The slums flood this morning,

pandan, typhus, & what collapses DNA

overwhelming the barricades.

Under his tree, tools in rough orbit,

I remember the warp of

trees on the windshields

of cars passing through

the masculine cemetery.

From Book 2 of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood)

Barnabas Collins steps through a secret
panel in the wall of Josette’s bedroom:

proof for me in 1968 that a vampire
lived inside the walls of my own house;

Love, I’ve thought up how we should die.

Consider the ancient froghoppers

just unearthed in fossil form, winged,

doubled, held in stone for as many years

Dying is such an irresponsible thing for a father to do.

People do not laugh at our dead dad jokes.

Dying is easy, but comedy is hard. ­­

You make art about elision and absence,

the unsayable and the image erased.

What else is there to offer, god, but the body

and everything in it? What’s mine’s

for mining. The wooden cages do not warn one another

of danger. I’m burning means I’m burning

Fingers in the mouth make mud

into a poultice to warm the dead. Only water moving fighter slow can’t get out til

something goes in, above and below meeting at ice or lotus or iris. Look at me

When I was eight, the sweet beast of my body would

wake in a moment to beautiful boathouse smells

of batshit, warmed tar, drops of oily gas, beer

cans on vinyl cushions; it would snap

I’m opening up & then shutting down

Why this compulsion to tell everyone

when I should keep it zipped

They fly like gulls to the rose of your throat

a surface made more tender by the flight

of your fingers in the oh no of gestures

to the valley of come quickly at the notch

You want to stop the car.

To not proceed any further

into the place you have been

and the place you continue to go.

He puts his mouth on me even if

it means ruin. He says we can't

do it in his house or bed, his wife

will know, then shoves my hand

Our bodies are made for bliss

and blessedness. Do you trust me

more than the ten-minute rush

When the satellite signal berserks, the conversations

Begin. Today’s devotional: Windex scattershot, ecstatic

Gasp of the punctured cat food tin. It seems everything

Within earshot has something to say. The linoleum unpeels

Always trust a red door

On a black Camaro, thighs

Sticking to the vinyl in the June

Sun, pinking up the place.

Indiana Northern University appears entirely made of concrete. My alma mater wasn’t Harvard, but we had green places to meet, toss the bee, and ogle ladies. Here, there’s no quaint office of the registrar built at the turn of the century, no frolicking squirrels and tree-lined, undulating brick paths.

A man with a 5-inch lockback knife buried to its heel in his chest stumbles into Café Olé on West Dixie, settles into a chair, and leans his shoulder against the wall. The barista looks up from his issue of Automundo and sees the bleeding man. “Puta madré, dude! You’re stabbed!”

I.

Maybe.

A party. A kitchen. A thinning crowd. Near the table, a boy meets a girl. They talk together and laugh. When the boy offers to walk the girl home, she hesitates.

There are dangerous people about, the boy insists.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

According to Simon Hart’s 1959 study The Prehistory of the New Netherland Company: Amsterdam Notarial Records of the First Dutch Voyages to the Hudson, published by the City of Amsterdam Press, a certain “Jan Rodrigues,” described as a “mulatto . . . of San Domingo,” sailed to what is now Manhattan, New York, in 1613 aboard the Jonge Tobias, captained and owned by Thijs Volckenz Mossel. Hart continues by pointing out that Rodrigues was “not satisfied on Mossel’s ship and did not wish to go back to Holland with him.”

Red. Li Wen can smell the petals, bathed in rosewater, floating in the grass by her feet.

White. This is Li Wen’s granddaughter as she walks down the aisle, carrying a bouquet of calla lilies. White. The clarity in her eyes. White. The pearls around her long, graceful neck.