Myths: A Sonnet Crown

1 On All-You-Can-Eat

A sentence is not always a consequence waiting to happen.
The edges of the park were yellow-taped from the public.
When the first man landed on the moon, I only wanted to go
home. No one listens to the radio after the hurricane makes
landfall. I dreamt of walls papered with ripped bougainvillea.
People always say the safest place is the center of the house.
I finished school a hundred years before you laid the first stone of your
academy. With patience, anyone can gather enough melted wax to shape
into a ball. The hours are longest when you can’t understand the love-
cries of crickets. Fingers learn the way in the dark. With only one pail
of water, you learn to wet your hair sparingly and soap down just once.
I know how to use up a thing to make it stronger when it’s gone.
You didn’t take away my job, you only took away one of my
disguises. What you don’t see you will never see.

2 On Emptiness and the Void

What you don’t see you will never see.
But oh what you could know, if you saw.
I knew no one who wanted to be the last to know.
This is about secrets plain as water lying in the sun.
This is about a lifetime of practice coming in on the heels of the favorite horse.
This is about the hope that perpetual labor delivers the soul into its heaven.
Twice now, I’ve come upon a colony of mushrooms under the citrus tree.
Once, in a store, everything we saw was made of staves from old wine barrels.
If you try to see into the future, all you find is a mirror clouded with distortions.
A praying mantis looks like a branch denuded of its green.
How could you know you’d become a candleholder, chair leg, rocker?
Split a fish open down the middle; its eye still holds on to its envelope.
Every butchered animal glistens with onyxes of blood and bile.
After a body is turned inside out, what of it is finally exhausted?

3 On Inevitable Collapse

What of a body is finally exhausted after it’s turned inside out?
I thought the hospital where I wanted to get a mammogram had closed.
A sign appeared on the sidewalk with the words luxury and development.
I can’t count the times I’ve had to swallow what’s called humble pie.
Some people are always giving advice like Play to win.
The only questions worth asking have words no one says much anymore.
It took a while to find the name of the person who spoke so rudely to us.
Some people have an unshakeable belief in their ability to prevail.
You have no idea how much I steel myself but hope for joy.
He said, You must admit you’ve been brave.
I just like to make sure everything is zipped up tight.
What of a body needs rewinding, refreshing?
Sleek with cinnabar sheen, a fox has been seen in the neighborhood.
Wouldn’t you rather be subaltern to the possible though seemingly improbable?

4 On Repetition

I would like to be subaltern to the possible,
            though I don’t mean subaltern in the way

natives, in colonies overtaken by empires,
            were stripped of property and their own

agency, including their indigenous tongue.
            What I mean to say is I wouldn’t mind yoking

my view of the world to something that instructs me
            to let go of all I’ve been taught about knowing

my place, or the belief any pleasure or reward could
            rightfully be mine to claim in the present.

Historical trauma means walking around in the world
            with ghosts draped on your back as if this were

ordained, as if you were nothing but their beast of burden—
             until the day you realize not all wounds are yours to bear.

5 On the Fallen

You step on a scale the day you realize not all wounds are yours to bear. 
Where the needle lands isn’t far different from yesterday or the day before. 
Yesterday and the day before, you craved a view of hills overlooking a lake.
A natural lake, not a man-made one; ringed by trees you don’t all know 
by name. Hasn’t naming been a way to wrest us away from a deeper, 
more immortal sense of time? Name creatures that live on dry land
and in water; the planets and their moons, the constellations. Name 
creepers, runners, vines, the teeming greenhouse edging forests
and cratered lands. Name the barrier above and below the horizon, sky—
that’s where night and day separate, as if the right hand doesn’t need
the left, as if there’s only the dark left to inhabit after a gate has closed. 
Only this, then: Let there always be a path to safety clear of border guards. 
Let there be places to stop and rest. Let those brought into this life open 
their mouths and freely eat what glistens there, because this too is theirs.

6 On Stasis

In river shallows, minnows freely eat what glistens there. 
A little further up the chain, the wading birds claim, too, 
what’s theirs. The ant has found its clod of sugar,
and the spider has secured its pantry. What kind 
of luck is yours? Card of the sauntering fool 
capped with melodic bells; of sharkless waters, 
full cups and benevolent swords—it’s a deck
made up of singular scenarios, pulled then
spread out on the table. The moon is always cusped,
or always on the wane. The pleated shade in one window 
might not match its twin, and the circuit-breaker box
is upside down; you haven’t had a full night’s sleep 
in days, but you’re convinced change is coming:
a shift, a turn; a good wind to shuffle the cloudy dark.

7 On the Finished State

When a good wind arrives to shuffle the cloudy dark, 
                    the moment’s derived from a previous state.

History proceeds, you learn, by such swings:
                    from stasis to revolution to a new regime, until

out of the bombed plazas and bloody battlefields,
                    the new-crowned victors settle into their thrones.

