2 October 2018

I want to write an honest sentence about love, but I keep confusing it with fascism. The leaders sent each other beautiful letters and then they fell in love. The rest of us live in trauma-land, white walls stenciled with flashbacks, a roller coaster ride that dips around a statue of Stalin, who hears our screams as his joy and not ours. At the soccer game I set my chair on concrete. A bright green praying mantis with one back leg hobbled between me and the woman sitting beside me. She’d been reading a text out loud about her granddaughter who can’t get out of bed or comb her hair. This happened after she won an award. She’s had good treatment. This has been going on for a long time. My neighbor's gentle with the mantis, letting it sit between her two legs. We miss the game’s only goal because she forgets the mantis and jerks it off her leg. She apologizes. It falls on concrete, abdomen heaving, its one bad leg skittering. It hugs a metal chair support. Her grandson is a missionary in Africa. The game ends. The mantis is dying. Her friend finds a leaf of appropriate size and they cajole mantis onto leaf. Friend carries mantis to the grass beneath the tree. It’ll be more comfortable on the ground in the shade. Walking to the car I see the man beside the bicycle who’d been talking loudly about dog sleds. The blizzard is coming, he’d said at Waipio Soccer Park on a hot day when the trades had stopped. There’s a golf cart beside him now. My dog sleeps under her blanket on days like this. When I put my cereal bowl down, she comes out to drink.

--2 October 2018

6 September 2018

I want to write an honest sentence and then tease it open. My doctor says her emotions are for putting in a box across the room. She didn't get poetry in her genes, she tells me, only arts and crafts. We (verb) craft or we set out to sea in our (noun) craft. The doctor makes a sound somewhere between confusion and disgust. I suggest she read a poem without that noise. What I forgot to say is that her box is a poem. The houseboat is house without tenure or the hope of tenure; there's no insurance, no pension, just one thin plank between cot and a harbor that isn't one. It's all “fake news,” because words function, rather than mean. “Be careful how you respond, sir,” Sen. Harris said, suggesting words might function in honest sentences. The nominee, flustered, says he doesn't know what she wants to hear. He's the good student, the boy in the bubble, the judge grown in a terrarium. Sangha's shrimp have made more shrimp under their bright light beside the flag on his wall. To kneel before it is an act of consumption. Either you consume the flag or your shoes. Nike's new ad is about being the very best. Let's not fool ourselves, a friend says, we're not Bodhissatvas, not even close, but we move closer with attention. The fruit of each morning's meditation is a photograph, the bright and back-lit green of a leaf with narrow threaded veins. A shower tree in front of purple clouded mountains. The sea urchin, whose spines dissolve into lava rock. My dog on the wall my children walked on. The nominee is a leaf: we see him for what he is. A good man, terrified.

--6 September 2018

30 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence, and then I want to revise it. Not to put it in a vise and clamp it down, but place it in a different light. I saw a sea urchin shell on a rock wall, spines spilling around it. Each a black wand, at one end a white plug that sat in the skeleton's ball and socket. The philosopher saw an octopus dying, her body parts dissolving in sea water. Death is one such revision. So is breath as it runs its tunnel. Describe the feeling in your chest, the brightness in your spine, and I will say it back. “We're all going to die,” Marthe said, “and no one will remember us. That's ok.” The urchin is a lantern: its top is anus, and its bottom mouth. The entire body might make a compound eye. I see it through a chain link fence, and the mechanical waterfall beyond. A blaze of purple shows in my photograph.

