Otherwise a good tenant Hamid lets bulbs burn all day
in every room through winter. Makes no sense, I told him:
how do you sleep? how much do you send home?
"Do you know in my village? there are 24 hour
funeral pyres for body disposal."
Excuse me! and the shoeless
skinny old river gods fired ̶ they failed to ferry dead
souls 'cross the Ganges ̶ strike back with sewage
garlands and immersions, but what do I know?
"But who're we here? tails working
off? like slave device?" Hadassah: to the Pizzeria
help who swears under the Mali wrap she wears
from Spring 'til Fall her buttocks shudder.
She rents on the 17th floor
cleansed view of sky and peaks and domes salt slates;
she prizes her acrylic bathtub, she strips lowers tears
away for hours through bird calls petals prayers.
No hands dare reach touch sponge inside
her thighs again, and how do I know?
care takers hear: swollen résumés relieving
fear slime wiped, stomachs rewiring.
See, back there ̶ no word,
some missing arms and legs ̶ blood let left sigh assume
you didn't transfuse. Only the coyotes' rapture whiffs where
last your bones sought rest: so close the Arizona fence,
so near the Lampedusa shore where lungs
scoop bailing bailing out the chest; where worn
from wait! a cobra head demands you spread
I take, or else! life savings lost right there.
Free reset means light bills paid, with fist
on heart and limbs pledged wide you can
design abodes for borders! die or dare, take
leopard steps to side walk vamps of rupture.
Being the Super,
these things I know; they're cyclothymed to happen.
You hear knee angers sudding swirling drain to schools
of effluence forming in the earth. And mine like metal
earth rare your own business.
-W.W.
MAROON ON NOVEMBER ROCK
With no books by which to read me now, I write
one, on the blank air; with a finger trace
the wordless mountains of memory
as in and out of clouds they haze,
erasing and rewriting
their peaks; and with my breath reshape
my book of days whose light daily still
returns yet nightly longer and longer
stays sunk beneath this indifferent swelling sea.
(from "Scratches On Air" by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 