe all its parties – the speaker, the spoken about, the reader?  And how ghoulish is it that we ask ourselves these questions of being owed knowledge at all?
Wet Land is about swamps and birds and sex and bodily functions.  It’s about death and grief and questions regarding the “proper” way to deal with tragedy.  As the reader of this book, as an elegy addict and grief-stricken person myself, how am I supposed to “process” these poems and de Lima’s project?  Wet Land’s provocation of these questions, its troubling of them, is what makes this book worth reading.  It’s weird and grotesque; it certainly will not appeal to everyone.  But as an evocation of grief – which is ALWAYS personal, which will always alienate anyone on the outside, which bothered those grant critics because of the ways in which true loss can never properly be conveyed – Wet Land can be quite beautiful even in its “grossest” moments:

O, THE BIRD INSIDE ME SAYS, IT HURTS TO KEEP KILLING ANA MARIA
& IT HURTS TO KEEP KILLING THE ALLIGATOR.
BUT THAT IS WHAT THE HUMAN DOES WITH WORDS
WHEN HE BLOATS & FLATTENS THEM OUT.
IN BETWEEN THE GATOR’S JAWS I TOO SHALL POSE
WITH MY HEAD.

Perhaps it says a great deal about how I feel about this book, how I came into its bizarre and disquieting folds, that the page that finally made me break down and cry, right in the middle of a community college hallway, was simply a page where Ana Maria’s name is repeated in giant letters:

That page, that image, just as much as anything else in the book, conveys what it means to grieve.  Those big, capital letters are angry and violent and painful to encounter so close to the end of this book.  They convey all the personal grief that we cannot touch.  I cannot, in the end, no matter what an artist does, truly know the subject of the grief; I can only know the words the speaker uses it to tell of it.  To encounter the name of the grief in this way is upsetting because it is a reminder of that half-torn interiority.  Here is what I am wrecked by, de Lima seems to say here, and while this name now means something to you, you cannot, in fact, fully enter into it.  When I read this book, I wondered if it perhaps was withholding catharsis on purpose.  But upon further thought, I now believe that the catharsis is not the end goal.  The writer does not “owe” the reader a tear, a sob.  The writer’s pain is private, and that tension between personal grief and public display through loaded language: that is where the real catharsis is.  I did not come away from Wet Land feeling the way I normally feel after reading a book that wrecks me emotionally: which is to say, feeling somehow lighter, less burdened, sleepy with a kind of self-satisfaction.  Wet Land does not do that.  Instead, it made me feel heavier, a little damaged.  And that seemed to me the real elegy of this book: Not just that de Lima grieves a dead friend, but that through his work he has conveyed how grief becomes necessarily alienating.  The impenetrability of the book is what finally DID make it cathartic for me.  In a time where grief felt nearly impossible, the book reminded me that it doesn’t just feel that way. Grief, true grief, IS impossible.  Wet Land is a stunning – and at times, upsetting – display of that impossibility. - Beth Towle

Have you ever lost someone to an animal attack? Have you ever imagined yourself, in your most grief stricken moments, as an animal? Have you ever imagined yourself as an animal to escape your grief? Most of us have not had to confront any of these questions, but Lucas de Lima, who lost his dearest friend Ana Maria to an alligator attack in 2006 has. In creating his chapbook GHOSTLINES, de Lima, insofar as he confronts his relationship to the death of his friend Ana Maria, does so in an animal body. By using an animal body de Lima is better able to both move beyond grief as he is intimately connected to it. His choice of animal is the bird, allowing him to create a form of flight to move forward even as he remains connected to Ana Maria and the alligator. This connectedness is achieved because de Lima predicates his experiences on the idea that biologists have found them to be evolutionarily descendent of reptiles. In staying connected, de Lima does not dwell on his grief; instead, he able to reconfigure his grief and the legacy of Ana Maria in this new body. Doing so allows GHOSTLINES to find something new in the study of grief and, as he says, “reach into those jaws to find her heart.”

In order to better understand the bird body de Lima configures, we must start in the introductory page, a prologue of sorts, which explains his journey into grief. It doesn’t take him long to enter into the body of the bird. As he remarks, “To write this book—to inscribe myself into its bloodstained ecology—I have to become a bird. I have to transform myself into the airborne body that shares a dinosaur ancestry with alligators and remains their closest modern kin.”