--30 August 2018

25 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. We bathe us in our blood money, covering arms and shoulders with it, bearing it down stairs to join our families, seated on their blood-red couches. Everyone was so relaxed, wiping blood off their plates, their forks, their teeth. Her smile beamed red until gravity changed its hue. The house fits; no corner outgrows itself into dim and unannounced hallways. There are no rats, no mice, hardly any roaches to drink from puddles, carry the thick substance in sippy cups to their young. Despite the blood, floors are clean, walls hung with over-familiar paintings. In one, a girl seems to writhe on the bed, a cat's fur stretched like orange taffy until it blurs. “Many victims feel this way.” The scent of the old man's breath inhabits the stuffed chair he sat in. Great pretender. In a dream, he comes to ask where he should go and is sent away for good; but still he comes back, holding the promise of suicide on his palm, the lure of self-hate. He was a very careful man whom we care for even in his death. What dreams his ashes have at the top of the ridge near the bunkers, finally able to fly from the broken need of his blood. The other will be a stronger man for this, I'm told, his pale face filling with color as he re-organizes his memories in a bank. But how can he reclaim his blood, and where to put it inside? There's a broken fingernail, a sore thumb, a cut on his ankle. Hand me the siphon, the needle; let me dig in.

--24 August 2018

22 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. My son leaves to do an honest day's work, while I stay home to write sentences. The television splits its screen between two dumb-faced courthouses. After one verdict, a woman in a blue dress sprints away from one of them. We talk about persuading those who will not be persuaded. It's not logic we reach for, but a counter-emotion to fear. The man who took beautiful photos of our kids at the pool claimed Clinton's henchmen called him every night to threaten his life. (I wrote “lie.”) A former student thought there was a bug in his penis, installed by the government. Paranoia requires system, or is it the other way? Do not disturb the toothbrush in the cup or the place-setting at dinner. They are as they should be present. We assume the air, the trade wind through the palm with one dead frond, the round pot our dog digs in, fledgling bird songs, an entire world free of twitter and white nationalism. It no longer seems macabre to imagine my own death, but brute anticipation of fact. My dog pokes his nose into the white cat's side. He's the cat who's 14 on one block and four on the next, the one who comes when you call him. Orange splotch on his narrow white face, above pellucid blue eyes. Nearing 60, I pause to watch, scratch the cat, then turn up the hill with my dog.

---22 August 2018

17 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. In case you missed it, you can't believe the intelligence community because they're serial killers and you can't believe the president because he's a lying narcissist and you can't believe the media because they need ratings and you can't believe your spouse because he's been abused and you can't believe your kids because they're teens and you can't believe yourself because who are you to judge and you can't believe your students because they want good grades and you can't believe the airport van driver because he wants a tip and you can't believe in kindness because it's false and you can't believe in meanness because it's true and you can't believe in God because he's so last millennium and you can't believe in celebrity because what did they ever do except sing a few songs and you can't believe Aretha because she's dead and you can't believe Miles Davis because he was improvising and you can't believe poetry because there's cultural capital to be made and you can't believe your editor because he wants to publish your book and you can't believe anyone likes your work because they'd say so anyway and you can't believe you fit in because you don't (who IS that damn haole woman?) and you can't believe your animals because they want to be fed and you can't believe your car because it breaks down and you can't believe in tariffs because they kill the economy and you can't believe in the economy because it's rigged and you can't believe in rigged witch hunts because they're, well, rigged and you can't believe in tweets because they're too short and you can't believe in social media complaints about the school because it does have resources and you can't believe in resources because someone wants to be in charge of them and you can't believe in authority because it's abused and you can't believe in abusers because they leave holes in your soul and you can't believe in your soul because the hole grows every year like the plastic patch and you can't believe the television anchor just burst into tears because her children go to Catholic school and the man she's interviewing says he was abused and you can't believe the priest had him drive the car when he was ten so he could fondle his genitals and you can't believe any of it. I climbed the stairs with the dog yesterday and saw an old man in a cap dragging one bad leg while in his right hand he clutched red roses in clear plastic.

