#out of my collection

I have begun taking photographs
in an attempt to document
my every moment,
preparing. The moment
of total exhaustion
is the moment
when it all begins.

—Cynthia Cruz, from “Fragment: Verzweiflung,” Hotel Oblivion

Nothing to hold
between me and your death but some words. As long as I
carry words around and write them down, you won’t die.

As long as I write and write, the words will still
fall over us like a snow shower in May, the day we sat
in the car at Schiller Park, and watched the wind blow
snowflakes like dandelion fluff onto new green grass.

—Minnie Bruce Pratt, from “No Time to Be Afraid,” Magnified

She wakes with a fright,
someone cutting the rope,
something creeping
deep inside her.

Are you there, God?
It’s me, the ugly one.

—Warsan Shire, from “Extreme Girlhood,” Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

There’s no way to enter the underworld and leave unchanged.

Death changed me.

Death takes not the body but the mind.

In my mind, I come back to my mother. I stay.

Say goodbye.

—Paul Tran, from “Year of the Monkey,” All the Flowers Kneeling

Believe where
I am sending you. I have
been shoveling upside

down. And now my eyes
stagger, my hands ache,
my legs becoming hunter,

my back a raging shadow.
I have been gardening myself
into this remembrance.

—Mai Der Vang, from “Guide for the Channeling,” Yellow Rain

i get scared sometimes
and have to go look in to the closet to see if his clothes
are still there

i have been known to imagine a situation
and then get involved in it, upset, angry and
cry hot tears

i have gone after people

—Wanda Coleman, from “Wanda in Worryland,” Wicked Enchantment

I, too, had been taken apart.
I didn’t want to be
fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless

like me.

—Paul Tran, from “Galileo,” All the Flowers Kneeling

Take it the king
I return to

in dreams
said and I did

not because
I realize now

so long after
the fact

I wanted to die
but because

despite everything
the world I knew

as the world
I wanted to live

—Paul Tran, from “Scheherazade/Scheherazade,” All the Flowers Kneeling

The music and its darkness, how
its gelatinous emollient,
metallic and gorgeous,
coats the mind,
healing it back to sleep.
Contain it, I say
to her, like Genet’s prisons.
Make it small, again.
And the body, wanting more,
always trying to speak,
begins its singing.

—Cynthia Cruz, from “Hotel Letter,” Hotel Oblivion

Present the worst, the weakest,
most powerfully vulnerable work.
Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last.
It doesn’t matter, Hesse said later,
near her death, in an interview.
What matters is the trace. Silent,
the willingly weak and near-
incoherent language, inside.

—Cynthia Cruz, from “The Language,” Hotel Oblivion

I walked through the fog-covered field. I was told I could
See the planet visible in the night sky. Jupiter. Saturn. Something

Not usually visible, like my desire now for the life
Stars have. To be fixed. To be luminous.

—Paul Tran, from “I See Not Stars but Their Light Reaching Across the Distance Between Us,” All the Flowers Kneeling

i’m not good at explaining how i
feel. i have
run out of synonyms for rage

there are preconceived notions in which i feel trapped
i keep thinking my work will liberate me from them

it hasn’t

as though life’s language is its own snare

—Wanda Coleman, from “For Me When I Am Myself,” Wicked Enchantment

When I was in the hospital,
the other girls and I
changed—we became
deviant, aberrant. We morphed,
or warped. And I never
changed back.

—Cynthia Cruz, from “Hotel Letter,” Hotel Oblivion

How much more drama

can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams.
           I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness.

Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger.
           I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

—Ada Limón, from ““I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”,” The Hurting Kind

And aren’t we all alone in the end?
You put your head for a moment against my chest.

Then, all I could hear was our breathing. We were
both human and animal-hearted,
bound to the blades, bound to outrun them.

—Ada Limón, from “Forgiveness,” The Hurting Kind

It will never be over because it was told in the softest

part of her bones, passed through the velvet marrow
that lies within my body. It means that when

I return uncorpsed & say Ahma, a man hurt me
she says it’s over, bǎobèi, & looks

beyond the bruises mottling my neck
to the breath in my mouth.

—Natalie Wee, from “An Abridged History,” Beast at Every Threshold

I will never be a mother.

That’s all. That’s the whole thought.

I could say it returns to me, watching the horses.

Which is true.

But also I could say that it came to me

as the swallows circled us over and over,

something about that myth of their tail,

how generosity is punished by the gods.

But isn’t that going too far? I saw a mare

with her foal, and then many mares

with many foals, and I thought, simply:

I will never be a mother.

—Ada Limón, from “Foaling Season,” The Hurting Kind

It is what we do in order to care for things, make them
           ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn.

But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why
           can’t I just love the flower for being a flower?

How many flowers have I yanked to puppet
           as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

—Ada Limón, from “In the Shadow,” The Hurting Kind

What is lineage,
if not a gold thread of pride and guilt? She did what?

Once, when I thought I had decided not to have children,
a woman said, But who are you to kill your own bloodline?

I told my friend D that, and she said, What if you want to kill
your own bloodline, like it’s your job?

—Ada Limón, from “The Hurting Kind,” The Hurting Kind

It’s been a year
since I’ve seen him in person, I miss how he points
to his apple trees and I miss his smooth face
that no longer has the mustache I always adored.
As a child I once cried when he shaved it. Even then,
I was too attached to this life.

—Ada Limón, from “My Father’s Mustache,” The Hurting Kind