HEARD (crisis)

The vertical interior of the Americas
dreamt my spine, pulling through the eye
of each vertebra a tactile thread
—Liz Howard, “Infinite Citizen of
the Shaking Tent”

The world is in the book,
in your eyes, the rising
death toll
—Maged Zaher, “Words from
Bent Bones”

So they quipped and bickered and bit
it was like them, to bring the stars
underfoot and render the time a point
of contention rather than a beautiful
mingling of constantly translating spaces

We wished for our friends, the
circle of them, or pastry parallelogram,
only in this way, laying into the
fire, troubled or indecent, terribly our,
sickly, diseased, tremendously vulgar, in power

The flesh of the hour was red, was yellow,
was black, is red, is yellow, is black
to have to reach to the bone to
feel what we have in common—red,
yellow, black no puns, nor play, colors.

The horrendous charge of humanity
and one wished for Zeus to pull on the reigns
or back again to that hour, tripping
over the wires under the ocean—there is
a wire quand-même listening in there

If it was never for the hour
so ruthlessly prolonged, chirping there
in a sullen seat, politically electrically
charged: shapen this way and that
(hollow to the moon, you say you say)

What they wired in that space so there
a reckless freedom in the containment
gender and gender, race and gender,
all of race and race, swimming so
many dolphins (intelligent) in a sharked sea

Tore from them, making a space, making
spaces, if not for that, the serious
vote, being one point amid a tangle a
cluster a terrorized mass, and then
blinking, holding back and onto that thing

Reminds me of E, constantly making,
that place in the middle of a broach
which knows its needle, a woman in
power, just one, no not even, never
even, slipping down to a penisless space

Quand-même je voulais que tu écoutes
ton maître, maître d’E, pas pour
longtemps, mais quand-même, dans le
sacrifice de la mélancolie, les plaisirs
du langage abound (même si c’est ça)

Frustrating to encounter a hole in an
ought, when it’s really a sieve, and
J there smoking a cigarette all over
Brooklyn (not maimed, downtrodden yes, but
tending tenderly to the tinkering of the second)

The Rorsarch test (I can’t even spell it)
rocking on the balance of bedtime and life:
It was kind of precarious, the remainder
Of that hour, it’s like these words:
Hour, second, remainder &—her mountain

Theirs, theirs, she was forgetting again
and letting it sway to the side (I’m not
used to it). Night and pointing and
U girl (that was it). The freedoms
crashing together into one giant globe-wreck

Tearing at their hair, pulling at it,
by the braids, and the seams between
braids, on the scalps, in that place
carnivorous and deeply troubling.
(translated to the emergency room, said T)

How to market it, to make it, to
endure the twisting of the response into
a high end word slap. Paw upon paw
torn at the power of the weight shift.
A million women walking together out of step.

As if it were happening over there,
somewhere far away, knee deep in
water, the sickening reality of that,
however it was organized, the
grim determinant of the lesser known

Removal. And its fact so venomous
that removal of grievances was not
possible. Graves could not be dug
up and planted with clean soil, clean
earth. The world was sobbing (Is, will be)

Such the lick of time, into the textured
east, and a thousand veils falling over
a million women (not enough, not enough)
The collective scream not enough because
the screaming was at each other

A tender reserve of screams collected
in jars and presented in white galleries
and the hullabaloo of the fierce
peoples, the masks, the dresses on heads,
such material is fascinating for research

It was a wallop of fine rain
and they wintered in illusions and
polluted pelicans but the love was
it there (witness) such cantankerous
postcards and fine writing instruments
sent through the eye

Meanwhile writing and rewriting to A in prison
but could not summon the strength to send
the knowledge of not knowing the
conditions, horrifying that lack of power—
to infuse with love. Saudi Arabia here in my ear’s eye

There was the certainty T that
You are not in a safe space on the
subway, on the street, on the
telephone, anywhere even with your friends
your family even with (I am sorry)

Taking the temperature of the times
it comes out sub-degree zero
and yet the connections are very strong
very warm very trustworthy, worthy, thy
tie, in a y, or a t-shape, oh

Fermently caughtious or arraigned
the words M on your slip of an
eye which is really a paw (such is
laughter & the immensity by which
I meant that) so and so and so

On to something else, the alarm
goes off, the snooze is not infinite,
there are things to be awake to
query there and foreground the honest
(it is a zone) such that this

The remainder of what you had to say
there in the béchamel sauce in the
voting booth (so pointless if important)
they were looking at you or to you
just briefly for a second but it mattered

At that time she did ten paintings with lines
in black and purple (the sadness gaping
from the wounds) very straight
though not continuous, the lines telling
nothing, telling in a particular way

Dear M, in a meander, the threads
tangled, and you there free glimpsed in a sauna
how could it be otherwise, the smile,
and the thoughtfulness, everything vegan
the fists love and hate, and then yours, open

I heard what it was you meant, though not said
there were branches growing out of her head
and at this point, no leaves, but berries
and the occasional black squirrel pondering
there, and you asked, “how do I fly?”