--16 August 2018

13 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. Humility has to do with the soil, my neighbor tells his son. To be soiled is another thing. We draw in the word “dignity” only to dignify our choices: the retirement home radiates the word in its tables and chairs. There's nothing plastic about dignity. I refuse to dignify his tweet about lowlifes and low IQs; he's at the level of humility, but not playing it well. Shit might be the better word, its clean crisp sound. He said my poem seemed more finished than most, which meant that it had ended, like the final “t” sound of lock on a shed door. She cannot bear to take her lover's toothbrush out of their cup. He takes pictures of his empty house. She describes her dreams, gets her telephone number right, but he's gone, nonetheless. I would like to see a decent country again before I die, the poet writes to me. On the eve of my 60^th, I think about death and country, numbers and tooth brushes. Nothing seems trivial, or all. The printer reads “brother”; the dog under my bed snores. There will be no secret recordings. The distinction between pain and suffering is worth noting; suffering is pain after you think about it. To render hurt into language is to suffer from it. It is hurt, but it is also sound. Sound clots like blood where the wisdom tooth was. Patrick Wisdom got his first major league hit. Wisdom is the ribbon at the end of the race; we cut through it with our flailing bodies. When I dreamed in French, I couldn't speak it, but everyone else's trilled. I was at the grocery store counter, trying to buy my goods. The air smelled of grilled chestnuts and the film ended in very slow motion.

--13 August 2018

6 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. Interrupted, she said she lives alone with her cats, speaks whenever she feels like it. Laughter precludes apology. Yes, there was a meeting, but results were disappointing, and besides nothing was illegal. Who's to know which statement is true, the one we suspect, or the one we wish for? They're all sentences, or most of them, carrying bare minimum of verb and noun toward a moment of confusion or collusion. Change the word to “conspiracy.” Or “piracy.” The earthquakes stopped; a day later and apropos of nothing, my bedside lamp fell to the floor. To live on an earth without intention is to suffer. We could demand that Pele apologize, but the Christians down Highway 11 have declared her “fake news.” She at least intends, though what we cannot know. What I love about the teachings is their being drenched in metaphor; we talk not about yearning, but about potato chips. Those who were adopted live inside the metaphors the rest of you weave. It's a mythological condition, loss and recovery acted out by the village clown. It was everything I'd read all these years, staged before me, except the stage was also real. The eyes of the elders gazed at me through narrow, lined faces. I drank my tea from a glass and gazed back. The meeting was about adoptions, and then it was about dirt.
for John Gallaher

--6 August 2018

3 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. Start again from the so-called “prompt'; the age demands speed, but ordains surface complexity. All you need know is contained in Manafort's ostrich coat. An ostrich sprints down an Australian road, while professional goats eat up Boise's flowers. They are browsers, not grazers, my son's girlfriend says, chuckling at the company that promises well-cut lawns. What it means to grow old. What it means to be on the downside of the arch in a tub, having peered through portholes at a city that promises an opening for us white folks. How easily information turns to judgment, judgment to hectoring. Who can tell the hurricane from the volcanic “event”? Do I send him black sand and lava rock, despite Pele or a park ranger's mythological purchase? My book on ethics sits in the shed, softening in the humid air. The man in ostrich coat hid income on his taxes. “Our houses are worth nothing now. Should we pay?” To which the man from the county said, “Yes, we're still collecting.” What it means to pay, or pay off, to offer a defense so flimsy it demands a pardon. What it means to grow old at such a time, when earth casts off her coat and magma fills 300,000 Olympic size pools (for those of you not familiar with scientific lingo). To lose one's “brother” or one's wife. Or, in depression, to lose what is not there but feels lost, the threat of a lava tube below the surface of one of three highways across the island. One woman asked and asked again who would watch for her kids who play on the emergency by-pass road. My neighbor leaned over, whispering, “she should tell her kids not to play there.” Sun through the front windows, mist to the side, earth stumbles underneath. Time lapses like the crater spilling rock (deeper than the Empire State Building). We compare these events to objects, somewhere on the road to the volcano where the invasive species have settled. The air breathes their perfume. When the wind shifts, it'll be sulfur dioxide.

