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Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Give me tonight to be inconsolable,

so the death drive does not declare

itself, so the moonlight does not convince

sunrise. I was born before sunrise—

when morning masquerades as night,

the temperature of blood, quivering

like a mouth in mourning. How do we

author our gentle birth, the height

we were—were we gods rolling stars across

a sundog sky, the same as scarabs?

We fit somewhere between god

and mineral, angel and animal,

believing a thing as sacred as the sun rises
and falls like an ordinary beaast

Deer sniff lifeless fawns before leaving,

elephants encircle the skulls and tusks

of their dead—none wanting to leave

the bones behind, none knowing

their leave will lessen the loss. But birds

pluck their own feathers, dogs

lick themselves to wound. Allow me this

luxury. Give me tonight to cut

and salt the open. Give me a shovel

to uproot the mandrake and listen

for its scream. Give me a face that toils

so closely with stone, it is itself

stone. I promise to enter the flesh again.

I promise to circle to ascend.

I promise to be happy tomorrow.

Medical History

I’ve been pregnant. I’ve had sex with a man

who’s had sex with men. I can’t sleep.

My mother has, my mother’s mother had,

asthma. My father had a stroke. My father’s

mother has high blood pressure.

Both grandfathers died from diabetes.

I drink. I don’t smoke. Xanax for flying.

Propranolol for anxiety. My eyes are bad.

I’m spooked by wind. Cousin Lilly died

from an aneurysm. Aunt Hilda, a heart attack.

Uncle Ken, wise as he was, was hit

by a car as if to disprove whatever theory

toward which I write. And, I understand,

the stars in the sky are already dead.

Virginia is for Lovers

At LaToya’s Pride picnic,

Leonard tells me he and his longtime

love, Pete, broke up.

He says Pete gave him the house

in Virginia. “Great,” I say,

“that’s the least his ass could do.”

I daydream my friend and me

into his new house, sit us in the kitchen

of his three-bedroom, two-bath

brick colonial outside Hungry Mother Park,

where, legend has it, the Shawnee raided

settlements with the wherewithal

of wild children catching pigeons.

A woman and her androgynous child

escaped, wandering the wilderness,

stuffing their mouths with the bark

of chokecherry root.

Such was the circumstance

under which the woman collapsed.

The child, who could say nothing

except hungry mother, led help

to the mountain where the woman lay,

swelling as wood swells in humid air.

Leonard’s mouth is moving.

Two boys hit a shuttlecock back and forth

across an invisible net.

A toddler struggles to pull her wagon

from a sandbox. “No,” Leonard says,

“it’s not a place where you live.

I got the H In V. H I—”

Before my friend could finish,

and as if he’d been newly ordained,

I took his hands and kissed them.