The laws of motion and change don’t stop.
                    Bodies smarting from centuries of deprivation

also yearn to rest in the idea of rest—why not?
                    Yet freedom’s never a finished project:

the pendulum arcs from one extreme to the next.
                    Monuments topple; dictators’ children try to sanitize

narratives of murderous power, unscrupulous power. 
                    And then the people swell the streets again.

8 On Smallness

Multitudes will swell
           the streets, flood them
                         with feeling or pent-up rage.

A hundred thousand moths, 
           tipped loose from inside
                         their clipped & belted armor.

The air thickens with soft brown, with ripples 
           of startle display. Eyespots on Ios &
                         Polyphemus, sphinx moths drawing

into their bodies all but their large anterior markings.
           Morphogenesis, one of the body’s ways
                         of turning its sadness at being so soft

& open into a spell, into a cipher. Meaning, don’t 
           underestimate its capacity to reclaim power.

9 On Permanent Faults

Never underestimate either the strength or fragility 
of power—what ticks quietly all these years beneath

the walls, one day also buckles from the load 
it’s made to carry. Between circuits, a current

falters. A bulb goes out, and quiet spreads through
a house in which all the machines have mysteriously
 
hummed themselves to sleep. Yet this is not 
the time for elegy or grieving. The sun burns

hotter than before, but roseate spoonbills 
and other birds shelter in the dense sediment

of mangroves; see, they haven’t given up seeking
cells of cool sustenance. They plug themselves with full

belief into a web that trembles from the energy of every 
creature’s offering of their own thirst and desire.

10 On Distance

No creature’s exempt from thirst and desire.

            And so, when a friend writes The body is 
a constellation of joy, I release

a long breath, several breaths. I too want

            to be a shape reclining on the inky canopy, 
a string of garden lights tethering my left

heel to my rib bone, my scapula, my shoulder 

            dome; and the line from there leading down
the wrist and to the hand, which is holding

either a pencil or a mug filled with coffee

            and froth, or a trowel and a bit of cake 
on a dessert spoon. All around me, silky tufts

            of milkweed are falling at their own soft 
speed. And I am not alone, I am unafraid.

11 On Falling off the Edge of the World

Like anyone pushed to an edge, of course I find it hard 
not to feel alone or unafraid. I understand the child 
who bites hard on her lip: bleeding, it’s the only thing 
the teacher sees, not the larger laceration across
her knee—she tries to keep that covered with her skirt. 
I understand the man who walks back home with ashen 
face after being fired from his job without cause, and 
the woman who sings the same two faltering bars
of the only song she remembers while drawing
her rail-thin legs up to her chest. Sometimes, all the bits 
of suffering I’ve ever seen hang out on the ceiling, next to 
fears that the future has started to dissolve my shape.
Lying in bed, I try to quiet the chatter in that sky, remind 
myself the feeling of falling’s prelude to sleep, and nothing else.

12 On Singular Origin

Falling as prelude to sleep, as memory of skinned 
elbows and knees; or farther back, as memory
of permanent exile from whatever first Eden 
we were taught to call home, until we messed
with the topiary and orchards. Falling as failure, until
we remember: original is really that from which anything 
is first derived. Lift each bottle out of the spice drawer
and turn it around in the light: every exhale of Aleppo 
pepper, wild Malabar cinnamon, aromatic clove from 
the Moluccas, Kampot peppercorns to crush with lime 
leaf. Turmeric, curry, cardamom—all these suns
first harvested from our gardens. The question isn’t 
why we were banished, but why we shouldn’t 
naturally want our true homes returned.

13 On Reward in the Afterward

True north, true home, fixed
star of our multiple orientations—

that toward which we’ll nudge 
the nose of our ship, point the tip

of a walking cane, guide the beams of 
a torch or lantern. When we die,

how will we know which key will fit into 
which lock, which door will open, what

jetway leads to a field where dragonflies 
are taking off in brilliant groups of silver?

Once, I might have fallen for the old catechism
about how all we love will be our reward in the beyond.

But that’s not a heaven I want—instead, I just want
to not have to work through this life alone, on my own.

14 On Self-Sustainment

It’s not that life lived alone, in solitude, could bring no grace. 
But in every dream I have of the end (or versions of the end),

always there are multitudes massed on broken highways, 
trekking through sandstorms or huddled together in a field.

Wherever they were from, they only know they can’t go back. 
Days and nights are cinematic with signs and wonders—

a bear’s pelt at the edge of a wood, as if the animal had merely 
stepped clean out of a sleek jumpsuit; small bones linked together

like hands. Cricket and stag-beetle mandibles like masks 
discarded after a costume ball. And everywhere, notched

shadows on stone and iron marking the last fire, last flood. 
I used to think I wouldn’t mind finishing out the days

tending my own quiet. But now I know I’d want to feel 
something pressing back against my touch, saying I’m here.

Read more from Issue 21.1.