I want to begin with explanation because it reveals a lot about the conceptual nature of GHOSTLINES, specifically that grief, as de Lima imagines it, is ecology. Typically the term refers to the scientific study of the relationship between living organisms and their surrounding nonliving, or abiotic, environment. Though the relationship between these animal organisms in their respective environments maintains a central focus of GHOSTLINES by making it bloodstained, that is by bringing Ana Maria’s death into focus and using his imagination as the bird to reimagine the alligator’s legacy, de Lima translates ecology into a form of poetics. By creating the tension between science and poetics, de Lima manages to both remain grounded in the Earth and natural environments that informed Ana Maria’s death at the same time he is able to envision new possible relationships between creatures. In creating scientific relationships at the same time he creates otherworldly or ghostly ones, the complex legacies of grief are revealed with clarity that is transformative to his own experience and to the reader’s.

In the next line he remarks, “I do this without much thinking, as if the evolution of reptilian scales into feathers were an adaptation into grief.” It’s important to remember this point because the bird body that de Lima morphs into is not a logical stretch for him. It becomes as a natural progression, as, quite possibly, the only way that he knows to be able to deal with this particular death. Because it’s immediate and unquestioned as a form of transformation, the rest of the text follows in this bird body without hesitation. As he remarks on the following page, “Unlike a poem I write with her blood & the alligator’s / Unlike a poem we write like a wet land.” I want to specifically highlight the phrase “write like a wet land” because the act of writing like a wet land conjures up the image of being saturated by that experience, to literally write words that feel damp and dripping with grief.

Though GHOSTLINES has two separate narratives—the first is a string of seemingly mundane emails between Ana Maria and de Lima before her death, presumably (though it’s never spelled out) the last of the emails & last contact—the bird only emerges in the other narrative, a much less linear examination that oscillates between his own sexuality, their relationship, her death, and the dreams that compel him into an environment outside of all these. It’s important to remark that the physical characteristics of the bird are embedded throughout this latter narrative. References to “plumage,” “beaks,” “ripped feathers,” “jabbing,” “blood streaked feathers,” “gliding” and so on provide the necessary physical presence of the bird. While obviously de Lima is imagining all of this, the very basic physical presence of the bird provides ways for the reader to find attachment to that particular figure. If the bird only entered the narrative as a concept or metaphor, de Lima would lose the physical connectedness to the bloodstained ecology and grief that formed the motivation for GHOSTLINES. As such, though this flight is evidenced without being spoken of in the poetry, it’s feels so present, making us imagine the bird is brushing up to us. In this process, we become more closely imbricated in the storyline, which matters for de Lima’s declarations at the end.

It’s already clear that the tension between levity and gravity is already evident in de Lima’s transformation as a bird, but I wanted to illustrate specific examples and/or situations to highlight how suddenly these shifts can occur in the narrative and to explain why the changeability of the narrative matters in relationship to his bird body, grief, and bloodstained ecology. One particularly strong example is in the poem “Mutatis Mutandis,” which recounts de Lima’s experience at Ana Maria’s funeral. Here he begins, “Flying to Ana Maria’s funeral / I looked hard at the clouds so they’d get softer. / When they got bigger it didn’t help—I pushed myself / off the airplane.” I highlight this passage because in dealing with grief he cannot contain in his human body, de Lima exits the airplane and assumes the form of the bird. The weight of grief propels him into another body that might have the ability to understand the weight of the emotions he is feeling.

As the bird, tensions magnify even further. “My beak: a question mark,” he remarks a few lines down. The weight of these tensions become evident in the next line when he asks, “Had I stretched my wings before Ana Maria died?” In the bird body, it seems de Lima realizes that he hasn’t achieved his full potential form and vision until the death of Ana Maria. More importantly, it was the death of Ana Maria that has given him the impetus to soar, which is to say that in death he was given a new kind of life. Even though this life was bloodstained, it gave him, as he says a few lines down, “all this air inside, / outside / blood-streaked feathers.” When his human body could not confront the reality of this bloodstained ecology, he was able to find another form that enabled a more complete form of speech surviving through these tensions.

After the piece “Mutatis Mutandis,” de Lima’s poetry reaches the height of flying through the bird body, meaning that over a series of poems, his writing makes conceptual and imagistic leaps seemingly impossible in human form. Even if the physical descriptions of the bird body aren’t present, the pieces embody the language and vision of the bird. In one poem for instance, de Lima remarks, “No everlasting ray / perforates me & forks my tongue by / scalding it in half / & igniting the gator dummy I construct with sticks.” I highlight this particular example because of the turns of phrase and their dreamlike quality. The idea of the body being perforated and a tongue forked is both a beautiful and grotesque image. A splitting of form means a breakdown, but there’s also a quality of being opened up to the larger bloodstained ecology in the act of being split, of becoming part of Ana Maria’s ghostly presence. As a regular human form, such a move is impossible; with his imagined bird body, he can do whatever he needs to do to make sense of his grief.