Other than these memories, the present could
not contain us, and we were flying back
back, looking at the trauma dug into the
ground, looking at pictures of piles of
bodies (J wrote they were in the river)

Or there was a flow, and these notes
pittering in, an array of voices, some
violence, and they were at Standing Rock
(you vote with your feet) Another J
for instance was there (thank you for this)

Now there were facts (a flow of extremist
cabinet ministers) she could not pick
up that paper, even one piece of it,
without a large boulder weighing impossibly
there (and J was cutting the pieces)

If we could re-glue them together
there would be a treatise of whoever
was gluing, and that is all. Some glue,
and a subjectivity, carrying nations,
cultural belongings, not being able to untear

The flow came easily to them, bitten
out of boulders, the chewable kind
wand it was like that, hard, like
chewing on your own knuckles,
and there was blood, really, but elsewhere

What she was saying sort of made
sense, that’s what it was like,
an in and an out of a sort of,
the surest thing was to go to Vancouver
and to be charged and humbled

If it could be said if it could be written
all that thickness of research
flapped into a fold or nearly, under
that understood: all the women and
girls were saying it marching along together

Feeling along some sort of thread, a spiderwoman
of sorts, and then scrabbling back up the wing
wishing to rejoin the gutter, back and back,
Intzy intzy, wish wash up frame
no surrender, rain and sun, in a loop, crawling

Toppling into tea, a sort of 6-foot dormouse
greeting you nonsensically, though this
having the most of love, the craziness of
saying the crazy, Ethan the faun
inviting you to tea (and his house, torn)

If your friends were to freeze mid-step
their teeth bared, there wasn’t time
to pet their cool metal backs, you had
to go toward the frozen heart of things
(yes the word war is appropriate)

And not wrench it out, somehow
Love would have to win but the ending
of the story not known, and melting
ice apparently not the right metaphor
& what if there were not heart at the core

Rewriting histories very very quickly
to achieve a different ending
(such was not in the future but present
now and at this second for instance)
That’s what G was saying about love

We could have heard but for
our ears, covered in a sort of
political sauce, to be written by
distant peoples also motivated
by some basic needs (we had forgotten to ask)

Sorry, and the word not remotely enough.
Apology. Not remotely enough.
Remotely. That was the thing.
We had forgotten again. The western world
everywhere, in remote streams, the tongues of frogs

Taught at the rim of the last sought edges
into a meager determinant of beauty
wildlife caught in the mesh of goodness
(to preserve) and the words displanted
because of the rage of dreams

And this is nothing new, has been true
all along. The trick to terrorism
how it grows out of anger, and it is
that anger needing to be addressed,
not the terrorism. Not told slant

The slope of the slant very strong now
and a feeling of catapulting collectively
and being next to people very opposite
and yet not because very human
yet the mood very angry and so

The wind through the wind of it
Earth you could not touch, violence
you did not have to endure: the way
power enters the psyche and tries to
take control (the victories, victories)

And if she was held back, could they still
be friends, the woman with the beautiful
scarves, one wrapped around her head, asked
and then to clarify, explained that if
she were held back, could we still be friends

Poignant and remarked, fistfuls of rampant
lines, it was you, and it was you, down there
in a rushing, the bodies and the bones
(just words there in the schoolbooks)
How were we to mind the gap?

Etel and Babia, alive at the moment of words,
hovering in the love that inflects their
bodies, words connected to body, and we
a constellation, held in the night, even after
as the conniving ministers appointed day by day

Objects embued with a who-ness
among them a sea otter, a raven-eagle,
a wolf, a whale. The supernatural
helpers so needed “everything must change”
Already one—the better of evils (drones)

Even in the rain, they were, and how
the inversion sudden and strong, who
the giant pandas waiting there, wallowing
in an air infused with rainbows and pollution
a thing in this place, to the hour

A tossed vote (wasn’t sure who) and the
consequences oily, weighted by genocide
some victories, in North Carolina and
North Dakota, protesting helping,
necessary, and then torn, into that

The past of a paw, into that honey
a trap or an infused bill
frozen and dethawing the articles
of faith, who had heard of tie
sketched that skin so as to break

How to remainder, the cars flitting,
the planes one after another, edging
off experience, the whiteness, what
wash and tame zone, can we just
drop that word white now and let it go

Somewhere in the annals, more or less
held there, a sense of explosion
and capture, it was not possible
to render otherwise: the doors in—
the doors would have to open and let go

—for some Vancouver poets I met