I Don’t Know How to Say This in Your Language

The rain is drift-falling and layers

cannot save you from this winter.

On the sidewalk, an African immigrant

leans against concrete, his Air

Jordans leathered and grounded

in a shift of faces. I wonder

if there is an art to dying

young—if Turkish food markets

remind us good times aren’t forever.

Castles have fallen here but some

still watchdog the Spree,

pushing back against snow.

Yesterday we arrived to a

chestpunch of dark and cups of red

wine. We walked

to the farside until we no longer

knew ourselves, until they looked at us

for our tongues.

A Millennial Walks into a Bar and Says:

Let’s start off with a Disney movie because why
shouldn’t we? The one where the boy gets sucked
into the game his father created. Virtual reality.

And let’s consider how there is an invisibility to
everything. The way voices can break airwaves across
oceans slapping against us. And let’s disregard

the tsunami ripples. Who takes responsibility for this, anyways?
It’s an American thing to scream out take no prisoners in public. If not,
it should be. Think of national security threats. Anonymous hackers

who break code. I asked my students what they thought
about this and they told me about plaid shirts, the lag
of internet, Wreckin’ Ralph. I’ve mentioned

another Disney movie I haven’t seen.
But I sometimes worry about oil pipelines in North Dakota.
About congress evil-scheming behind

us. They will plant lemon trees
in our backyards and it’ll be okay. This is approval
by majority so sit back and watch that shit grow. I apologize

if nothing bothers you. I am easily bothered. This brings me
back to lemon trees and oil pipelines. Doesn’t this seem
like Planet of the Apes? What if Charlton Heston was telling us

something when he said “I’m sending my last signal
to Earth before we reach our destination.”
This is a rough paraphrase. What isn’t rough?

When they discovered neon it was accidental.
When they discovered continents it was accidental.
When they discovered race it was accidental.

Maybe not. Maybe I’m saying history
isn’t orchestrated by a perfect God.
We are byproducts of earthquakes. And English

is commonly spoken everywhere. Does anyone
care that it started with rape?
Sometimes I speak in a voice that isn’t mine. Maybe

it’s yours. I apologize. I apologize a lot. I apologize
for apologizing so much. In the 1940s
a group of teenage boys were used

for experiments during the Holocaust. I learned about them
during our tour of a death camp in Oranienburg.
How the Germans kept them around for scientific purposes.

How those boys outlived German lieutenants. Poetic justice
some might say. Meanwhile in the South Bronx teenagers
built cultures from wax, DJed inside broken

down project buildings and spit fluids into crowds
who kept their hands up until the break of dawn. A breaking
dance motion. Contortion of the spirit. Head spins. Nothing

like U.S. military drones missing their targets. Nothing.
But everything like jazz quartets. In New Orleans
there are streets that have retained the noises of ghosts:

Tchoupitoulas; Calliope; St. Claude. Find me
there. I want to remix the wrongs and make a mixtape
of imperfections. Put it in your stereo.

Let your older brother get drunk to it. Let your grandmother
fall asleep to this. Dreams are the origin of an end.
Think about it. Flying cars and robots that act and look

fakingly real. Am I wrong for this? I really can’t say
I’m Mexican just as I really can’t say
I’m American. Someone built this bridge between me. They carved

hyphens from the air for me to cross. Not just the crossings
you might be thinking. But the sort that can birth multiples:
national borders, a puzzle, holy crucifixions, movements

across disparate bodies. I apologize again. I just did that thing
when you use a word in your definition to define another word.
I’m sure language is empired from mistakes so

I’d rather not take this to you. It might stifle what my friend Stan
calls moon-guzzling. Instead, keep jogging until you reach
the edge of yourself. And jump off. And find pleasure between your falling breaths.

The week before Obama’s presidency ended we drove
to Half Moon Bay. There was 80s synthpop and a flood
of trap wave playing. I found a decayed bunker on a cliffside:

aqua graffiti letters spelled INNA TRIBE. Yesterday,
I ate ribs at a mom and pop’s in Hayward. The talk of teaching,
of weddings, the slow goodness of slow-cooked BBQ inside us. Nobody

flinches. Imagine Jeff Chang and Chinaka Hodge hurling poems
at the heads of protestors in our streets while something burns
in the near distance. Orange horizons to remind us of unbroken nights.