As the bird body continues its flight, it also gets increasingly aggressive toward alligators. It’s important to highlight this movement because in fighting back with the alligators in these dream sequences, de Lima is able to assume control over the narrative of Ana Maria’s death and her remembrance, even if he cannot ever undo what happened to her. By fighting back, he is able to achieve a new kind of birth. This is evidenced clearly in “Avian Dinosaur” when he describes how he would eat baby alligators in the reeds below him and would “gobble down its squeaky little body.” A few lines down, he remarks, “Now the book vomits my Triassic past so I become, with the / alligator, / a historical being / As the book eats me/ As I birth my way out.” The act of eating baby alligator turns the memory of Ana Maria’s killer alligator into his body. They become imbricated together in a past form, but at the same time, connected at last, he emerges on the other side as different, as stronger, even with this grief.

In continued flight, de Lima finally reveals one of the most important qualities of the bird body in the second to last piece. Here he finally talks open about the actual death scene, remarking, “Her blood mixed with the blood of the forest in a green & red / scum.” Surprisingly, however, the next few lines forgive the actions of the gator, as if, after his consumption of the baby gator, he has abandoned his hatred. It seems that in the dreamlike fusion of forms, as part of the larger bloodstained ecology, he cannot easily differentiate bodies. “O, Gator,” he says, “I know there is a hole inside of you so much larger / than the / lacerations you left on Ana Maria / I keep confusing the bodies / I don’t know how to talk about / both things at the same time. / bread & blood / they cut you up into / so many pieces.”

I quote this passage at length because it feels like the climax of the narrative, the final point of recognizing and absorbing all of the tensions in identity and emotion that have been possible in the bird body. As de Lima has assumed animal form, he finally recognizes he cannot blame the alligator for what has happened. What really matters (and deserves critique) is the violence against these biological creatures, no matter if they’re human or not. By enacting violence against living things, ecology will always remain bloodstained, as these forms of mythologizing violence perpetuate this violent cycle.

At the end of GHOSTLINES, it’s hard to tell what form de Lima has ended up. No matter his form, it is clear he has reached a different point of consciousness and understanding because of his ability to be a bird, because of his ability to reconcile the tensions of being part of bloodstained ecology that cannot separate out the tensions between levity and gravity, human and nonhuman, or scientific fact and dreaming. He intuitively understood that the only way to find peace was to understand the interconnectedness of all of these forces, which he explained by quoting Edmond Jabes, who said, “Death means alliance.” - Kyle queerembraces.tumblr.com/post/49887470507/the-body-as-a-bird-in-lucas-de-limas-ghostlines

FROM THE SEWERS OF LITERATURE: Lucas de Lima’s poetry is a hot mess. Spittle comes out of its mouth. Blood is contaminated, the flesh inflamed. It is a thing of feathers, teeth, scales and primordial black gunk. The manuscript from which these poems are excerpted recently earned the distinction of being rejected by the Minnesota State Arts Board, who found de Lima’s treatment of the propelling event—the killing of a close friend in 2006 by an alligator—melodramatic” and “inappropriate.”

They didn’t get it. As de Lima has contended elsewhere, poetry is “obscene adornment” in which “we lose control of our narratives, and inevitably end up thwarting not just our intentions for a poem, but also the way we conceive of ourselves and our bodies.”

De Lima’s spiritual and political cousin can be found in the fever dreams of artist Manuel Ocampo. His paintings, with their baroque phantasms of Catholic iconography, Nazi symbolism, monster roaches and Klansmen are the bastard products of history. Similarly, De Lima’s poems tear a hole through accepted feeling and reason to inhabit the “SPACE WHERE WRITER & READER BLEED THROUGH PAPER.”

In his transfiguration of his friend’s death, the tabloid-ready luridness of it all, de Lima locates the ‘HOLY UNCAGING” of the American immigrant and the immigrant artist, who are “NEVER DONE CRYING, LAUGHING, SPURTING, DYING” in the face of the fear of foreign bodies thrashing in our midst: “LIKE THE GATORS UNDERNEATH NEW YORK/WE CLOG THE SEWERS OF LITERATURE.” Or to bastardize the headline from Time magazine’s June cover story, “We are poetry. Just not legal.”