--3 August 2018

1 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. The difference between an order and a should construction is likely a matter of timing. In the Sessions of sweet silent thought the attorney general will be canned, his deputy sent out to pasture. A cow mooed this morning, a clock ticks; as I walked up the hill, I heard an earthquake in the groaning of the nearest house. My friend could call them to the decimal point before she stopped noticing. The house is a boat, anchored on porous earth. Ohia trees stand, not yet victims of the virus; coqui frogs chant a mile away, but not here, and the air is only sometimes acid. A violet belt of vog weaves through the Saddle, and where the horizon was is now a pastel smudge. It's not what we can't see that disturbs us, but that we see it laid out before us. He reached for the tortoise, but its legs were boiling away. A little girl died in ICE custody. They're summer camps, the president says, horrified his campaign director was put in solitary. They were all screaming obscenities, but we see her in a bubble, the blonde woman whose third finger thrusts forward at the reporter, face tangled, body coiled. She and they are making America great again. We could state the obvious in perpetuity, but where would it get us? To the next station of what cross? I wondered what the X meant in Charing X Road. The pope puts a cardinal in solitary to work on penance, which sounds like what he showed his altar boys. Sound unsenses us. Get as close as you can to the aching beams and the crickets. Cut out the middlemen, the lobbyists of meaning, the men in ostrich coats. Ostracize the priests, the grandfathers, the kind man across the street, the military baby-sitter, the perverted customs agent. I have put a good face on it, my friend says, but I am so disillusioned, so tired. As the Buddhists say, we are softened. Marvel at those who remain so solid on their solid earth.

for Carla Billiteri

--1 August 2018

26 July 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. Once upon a time a mother duck adopted 76 ducklings. She put them all in row, of course, just as I've come up with two sore thumbs, sticking out like puffy masts from the frigates of my hands. To tell the honest truth, I never thought it'd come to this, lies buried as deep as Troy and heretofore as hidden as the horse. Only the naked and the dead are true, though the bearded man who pisses in the sea could be said to have evaded that rule. I'd thought he'd identify with Hannah in Nanette, but instead he took the part of the straight white man. His anger kept me awake at night; hers kept him. Pretend you're holding a scalding object and drop it on the ground. Pretend the ground is solid ice. But back to the drop; it eases the pain of your burning hand, the one that stands in for your heart. The peach is an ambiguous symbol, as the girl is left to carry her pit from the scene of the crime. We eat our accusers like the goat at the petting zoo who took the boy's map. It comes back as a multi-colored globe. The novel has a protagonist who listens, known only by her name. As she transcribes, her ears grow larger and larger until they resemble the goat's enclosure, path around a small island populated by rocks and short grass. One goat sits behind a sign that cautions against touching it. A stress-free zone. I tell him the point of the monologue was to disown anger, to ease the tension by refusing to create it. But she did. On that stage, the dyke Lear lamented all those who'd betrayed her. Not daughters, men. Two rapes and an attack. First as farce, then as crime. I spilled two cups of water on my bare feet, then nearly ran into a sergeant in uniform in the parking lot. She in her white car, I in mine. I had slipped my troubled teen on like a cape, but thumbs couldn't undo the tie around my neck. To hang oneself is an act of anger, she said, as someone has to cut you down. But there's always discovery; the edge of that continent was as sharp as a knife. Call a dead woman by her name, the land by its.

--26 July 2018

23 July 2018

I want to write an honest sentence; rather, I want to write a not dishonest one. The double negative gives me an out, for that is what I hadn't not intended to say. ALL CAPS HELP MAKE THE POINT MORE PRECISE, like sharpening a pencil with an air hammer. Our country has jumped the shark: that reference comes from a sitcom; that is also relevant. The depressed people on the video used abstract language only. She was worried that it was getting worse. He was terrified of something about to happen. There was a forest where you couldn't hear a tree fall because there were no trees. No bark, no birds, nothing but the rustling of plastic refuse below the idea of a canopy. Leaves are the history of that idea. The house that contains them is smaller on the outside than within, a cinched belt that leaves small trails of dust down each corridor and before the toilet she sat on during the missile alert, contemplating her end. Where oh where have the nouns gone that got us here, the rich ones with lots of letters, lining up like squares of chocolate at a pot luck? When I curl my shoulders forward and put my chin to my chest, I am that girl again, the one who said “space waste” in lieu of how she felt. It's a kind of dementia, depression, displacing truth with metaphor, metaphor with blurts of sound. Air raid sirens didn't go off that day, a first clue. Still, we considered last words when only dust would become of us. Post-trauma, we're reborn as someone who just resembles us. As Sangha and I entered the hospital elevator, a tiny baby was wheeled out on a cart. A local man, tattooed, looked at me and said, “that was the scariest drive I ever took, 10 miles an hour.” After the phone call about where to put the car in case of nuclear attack, they hung up and screamed. Shoshona Felman said she sent the right letter to the wrong address. It had something to do with Lacan. Later, Sangha asked about our first drive. I sat in the car, while the others bought formula; a land mine survivor approached with a smile and a bowl. I didn't tell him that.