Remember to drive slow and pump your brakes. An orchestra of Kanye.
Shakir from West Oakland singing Italian operas—California
house parties. Not like what you see in movies. Or maybe

it is. We were born here and raised up like the Redwoods. Who asked?
Moving on, our neighbors are new and the old ones just moved out.
Not always by choice. How does space change over time? It’s just time

they say. I don’t talk with my mom much because she bounces
around, this time to LA. Video games are her pleasure. In Dragon Age Inquisition
you play as a character who hunts dragons and has sex with others—

she explained this to me. I’ve never owned a PS4 though. In the magazine Wired
you can read about two sisters from Seattle, ages 9 and 11, who built a Do-It-Yourself
spacecraft out of simple materials, used a GoPro to capture its ascent

into the blindness of space. It’s all on YouTube. I wonder
if our imaginations get wrinkled and weary like adults. I wonder
if things are really things. I’d bet that all things eventually change

because someone didn’t want them to. (i.e. Civil Rights). How this
can all pour from my fingers in a matter of minutes. Like newspapers
becoming outdated. We mostly use Facebook as a source of news, anyways.

Entertainment doesn’t hide itself from us very well. At the gym,
why do we look so discomfortable? At bars, why
do we look so discomfortable? This is rude of me to ask on a first date,

I’ve been told. Perhaps the salad would have been a better choice.
Locally foraged, says the 8-pt. font menu. Some of us would rather eat strawberries
at home while watching Trevor Noah. Note to self: do this on a Wednesday night.

Remember, they need this. Remember, you need this. Everyday
is a remembering of too many things. That’s why we keep calendars.
Maybe I’ll cancel our plans and see what tomorrow shapes.

A thousand paper butterflies shed –
skin, hair locked onto shoulders bare
in cabins cornered you see, They see
darkest of dreams, brightest of nightmares, They
tromp and stumble like unordered stringencies –
nameless, faceless wings and things

playing games on damask and toile, toiling with untethered
tassels and troughs, wretched bobbins and thimbles
misplaced and mislead
molasses mouse traps and maidens drowned –
and ants feast on dead ends of Her
and blood on sodden handkerchiefs

William, your harpy’s here
and heaven is far away

I am seated at a dinner table, surrounded by old friends. My posture is upright and leaning forward. Everyone is laughing. John says he has an aversion to birds, but he likes toucans because they have commercial appeal. John’s cultural high mark is always commercial appeal.

My palms are clammy. I excuse myself and go to the bathroom. The window is open and I look out at the big wilting oak in the backyard. Its leaves shake and tremble. There is a big smeared sky. The sun goes down over the horizon, pixelated and snuffed.

I’m really gawking, having a hard time accepting it.

The bathroom has an aquatic theme, seashells on all surfaces. There is a skin-pink conch, a bowl of shimmering abalone, a jar of sea foam air freshener. I turn on the hot water. It runs over my hands. Back in the dining room, John’s wife, Asmanti, who goes by Aasra, says, “I like the shiny fruit, the glossy ones.”

John seizes the moment: “Commercial appeal.”

I ask if they want to play a board game. They say they would. I put three boxes on the kitchen table and ask them to pick. John, Paige, and I agree on Monopoly, but Aasra says she doesn’t have all night. We chat. Aasra seems detached and spacey.

“I think my dad has Alzheimer’s,” she says. “He loses things. His keys, his wallet. It’s not the losing but the searching.”

“Doesn’t seem too extra bad, honey,” John says.

Aasra turns to him. Frustrated, she says, “You think death is for old people.”

John looks confused, like a boy being punished.

We all agree we’re tired and say our goodbyes. I’m standing alone with Paige. The driveway is enormous and the street is quiet in the way autumn is quiet. Mounds of brown and rotten leaves populate the lawn, softening the rattle of the highway. I ask if she needs a ride home. It’s a dumb question considering we’re in the suburbs and how would she have gotten here. She says she drove, but that I could bodyguard her to her car. She says it like that, with bodyguard being a verb. “A piggyback?” I say, turning my shoulder down and crouching. It’s funnier as a thought in my head, in a perfect scenario. She punches my arm. It’s hard enough that I feel a sting. “What do you think about John,” she says, like he’s changed or something. “I don’t know,” I say.

She thinks he’s confident in a way that worries her. She says I’m overly quiet—I could use some of whatever John has. I do an impression, “Commercial appeal.”

“Toucans,” she says.

At her car we hug. I can’t tell if she’s hugging me tighter than usual.

---

It’s early morning and the freeway is empty. I let the car drift, take up space. I chant the names of lawyers on billboards—Ahaab, Guntner, Niedecker—godlike and stern. On the radio, DJ Plato experiments with noises that rail and reverse, birthed from motherboards. The car’s tires peel against asphalt, producing a long endless rip. The dimples, the potholes, the quiet of the repaved sections. The high pitch of the thin, parallel grooves.