—Lisa Chen (author of Mouth [Kaya Press, 2007]. She lives and works in New York City.)

I FLY INTO GOD’S FACE

& ASK HIM ABOUT MY DEAD BEST FRIEND

THE ALLIGATOR IS ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD WHEN I’M IN THE MIDDLE OF

THE HIGHWAY

I FEEL CONTIGUOUS WITH THE LANDSCAPE

LIKE ANY FLATTENED BIRD WHO SNEEZES BACK TO LIFE AFTER GETTING RUN

OVER BY A TRUCK

I AM LEARNING TO STRAIGHTEN MY SPINE

WHEN I WALK I WALK TOWARD LOVE FOR THE GATOR

ANY QUESTION I ASK GOD ANSWERS BY CREATING A MEADOW FILLED WITH

ORPHANED BEASTS WHO

TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER

I, LITTLE BIRD WHOSE FEATHERS ARE TARRED

WANT TO GIVE BIRTH TO A BABY GATOR

AN ALBINO

I KNOW THE COLOR OF MY BABY IS IMPORTANT

IT MATTERS WHICH SPECIES I FUCK

BUT IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT

IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT

THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BIRD IS A BULLET’S

I SHOOT MYSELF INTO EVERYONE

WHEN I PICK SOMEONE

TERRORIST DIVA

ANA MARIA’S CLOSE FRIENDS CONSTELLATE AS NEW BIRDS IN THE SKY TO

TELL ME I’M NOT THE ONLY SACRED FIGHTER.

OK, I SAY.  LET US CHANT IN A WINGED PROCESSION UNTIL OUR VOICES ARE A

TIDAL WAVE OF

WE LOVE ANA MARIA EVERYDAY.

ANA MARIA’S FRIENDS NOD, WRINKLING CLOUDS, BUT A BEAM OF SUN

PARTS THE CLOUDS

TO MOCK MY CATCHY REFRAIN.

THIS IS A HIGH-PITCHED POWER BALLAD, I TELL THE SKY.

MY BODY BLOWS UP ON A CRUCIFIX.  I NEED A FLOCK TO WITNESS MY

MIRACLE &

A SURPLUS OF FEATHERS TO DISPERSE WHEN I DIE.

MY EXPLOSION MIMICS THE SUNRISE IN LIGHT OF THE LIGHT

ANA MARIA

DESCENDED FROM.

UNITED ANIMALS

PLOP THEMSELVES DOWN.

I LAY DOWN MY CROSS & GUN.

WE ALL BRING OUT EACH OTHER’S BEAUTY, THE ANIMALS & I, AS PIECES

IN ANA MARIA’S ART INSTALLATION.

THERE’S A DEAD GAY ARTIST HOLDING HANDS WITH THE GATOR.

A GOWNED CONGOLESE CHOIR PROVIDES MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT &

MORAL TENOR.

BABY APES GLITTER AGAINST MOTHER’S TONGUE.

EVERYONE GATHERS AT THE MOUTH OF A CAVERN WHERE ANA MARIA

IS BURIED:

THE MOUTH OF OUR CREATOR.

AS SOON AS WE BEGIN TO UNCOVER HER A SPARROW FLITS BY.

ANA MARIA HAS RISEN, THE SPARROW SINGS.  ANA MARIA HAS RECOVERED

HER SPINE.  ANA MARIA LIVES WITHIN THE EYE OF A TORNADO STRIKING THE

NEARBY SLAUGHTERHOUSE.

OUR MENAGERIE THEN TURNS INTO A MOTTLED ORGY.

BETWEEN FEATHERS & SCALES, WE CELEBRATE

THE HOLY UNCAGING.

I FALL IN LOVE WITH EVERY SPECIES I FUCK.