--23 July 2018

8 July 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. An empire dissolves in an acid bath of lies; I dip my foot in vinegar to kill a fungus that lives between my third and fourth toes. It likes a basic environment, Bryant tells me. The president manufactures a violent pity, piety matched to a sacred gun. Go fund the little girl's surgery, the man's rehab, redeem the coupons of our anguish. A psychopath's self-study guide would include questions about intent, the ardor required to carry it out. Pity without empathy is all self-directed.

My dog pushes up on my hands when I meditate. She licks my leg when I type. She turns her big brown eyes at the precise angle to touch me. She places her head between her two front paws: one side clear claws, the other side black, her ears up like satellite dishes. She dishes out the self-pity, wanting a walk.

Wind rustles in the near palm, the further trees. Birds chitter in layers. The earthquake map spills outward from the summit in yellow and red dots. House like a hammock in the wind. The outcome is either 1) very good; 2) very bad; or 3) takes the middle way, whatever that way is.

The dog has moved beside my chair. She stares at my feet. A woman climbed under the Statue of Liberty's foot, as if to be ground down by her heel or to persuade her of something. Suffer the little children in a court of law, testifying at age three about their missing mothers, their missing brothers. Suffer, the president says. That's how he negotiates. That's how he negates.

How do you write, my former teacher asks. How do you read, one might ask in return. Do you take what is crafted and drill a whole in its hull? Do you take its material and de-matter it? Is meaning immaterial before it enters the bloodstream, like lead? If I were in Flint, he says, I'd kill someone. Hard Flint. The man who studied psychopaths was one. He only lacked the urge to kill.

Adulthood is a suburb we inhabit only to the extent that we accept its boundaries. The small lot begins from stone, ends in soft earth that easily shifts. The earth is so fragile I want to bend down and hold it still.

8 July 2018

5 July 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. A helicopter stitches the mountain, disappearing into its creases, emerging through mist. A round headlight flickers on and off. We can hear it, though we don't know its errand: errant hiker, downed line, plant survey. If you see someone hanging from a cable, you know. Power cables mimic the mountain's lines in cloud. My dog tries to play with a gap-toothed gardener who reaches in thick gloves for his rake. When I say I want to be a Buddhist chaplain, my kids tell me I'm too angry. The tv keeps me ginned up, even as gin pins me to the couch. Trump's private audience with Putin is planned without interpreter or notes. Nothing there! When I write that I admire Adnan's meditations, Norman responds that no American could hold such a large view. To make one's world small is characteristic of men who've been abused as children; getting out in the world is what spurs anxiety, chaotic word spill, nerve drills. She has to move her neck when she plays soccer, the blood flow is so strong. But that's something else. It's all something else, this sewing of lines or limes—Marthe makes mother into lime and, while her ending doesn't quite work, the acid image does. My mother Martha hated herself for hating her mother screaming hysterically in the dark, as I screamed after my father's heart attack. We try so hard to forgive the dead, to love ourselves as mothers. Trauma travels generations, a friend says, his son's great grandfather an opium addict, his son a bit lost. Another grandfather watched his sleeping grandson through the window--and that was the least of it. 