---

I’m at home watching PBS with Anna. We’ve been together for six years. The program is about the Roosevelt family and their patrician ambitions. I think about my life and all my average ambitions, my girlfriend’s average ambitions, my friends’ average ambitions, the overall ease of it. Anna is at the other end of the couch. She stares at me until I look back at her. I focus on the TV. She says the Roosevelts cared so much; they cared so much about everything.

Anna and I exist in a world that doesn’t resemble what we’d expected. Initially we went at our relationship in a focused way. There was a side-by-side feeling. In time we sputtered, made tiny adjustments in degree that grew to unsaid distances. Now it’s lonely and painful and neither of us knows what to do to fix it.

“Maybe the Roosevelts don’t count,” she says.

Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother died on the same day. His wife died in childbirth and his mother from typhoid fever.

“That day,” says Ken Burns, “Roosevelt wrote in his journal a single sentence that revealed more about his inner life than any other entry: ‘Today, the light has gone out of my life.’”

---

I drive to San Ramon where I know of an In-N-Out. I call Paige but she doesn’t answer. At In-N-Out I get animal fries. My phone rings. I let it ring without answering. I call her back and it goes to voicemail, so I say something about a movie that I want to see and that she might also want to see. “Communicate through voicemail,” I think. “It’s not cheating if we don’t speak directly.”

I drive past my exit. I can’t go home yet. Eventually there’s the Best Buy, the Michaels, the Walmart.

I pull into the Walmart parking lot. There’s a group of idling semi trucks. I drive around them to the center of the lot, where there’s a big open area.

I eat my burger and fries. The parking lot has an artificial light; it’s another planet. The clouds are thick and reflect the pale orange of the distant city. Something will probably happen, I think. Things eventually happen. You don’t ever have to do anything. People think you have to make things happen, make your life happen, but life happens to you.

The mall’s outer wall, the face of the Walmart, bleeds upward into the night sky. There is no discernable boundary between it and its background, between the thing and its opposite. John would appreciate this, the magnitude and smallness of everything all at once.

Suddenly, in a rush, it comes to me that I could start a diner, an old-timey diner. It takes all my imaginative power to play out a scenario in which I explain to a regular customer that I had hoped to be a writer, but I’d given it up to run this diner. Not a patrician ambition, but an ambition nonetheless.

The customer’s face is round, almost swollen.

“True,” I say. “Time is money. Money is time. Speaking of money, I’ve got some bad news. The burger special—the cost of beef has really skyrocketed—it’s up to $14.50.”

His face grows larger; I’m worried he’ll be upset. “No problem, bucko,” he says, slapping my shoulder. Condensation clouds the windshield. A semi starts its engine. I draw a smiley face with my knuckle and look out of its mouth. A driver hops down from his cab. He stands there, stretches his arms and punches the air, his breath silver and becoming.

it always seems like honking makes the city
bigger than usual

on most days. you told me you wanted me
to tell you when the reign of seafood was over, but

first, witness agave leaves ablaze,
wads of green

spikes browning deeply to
curly wafts gathered near

your face, like smoke unmade
from a once and future king’s

spice filled censer served a la mode
from a roadside stand, sturdy walls

glazed in ozone
and pocked with abalone bits, proprietors

sworn to grill soft shell shrimp, tiny
appendages, pincering mandibles, all

consumed by the infuscate water disappeared
down the sinkhole growing

inside. your soft neck blows about me
(do you remember what i was talking

about about like ten lines ago?
oh, your face and smoke? again? ok, thanks). i tile wood

floors with coins rather than tiles, so really
it’s more like harboring a villain

than anything else, or perhaps like burying
ligamental chunks of you

for to grow in the blood
red clay and bewitched moss

my house rests on.
all in all, i think it’s just got to be

your touched destiny
and me, and then some

out of the loop obelisk guts
we CTRL + S’d for eternity

in talking cookie jars
shaped like thieving bears

whom get their stinking paws off on
my collection of unfulfilled promise

rings melted down and recast
imperfectly into planet shaped musket balls.

you’re told

to sit still until birds call out

your name

in the rain

made gloom,

informing you

your table is ready.

you’re told

when you visit the sea

the waves are saying something

that sounds

suspiciously like

“we miss you”

over
and
over
and
over
and

even though i don’t know

you, yet,

i think this
gestures across the two of us
could be as true as all that
gestures above the two of us