“PREPARA TU ESQUELETO PARA EL AIRE”

ANA MARIA & I SLEEP WITH THE PHONE OFF THE HOOK.  WE DREAM

TOGETHER AS TEENS.  SHE DREAMS OF A STARTIP IN HER SIDE & WAKES UP

WANTING TO GO SWIMMING.  IN SACRED WIND THE BORDER BECOMES A

BIRD’S NIGHTMARE OR DREAM.  A BIRD FORMS AN ENCLOSURE OF WOUNDS

BY INVITING 230 PAPER CUTS & NEVER BANDAGING THEM.  A BIRD UNRAVELS

THE SKY, STAINS ITS BABY BLUE SURFACE, BOMBS THE ARTIFICIAL DOME

UNTIL NO COUNTRY IS SHRINKWRAPPED ANYMORE.  ALL CHARACTERS BLEED

INTO ACTORS BECAUSE I ROOST IN A NEST AMONG ANA MARIA’S FAVORITE

FRUIT.  POMEGRANATES, HER ORGANS EXPLODING.  WHILE A NECROPSY

REGISTERS THE GATOR’S HEARTBEAT HOURS AFTER HE DIES, NATIONAL

GEOGRAPHIC NOTES THE TEARS OF CROCODILIANS WHEN THEY EAT.  ONLY

MOTHER LORCA PENETRATES ME AS MUCH AS THE GATOR & ANA MARIA.  HER

RUISEÑOR FLIES INTO MY CAGE OF FLESH HANGING OPEN LIKE A JAW,

FROTHING & BUBBLING IN THE GATOR’S IRISES.

THE GATOR-ANA MARIA-LUCAS BODY

ON A CRYSTALLINE MORNING OUR BODY CLIMBS A BARBED WIRE TO

HEAVEN

& SLIDES BACK DOWN INTO MUD.

WE ARE SUCH A HEAVY BOOK THAT WE POUND TILES WHEN YOU

DROP US.

WE ARE NEVER DONE CRYING, LAUGHING, SPURTING, DYING:

ALL POLITICS ARE REDUCIBLE TO US.

WE ARE GOVERNED BY A WAVE CRUMBLING THE SHORES OF THE AMERICAS

& YOU DIGEST OUR BODY AS YOU READ,

ALL THE FEATHERS, SCALES, TEETH,

BREASTS, BLACK

MUDSLIDE GUNK.

LIKE THE GATORS UNDERNEATH NEW YORK

WE CLOG THE SEWERS OF LITERATURE.

WE MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE MOLE PEOPLE WHO TOSS RATS INTO OUR

BOOK-BODY.

RODENT CORPSES ROUND OUT THE FAT

UP OUR SLEEVES.

MARIAS

I DREAMT OF MY MOTHER DYING & WANTED TO BUILD A FIRE

MY MOTHER IS ONE OF MANY MARIAS FLICKERING

IN CIUDAD JUAREZ, ONE MARIA DIES EVERY WEEK ON THE WAY TO A

FACTORY

AS A WOMAN I CALL MYSELF MARIA & WEAR THE DARKEST RED ON MY

LIPS

WHEN I KISS PALE BOYS I TRY TO SET THEIR FACES AFLAME

SO THE WHITE BOYS’ CHEEKS MELT

THEN I RECALL MY PAST LIFE AS A WHITE BOY WRITHING IN A WHITE

BLANKET

WHENEVER I WANT TO THROW THE PAGE INTO THE FIRE

ANA MARIA STOPS ME BY CRASHING INTO MY BACK

LIKE A WAVE OF THE VIRGIN MARY’S TEARS IN A LATIN AMERICAN

CHURCH

ANA MARIA WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO GIVE ME A CLOVE

CIGARETTE

IT SET MY LIPS OFF

WITHOUT BURNING THEM UP

ONE TIME MY MOTHER ACCIDENTALLY KISSED ME ON THE LIPS

I STARTED WRITING POEMS WITH A MATCH

KILL SPOT

MY BULLET CRACKS THE GATOR’S SKULL LIKE AN EGG.

MY BULLET SHATTERS THE GATOR THE WAY A WORD BREAKS OPEN THE

LORD.

MY BULLET IS BEAUTIFUL.

IT SHIMMERS IN THE QUARTER-SIZED KILL SPOT ON THE GATOR’S NECK.

MY BULLET MAKES MY FATHER PROUD.

HE HOISTS THE HUGE GATOR INTO THE FISHING BOAT BY USING THE HEAD AS

A COUNTERWEIGHT TO THE ARMOR-PLATED BODY.

IS THE GATOR A MANLY PINK UNDERNEATH?

I FANTASIZE ABOUT STRIPPING HIS SCALES.

HIS LEG STILL TWITCHES, FADING SLOWLY WITH THE LIGHT

WHEN I SHOOT HIM NEAR THE HEAD AGAIN.

THE BLACK CRY OF A HAWK COINCIDES WITH MY BANG.

I KNOW THE HAWK IS ANA MARIA BECAUSE HER CRY PIERCES

MY EGGHEAD.

