a poem for dzhokhar

they say your brother dragged you into it,
the conquering warrior intent on land mass, on massive ego,
they say his convictions were not your own
but in a land so far from home, so far from family,
who else did you have?
they say, they say.

if reincarnation is real, i know you will return
as a monarch butterfly:
regal, kingly, Asianic,
but a power so fleeting as to be no power at all.
from a place of safety you will emerge,
from the wide, sweeping branches
of a royal tree in the heights of the highest mountain:
and, opening your frail wings,
you will be hard-pressed to not be caught up
in the harsh, high winds.
you will experience an unbearable weightlessness,
unthinkable strengthlessness,
you who are named in a tradition of kings and warriors,
you will be stunned by the violence of the world:
appreciable, in your brief beauty;
squashable, like all other bugs.

i am coming into my own, now.
strong and straight-shouldered, serious and long-sighted,
and searching for the ways
to make the changes i am going to make.
i am no nightingale, no half-life, no split personality and
no time constraints on my song.
i am no peacock, no tail for show or ostentatious strut,
in fact i am often awkward, and sometimes ugly,
mostly as brown and homely as the hen.
but sometimes hen, and sometimes hawk--
this is the difference, in me, between adolescence
and adulthood.
there is no getting past my habitual harsh self-hatred,
the frequency with which i put my foot in my mouth,
the tyranny of the inner monologue
and my tendency to judge everyone, myself most often,
on looks and codes and performances;
manifested in the full-body flush
that tells you without fail when i feel pressure or fear,
and those moments when my monologue
comes out of my mouth,
mischievous malcontent that it is,
intent on social mayhem and spiritual madness.
in these moments i am as squat and unkempt as a hen in the yard,
pigeon on the sidewalk,
pridefully preening fleas out of feces.
but catch me when i am feeling the fullness of legitimized rage,
the power of progressivism when i am on the street
or in the courthouse or the statehouse,
catch me when i have an audience and an idea at the same time,
watch me when i am wandering into
new political territory, someone else's sandbox,
coming up against established power structures or established egos,
people who have been in the game too long,
watch and see how this newcomer plays.
i have no time for your lies or delays, i have a message
and a mind that is slick and a spine that is straight,
i have a need to make waves
in this ocean where too many leaders
have been content to float, obese, obscene, shoved around by tides,
and i will make myself a tsunami
and you will be moved by my hands, by my words, by my work.
i am a hawk, strong-shouldered, long-sighted,
making miracles out of the molehills that left us stagnant for so long.
my power is built on memories,
my power is drawn from the weaknesses that i will still display
sometimes accidentally, sometimes purposefully,
because though i am a bird of prey
i remember falling out of the nest, and my straight shoulders
will catch my siblings as they fall too.
we are a phalanx of fearsome, awesome intent,
and my sisters and i will fly far.

redux, "things that stanley plumly said"

he said, tell a story.

give the context, and make the poem

breathe a little heavier for it.

he said, i am from pickwa ohio

and people there die,

and i said, i know they do.

(people from ohio

die young and old but always tragically,

though never from a drive-by

or an airplane crash,

usually just cancer or tractor accidents.)

people from ohio

all grew up in one-room schoolhouses

and poked crawdads with sticks and ate pokeberries

and dreamt of being one of the ones

who does not survive their 45th year

of being a farmer

to an ungrateful leached dry corn field.

stanley plumly said, this

is the way to get out of anything:

dance.

and i'm dancing my way to my car that night

and i'm thinking:

people from ohio are all the same,

all grew up in the shadow of insane asylums

and rivers that lit on fire in the 1960s
(memories only ohioans can see: ghosts of human victims,
ghosts of genetically manipulated fish),

people from ohio are born

already situated in the middle ground,

the demographic demarcations of society

having no effect in a place like east cleveland

or the foothills of appalachia—

people from ohio have a higher amount of nitrogen

and arsenic and fluoride in their bodies

simply for having been grown in ohio.

i know these things because i am from ohio,

because arsenic and corn and concrete have lived in my heart

since i was old enough to recognize

what having mud and dirt and chemicals in the bloodstream can feel like:

and the kid who sat across from me in social studies

found a rope of the right length

and hung himself from an incredibly stable ceiling fan,

and when we found him

he was still dancing, jumping a little, maybe it was just

the polluted blood still pumping.

i am from ohio in the same way

calves are from cows.

and i have seen a lot of cows.

some illnesses announce themselves,
brandishing their weapons and consequences
blindly, blithely, letting your body
betray you: vomit on the tiles,
blood bursting behind pressurized flesh.
by their signs you can know them,
a flu, a fever,
an effluence of bile, an estuary of sweat.
some illnesses announce themselves,
self-identifying, self-assured,
full of pride and hubris and vitality:
hello,
here i am,
a disease, a disorder,
malady and misery come to camp out awhile.
but the sly disease,
the slick illness that knows that
awareness will oust it from these cozy surroundings,
those furtive cancers
will linger lazily along the lengths of your limbs,
creep quietly into the chasm of your chest,
remaining mostly motionless
so that the beat of your own heart will spread the poison.
it can take years to notice;
and after all that time,
the illness is so entrenched, it can feel impossible to oust.
this is why we ignore our illnesses.
content to let it lie, because that's easier, because that's simpler,
because in the groups we surround ourselves with
it is easier to call it state pride than racism,
to call it traditional values instead of sexism,
conservatism, not homophobia,
fiscal responsibility instead of fuck all them poor people
that never are gonna do anything for society anyway.
for these diseases, the cost of a cure
is steeper even than the cost of a welfare program;
to strip those disorders
out of the heart, to mine them out of the blood
and the organs and the pulse,
to raze them out of your mind,
it takes fire, and burning, and pain, and a long long time.
this is no walk-for-a-cure kind of feel-good get-well mission.
this is rage, and hatred, and grief,
and a sadness so deep it will burn.
and maybe you never get to the other side,
maybe you are never quite clean of that illness, of the grit of it.
maybe you become a shell, almost exoskeletal
in your gauntness, fragile
in the breakable foundations you are trying to establish.
but you fight for that cure,
you fight till your hair falls out,
till your blood is poison or sludge or chemical,
till your skin is yellow and your eyes are grey
and none of the processes of your body
function the way that they used to.
change like that, it hurts you.
but the illness, and all of its consequences, hurt everyone.

in halves, i am peeling apart:
left-brain, right-hand,
sunrise vs. western skies.
the jagged fissure
demarcates breast from bone,
hip from hip, dream from dust.
i am a hazard,
a disjointed two-step
stumbling down the road,
a ledge for others' feet,
the jumping-off point of desire.