Mimic
What makes you human, and what does not
Does baring my teeth like an aggressive beast
Make me seem pleasant to you?
Or is my queerness too much
For I can’t meet your eyes?
I will never be human enough for you
There was a time when I would have gone blind for you, but now,
I see you, still so far away. Still,
unmoved by what you have seen,
even though it makes me tremble, still,
after all of these months.
You come to me in breaths, in the oxygen that sustains me,
and I think you’re in the exhales, too. Still,
too herculean to be a real man, I think
you lift me up
after all of these months.
You texted me this morning, said that you
were excited to see me when I finally go back.
And I’m afraid to let you know that
I still am excited to see you
after all of these months.
You were swimming in pools of grace.
You want to believe you brought liquor to your face because you lost.
from the U.S. Holocaust Museum
I am in an orphanage
or maybe a no-man’s-land
where the living marry the dead
making families.
It is where I find
Gert Laske a German Jew
perhaps a communist
Standing in line
I pluck him
from a bin
by the nape of his identification card.
He looks back
from a blurry black and white
smiling
his hair tasseled like he just ran a race
which he did
breaking the tape
by staying alive
I carry his card
through the museum
He is with me through
the rise of Nazism
the Final Solution
the Cattle Car
Nuremberg
He sits silently with me
in the Hall of Remembrance
its eternal flame drawing fresh memories
to the hexagonal heaven
But this is where I also meet
Susan Strauss Taube
Bernard Rechnitz
Rifka Fass
their cards left on the floor
Others less lucky
suffocate in restroom trash cans
like a toy genocide
But I rescue these four
my paper family
bringing them home
I am a righteous the tourist
There is a special place in hell, sis
My son and I scout out circles
skimming the murky shallows of the pond,
shells no bigger than silver
dollars, yellow-striped necks electric
under the midafternoon sun.
Downshore, I wander a jagged
heap of limestone, leap
back at the sound of a slither,
glimpse black leather
skin sliding under shadowed rock.
Should I tell him this is the way it goes?
You can spend your life searching
for only what’s sweet, and still,
you might step on a snake.
Cicadas begin our journey,
tiny tour guides
leading us to the Kentucky River Outlook,
the brown water still muddied
from last night’s storm.
We balance in one another’s hands,
step over puddles, rocks,
the earth beneath us
carved deep with memory.
I slip, stumble, never fall.
We pause to watch a centipede scurry between us,
listen to a barred owl’s hoot,
his nights and days turned inside out.
Hand in hand,
we move deeper into Nature’s Sanctuary
toward rushing creek currents
and silver splashing waterfalls.
Storm runoff trickles
along sharp stone edges
filtering through damp moss
and into your laughing mouth.
The joy of us echoes
between the bases of oak trees,
creating ripples in the streams
as cicadas roar in tune–
first with me, then you.
These are the moments I carry through May,
when cicadas uproot themselves from the earth
to sing the sounds of us between their wings.
Our journey will live in the breeze
until the trees stop growing
and silence settles where our laughter stays.
What if we told the truth
and no one listened?
The air fouled with the breath
of liars turned hope sour
like clabbered milk
stored in a stone jar
Truth was once was sweet
She was thornless;
Kind-hearted and sweet.
But she was thorned.
A rose with thorns took one of theirs and
struck her so she could defend herself.
She gained a thorn.
But it only pierced through like a sword,
Leaving her bleeding out.
She was abandoned.
All the other roses stared,
either grossed out, unsure, or scared to be pricked,
She was left.
But they continued to grow.
I stood in the familiar field of roses,
Looking for MY rose, THE rose without thorns.
Then, I saw the piercing blade in her,
And handed her the one I had.
We love.
We stay.
And I’d pick her over and over again,
with or without thorns;
given or grown