I CRY YOLKY TEARS IN THE BOAT WHILE MY FATHER FROWNS AT ME.

THE SKY IS BUBBLING

YELLOW ABOVE.

O FATHER,

I MOAN IN THE CYPRESS GROVE,

O.

ONCE A GATOR INGESTS THE HOOK

WITH THE BAIT OF CHICKEN,

WINGS TEAR THE SKIN ON MY BACK AS THEY GROW.

GHOSTLINES

THE GATOR’S BRIMMING RED EYE DEPRIVES US OF THE GHOST.

MY MUTE WINGS TALK AFTER SOMEONE CUTS THEM OFF.

THEY REVERBERATE OUT OF MY BODY.  THEY FALL BACK TOWARD THE

RED SUN.

IF I FALL INTO THE GATOR’S EYES, HE WILL GLITTER WITH ALL POSSIBLE

COLORS.

HE WILL LOSE HIS COLD-BLOODED BLANKNESS & BECOME A HOT BODY.

WHAT ANA MARIA WAS TO HIM.

ANA MARIA.  I JUST WANT TO CHECK IN WITH YOU.  I’M NOT GOING TO YELL.

ARE YOU THIS BOOK YET?

ARE YOU, ME & THE GATOR ALL

HANGING OFF THE SAME SPINE?

WITH FORMALDEHYDE, OUR BOOK COULD BE PRESERVED AS IT TURNS

BLACK:

OUR MAGNIFIED MEAT BURNING IN SUNLIGHT.

LET US MINGLE IN THE SWAMP A FEW MORE DAYS.  THE BEST SHADE FOR

A TEAM TO PERCOLATE & PRAY IN.

WE TEEM AGAINST ALL ODDS IN THE QUICKSAND OF ALL EYES.

ANA MARIA.

YOUR ADUMBRATION.

I SEE YOUR SPLASH OF WATER FROM THE SKY WETTING THIS BOOK.

MANY READERS ARE GHOSTS

OBSESSED WITH OUR BODIES.

Broken Hummingbird Heart


"You die & so do I—

."

A sentence flits away from Ana Maria's period,

knotted stems choking floral embroidery,

each word racing to a hole in my pillow case @

1260 beats per minute.

My mouth trickles or drips. Other hummingbirds swoop,

dazzling my brain,

suspending suburban malaise. TEARLESSNESS.

My beak returns to Ana Maria's throat. Feeding.

On cloudy nights when she dies again I have to perform such dives—

rose-colored blur

thudding on a pillow. I can't be any wetter than the line

"I get depressed after masturbating."


----------

OurSpace


Ana Maria's Space still exists

I hold onto her mouse & dash through lightning

Fleeting eyes behind screens

Drown & surface

Ana Maria & I are clicking so fast our tails can't catch up with us

Drop in the mud

It is not a hacker we pursue

Or a wireless connection to bathe in

We want a waterfall in the Space we digitize together

I maximize windows when Ana Maria throws a seed at me

Keep MySpace blank for her

Her body had to spread when she died

Across webbed sites

Screensavers

A National Geographic special that re-enacted the attack

A rainy garden

A hundred tears I cried in Spain

After getting the Skype call


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Your Valley: My Anus


A thousand horns whose pointed tips graze our calves as we twirl & laugh.

Sheep circle us like mirrorballs.

"You're the only other boy in the world."

My face reddens then my hair. Blood spurts out of what was blue skin.

Ground so slick we're afraid to keep dancing I'm a puddle after you speak. Smeared &

melted lipstick over hooves.

I smile at you—ripple—while a million

multi-colored balloons rise in the sky you see them on my surface filled with California

light.

The sheep soak the light up they kneel on me.

My blood mixes with their fleece their bodies turn pink.

While fireworks explode you don't feel alone with your sheep.

You just want the fireworks to change the color of flowers branches crows.

You wait for a rainbow to accompany the disco it goes on after I'm dry in the choir of

sheep.


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Wax Brazilian


Wind swirls words like Cum here but I'm not naturalized.

I am a mottled presence from the Amazons of crying.

I hate the Ashbery Bridge it's too hot in my body to stand still & read in Minneapolis.

I stain surfaces with my sweat ejaculate a sigh O my father land!

I drink the milk of older sloths who lift their shirts for me, their sheets.

A jaguar draws a line in my belly & splits it.

A child pops out. My family spills out of zoology.

I stop trimming pubic hair so my forests feel thick again.

With crabs, claws—they protect my juicy fruits.