--5 July 2018

3 July 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. A dream of pink bodies on the beach spliced with one of dead brown children. Pull your focus in, three monk seals dead of what cat shit contains. Bryant says he hates to kill roaches. Time is an engine, but Belgium's a damn freight train. That was not a traditional head butt, the announcer opines of the Colombian player on the line. When the bereaved party tells her story, you must not include judgment in your mirroring. We have confiscated your words at the border, shrink-wrapped them to avoid damage. An undamaged word floats in a no-gravity space, cannot find its sentence even as it dreams of bridges and forests and a GPS so powerful it creates the landscape while miming it. We've lowered the warning levels, though each hour packages several small earthquakes that lead to a larger one, house shaking like a boat at dock. You get your land legs back by flying to another island. There are birds here, too, and morning rain that makes the dog limp and tired. A naked pink doll sits beside a red trike on our walk and I don't have my phone to take it. I am ardently civil to the pot-bellied man who walks the one-eyed dog and calls himself a lonely centrist. He hates Trump, but he loathes Hillary more. Told me I fit in at the university, all those leftists. The mail carrier in pith helmet mutters about my long vacation, and I'm tempted to leave him my resume, but who the hell cares. He plays the market, goes to Vegas to take classes, talks your ear off about how to make money. I like him, too. The door opens, I'm typing, and Bryant asks if I'm writing.

--3 July 2018

19 June 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. A small salmon-colored poodle ran toward me and my dog, off her leash. I picked her up, returned her to the address on her tag. A little girl, held in her mother's arms, had tears on her cheeks. When the doctor asked about the first time I felt depressed, I remembered a stuffed animal left in a Little Rock motel. I tell her the last doctor said I had a 99% chance of relapse, to which she responded that it was higher than that. I cannot listen to the audio of children crying from their cages, though I do respond to a woman I don't know who wishes the mothers would simply do the right thing, go to the legal portal. Trump uses the phrase “separate but equal” in reference to his space army, but not in relation to relatives torn from their children, because of course we are not a nation of migrant camps. They might not all be relatives, even if they cry. I love letters, but I detest the letter of the law. Besides, the photographs are old. If there is evidence we deny it; if there is none, we invent it. An older man in dreadlocks sits in the park where my son plays baseball; on the other side of a rock wall a middle-aged couple sets up their tent on a sidewalk. I offer them toiletries, catching sight of a container of Q-tips as I hand over the plastic bag. The better to hear traffic as it streams by their tent. My interlocutor points out that there are homeless children in our country, as if that mitigates those who arrive at the border with their mothers. Their homes shall be tents or chained link cages. They shall be flown to other states in airplanes, wearing Walmart goods and numbers. No one shall hug them, neither flight attendant nor sibling nor congressman nor judge. No one will clean their ears, or wash their faces or brush their teeth. They shall be our ransom and our goad. A small child surrounded by official knees cries. There is no poodle in the photograph. Nor is there a mother.

--19 June 2018

21 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. I gave each old woman a flower and asked her to describe it without using the words "beautiful" or "gorgeous" or "nice" or "pretty." It's so pretty, they said. So beautiful. “She won't let us use those words!” There were lavender petals and dots. What color are the dots? There were long stems. How long? 20 inches, they wrote. Are they all green? Mostly they recognized the flower as described. I asked them to express an emotion by adding to their descriptions, but without using those words. An Englishwoman named Fleur (how do you know who I am? Because you came to my last workshop) erupted with the story of her homeless brother and their mother killed by a drunk driver, all having something to do with a yellow chrysanthemum (though she didn't remember which flower she'd started with, it might have been purple) and by that time I had given up getting them to WCW's "The Great Figure"--the poet's insertion of the word "tense”--but I shared it with them. I feel anxious about my children when I hear a siren, one woman said. So it's you and not the truck! As I looked at them, they were pulling their flowers and stems closer, holding them to the light.

