The thing about running into your house
after it has been on
fire is the amount of cinder and ash.
Something I didn’t know
was after the fire department puts all of the fire out,
the family goes back in.

I was afraid to go in-
-side. I thought the house
would collapse. The idea was to pick out
everything I wanted cleaned and put it on
“the pile.” Photo-albums, Baptism gowns, no-
tes from the war. All covered in ash.

I don’t remember what I picked, but I remember the ash
For some reason I open-
-ed my particle-board nightstand. No
valuables, but books, and a CD. How is
that I remember that it was a Rugrats Computer game lying on
a stack of Goosebumps books, but I can’t pick out

anything but the out-
line of an ash-
-free cd-shape on
books. In,
my whole family, how is
it that no

one else knows,
no one else figured out
that my mother got everyone out of the house
and was so desperate for cash
that she went back in
and turned the iron

on.
No-
-thing was accidental. The en-
-tirety of my childhood smoked out
by sheets of ash.
Coming out of the house

That day I learned some things: When you clean ash out and when
you leave it in, when lies go on and up and build a house of lies to live in.
when to say “I love you” and when to say, “No Mom, I don’t”

with apologies to Aaron Sorkin*

The atheist starts off with,
“this is silly.” I think I see
him sense the abrupt change
of atmosphere walking through
the threshold into a chapel like
plunging into lake water naked.
When the actress kneels, the atheist explains
how God shouldn’t be so vain, I think of
the actress and whether or not, with her real
kneeling in the fake chapel, she actually prays.
She says, “You don’t kneel for Him; you kneel for you.”
The atheist storms out saying that “This just doesn’t
feel right,” The atheist is outraged that a mother is bleeding
to death, her baby may have no father, and someone’s
little brother is being held hostage by Islamic fundamentalists.
I remember two conversations:
Courtney telling me that God wasn’t saving me
when my brake lines rusted out in the TGI Fridays
parking lot instead of on the 74 bridge.
River telling me that she feels blessed that God has watched
over all the people in her life who have attempted
suicide, because they failed. She hastily tries to add
that God was also watching over Jenny, but is too
worried that she hurt me. Right before the scene switches
The actress looks upand tells God
that the atheist “made some good points.”

Customers have torn open the Christmas
chocolates. Shoving it in mouths,
shopping bags, children’s eyes.
Quiet. We are shopping. as. a. family.
Smoke accordions out of Santa’s mailbox. The sprinkler system
hisses stale air. Custodians ride by on their metal cart laughing,
sanitation chemicals flickering out of buckets.
The 80 year-old piano player is hammering out Schoenberg.
Customers shove lamps into their shopping bags, shove children
into them.
Turn on the light Jimmy.
The ninth floor is barricaded off by old woman. They
have turned the clearance divans on their sides
and are throwing toasters. Down in the basement,
the security staff have locked themselves into 2’ by 2’
cells. Fetally-positioned, their panting echoes off stone walls. Static
sizzles on the array of sixteen camera screens. Customers
have begin to bow in the reinforced door next to the two-way mirror.
A fat man is leaning against it. He has been dead
for over an hour. Restaurant staff are tearing
down the great tree. Ornaments funnel down pop-crashing
upwards from the floor. Three pound ceramic dinnerware crashes
into the walnut bar The customers are putting mattresses in their bags,
they are putting the offices in their bags. Human resources
are backed into the employee orientation computer lab. Customers
have poured Starbucks on the circuit-breakers. The lights are dimming,
Escalators are jamming. Children scream
I want to see Santa.
Santa is dead. Employees calmly walk over  his protruding
belly. The velvet and fat feels good on tired
feet. An inhuman voice garbles
The store will be closing.
Families grab onto shelves, racks, other
families. Employees pick up the registers and slam
them on granite counters. Coins explode out like bells. The rotating
doors are not spinning. They are stuck, crunching on limbs.

~for Rachel~*

You don’t know what it means to feel my sense of absence. You don’t know what it
means to have this phantom cavity. You don’t know what it’s like to walk around with synthetic rubber pushing against where my left breast used to be.

You don’t stand in the closet looking at old bras. You don’t remember the orange one that you managed to bend the hook on. You don’t remember repairing it with a pair of needle-nose pliers while your reading glasses slipped down your face.

You never read the Hass poem, the one with the dead bees. You never guessed, but sending it to you was my way of saying goodbye, It was my way of telling you how your claws felt on my chest.

I saw the news in obituary black and
alabaster-chamber white. Women mulled about
in shining dresses, all pinwheel-galaxy black.
The men’s suits: darkness-between-
stalks-late-in-the-cornfield black

The pastor wore a Cosmopolitan’s-table-of-contents
white stock in the non-air-conditioned
church. His sermon dripped on the bereaved
like hardening wax. A portly woman wheezed
in the second row. A first-roadkill-of-summer
red paper fan swayed  idly in her left hand.

The coffin creaked, 4am-grandpa‘s-coffee brown
the procession moved outside slowly. The moment
was like when two trains  are idle and one begins
to drift forward. From inside the other,
it feels as if we are drifting backward.

Backward to days before with the namer in his study.
He has on his 1862-edition-Les-Misérables tan
blazer. His wrists crawl out the undersized sleeves.
Above his roof, the sky milks over
to 4th- grader’s-scratched-locker blue.

A wine glass full of just-waking-up-seeing-steam-
waft-from-under- the-bathroom-door white wine
rests on his particle board desk. I want a 70s B movie villain
to bust through the door yelling, "I’m not sorry" and shoot him
with a chipping-paint-bike-rack-next-to-the-library¬ grey revolver.
I want the namer to be speechless, knock over the wine glass
and die with grandma’s-new-couch red  pooling on his blazer.

The truth is my grandma’s new couch is this ugly
brown-yellow color. I don’t really know how to describe it.

I am watching our life together,
on some old movie film.
It is happening in clips.

Now that I know the ending,
the clips are different. The music
we danced to all night has changed.
Rather, I am hearing it for the first time.

The time we baked chocolate chip cookies at 1:00am
The time we played chess                                    at 1:15am
The time we touched each other until our bodies didn’t ache
                                                            ­                             at 1:45am.

The letter you wrote me. Every song you sent me.
I fold the moments –corners in– and put them in my pockets.

I want to teach you how to touch a body slowly. I want to learn how
to kiss again. This time with you. I want forget that feeling
of learning the valleys of someone’s hands, so I can fall into yours.

There are so many things I want to tell you.

                                                           ­                                  That is a lie
There is only one:
                                             I wish you were here,
                                                           ­                                   right now.

~for R~*

I’ve been trying to write this poem for years.

It needs to tell you that I love it when you sing
while we are kissing the humming becomes my lips.

It needs to tell you that if I woke to find the world caught
fire and I heard screaming to the north, the first thing
I would do  is hold your hand. The second is pray.

I need to tell you that I would leap  into the ravine with you.
We would hold each other’s body parts in wild clutches.
The wind pushing us apart. My hand your elbow Your ankle my ribs.
This is our love: falling. It needs that and something else.

A Portuguese word I cannot pronounce.
An east Asian character that I cannot write.

It means: your-face-is-a-flower-blooming. Or our-lips-are-atoms
smashing together. We are the sun.