--21 May 2018

[based on a facebook post]

20 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence about the photo of an empty chair to the other side of a dark wooden table. The viewer sees a bowl of cereal and a spoon, its handle set to the right of an avocado green bowl, thick white mug of black coffee (half full) between bowl, place mat of mixed colors, and empty chair. Beside the place setting opposite a mussed up cloth napkin. Windows behind the empty chair are blank in early light, a barely visible tree trunk more resembling falling tears than bark. Bryant picked up a thread of Pele's hair from a bed of moss, placed it on his palm beneath his ring. Ring dwarfs hair. One end of the thread is bright silver, the other a tear above a tail of curling black ash. It resembles a tiny hockey stick. His bicycle tires kick up volcanic grit, and the air smells of sulfur. He turned on a video of fissure 20 just as the bed started to shake. Arrived at Volcano golf course when the first explosion happened. His photo comes after the second boom, gray cloud trailing steam. The sky is otherwise blue and clear. Puna's coastal road was closed last night. Lava has reached the sea, sending up clouds of toxic steam. Remember when we walked past the end of Chain of Craters road, molten red flowing into deep blue water, and whales blew columns into air?

--20 May 2018

17 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. Ash is general over Ka`u. The therapist advises my husband to imagine he's holding a scalding pot, then to drop it on the floor. She imagines letting go of the blanket around her shoulders. All we have is an invisibility cloak, especially if we're older women; it's like an ID to a national park of pure observation. Mike signed my husband's name and Marthe shared my middle, inherited from my mother. In the Alzheimer's home she shed her maternity, became Martha with no-last-name. She was our child or our pet. The dog is about as smart as a toddler, cannot find her toy through the back slats of a chair. The front is still open, but she stays at the back, pawing spaces between slats, wanting to make the toy squeak with her nose. He says no one understands depression who has not lived there. Laughs at the dog, holding down his end of the rope, its many colors torn by her teeth. One man was said to turn his hose on the lava to slow it down. An old photo shows the US military bombing a flow to alter its route. It's the way men try to calm women down. Graffiti in Makiki claims Pele's ridding the island of “haoles and n—ers.” Now there's a logical statement. No sentence quite refuses meaning, so we hold onto its handles like old women in slick bathtubs, hoping not to crack our bones on the way out. We'll hold onto anything, you see, to bear our mortality. My mother was afraid the doctor had bad news, was reassured it was another woman's husband who died in surgery. That was before he and she died, and Paul and Monica and Marthe and those who protested at the fence and those who answered cell phones in their back yards and those who ran away and those who stayed put. No air, he said. No air, Pele ordains, that is not ash-full. So hard to see through. I wanted to write an honest sentence about Tommy Pham, whose eyesight degenerates even as he hits over .300. He vents at the Cardinals, who kept him down so long. We love Tommy Pham for his beauty and his disgust. Marthe's twitter rage machine has come to life again. Laura reels at this new manner of grieving the dead who speak to us from our devices. “Are you driving?” mine asks, and I press “no.”

for Mike and Laura and i.m. Marthe

--17 May 2018

16 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. I was or was not at the Trump tower meeting and I did or did not agree to receive incriminating evidence. I heard and did not hear the shama thrush at one distance, an ambulance at the other. I watched and did not watch a man scream at a Muslim woman. They were killed, are being killed, someone kills them at the border. Lust for fixity, for an anti-ocean, paved expanse where water has been. We sit to watch a white screen, but it's still populated by terrorists and aliens and conspiracy theories. Abraham Zapruder films the screen, but all he sees is lava spatter from a president's head, as if natural violence matched the force of a rifle's bullet. He says he's measured the toxicity of his anger and means to flush it out, but it falls like ash on Pahala, on Punalu`u, on South Point. You must forgive comes without an instruction manual. Her civil defense brochures sit at angles in front of a vase of flowers. That's documentation for you, with an aesthetic grace note. He infused Versailles' ponds with perfume, as if to bring another century forward, back. What we smell makes us sad, he says. For me, it's cat piss, the stink of our late cats in the stink of our present. Memory is also smell, insubstantial, unanchored to this earth, wind's intricate chances taken. Photo of an offering to Pele, ti leaves bound in a circle, pohaku at the center. Without a name, it's just a mountain. With one, it's the ethical destruction of a desecrated place. The man without legs who slung rocks at Israeli forces was shot dead yesterday. Maged reminds us he had a name. A UN soldier ducks as a sniper's bullet lands beside her. “Tone deaf murderers” suggests that somewhere there's perfect pitch.

--16 May 2018