How to Begin

To Annie

Sometimes we spill the milk

and it looks like the moon.

How it’s all over the place, how

my dad yelled so much in kitchens

but still taught me how to chop

peppers, digging out the seeds

like a pumpkin. Add more sugar,

but never tell, he said. Sweet

spaghetti sauce, our specialty.

The secret is always to be tender,

to let yourself crumple in the water—

unfit levee because love was always

meant to knock us over every time.

These horizontal days, we can only

find someone warm and begin

to give everything up again:

the ties I saved after my dad’s

funeral, the newspaper clipping

of the man I loved face down

under a bottle of perfume,

bell peppers I carried home

from the market, carved out

and chambered like a heart.

If you can hold them—if you

can make something sweet

of them without cutting out

the bitter parts—you can keep

all of it, nested in your arms.

Ready, Wrecked (by Annie Pittman)

Ok, I usually don't include others' poems on here, but I love this one so much I'm going to make an exception. This one is by the lovely Annie Pittman, written to me.

Dear Liz,

The milk spills and,

the film rewinds,

returns to the carton.

I often think of home movies

we watched with your Mom.

I see you, at the beach, so small.

Your mom filming, laughing, saying

like she does, Elizabeth.

You toddle into the ocean

and when waves come

at your baby legs, fall.

Your dad, his short 90s trunks

runs to you and removes

you from the tide. You

go to the water, fall again,

(he runs) stand up again.

A safe distance.

What is that?

There are so many stories like

the phone call and then

the phone call.

Once my nephew choked

and I thought of holding

him backward in my arms,

the Heimlich way. Locking

my hands to free him from that

piece of food gone wild.

His throat, my force against

his small xiphoid process,

glass box of the sternum.

My sweetheart

eyes watering.

My chair on the floor,

table wrecked, kitchen

unready. Then, in the matter

of fact way of the body,

a cough.

Cranes

To Annie

Wrecked clean through, I am

all ache these days, thinking of

my friend who tried to hang himself

with his coat and a shower curtain rod,

how glad I am that men are

not made to be shower curtains,

that some things can’t hold our weight.

How he said come over and I prayed

in tongues all the way there because

sometimes our language is stolen,

and we need a spare. Because

even words break down: migraines

fold into a migration

of cranes, paper birds sharp

in my head and unable to find south.

No compass or stars. Blind creatures

with only edges to speak of.

And me, groping.

There are so many war poems

about the body—cancer or

heartache—but how

to write one for you

when love is the landmine

I can’t stop trying

to set off. How to speak

against breaking when birds

begin there, hammering

their heads against eggshells

until the sky cracks open

bluer than anything.

Native

Last time I was under rain,

it was a monsoon, soaking

me and all my laundry hanging

on the roof. Some things follow

a Midwestern girl all her life:

unexpected rain, lousy weathermen,

the instinct to disappear into cornfields.

In India, they name the seasons

by how much water is left

at the end of the day. Here, it is

love with the neighbor boy,

then harvest, the stitching

into small-town life, the ache

of having everywhere to go

and no way to leave. Here,

rain means nothing

except that it’s raining, again.

Because even when we say

tornadoes are a spring disaster,

they keep showing up

all year round. Because

none of our clocks are right,

but we can’t stop looking

at them, and the boy

goes out in the lightning,

will hold out his hands

years after you’ve forgotten

how his palms said stay.

How We Used Our Hands

Always my fingers in the divot

where your bones meet at the temple,

trying to release what’s caught there.

You tell me your mother would love me—

girl who prays on the roof at 4 am, girl

who picks up Buddha statues only to see

how heavy, who knows the local word

for blessing, the way a mother lays hands

on her son before he leaves home.

Here, to reach is to empty your palms,

and to be empty is to stop reaching.

We only touch each other’s foreheads,

raw skin asking to be mapped out.

When it rains, temple bells ring,

and we perch on your balcony all

morning. You read to me, and I ask

again what happened those years

the army had you. Persistent

ache. Behind a desk because

your body was too weak for war.

You admit it. Then turn back

to stories of the Russian tundra,

that expanse of white nothing,

and how you can hold it now

because it’s so far away.

Before Zen

Taylor is sitting next to me in the rickshaw,

touching because there isn’t room not to.

He’s noticed that the man biking us to the temple

isn’t wearing shoes. I’m looking ahead

at the crowd of men up the street, huddled.

When I see what they see, I wish I hadn’t:

a man thrown from his motorbike, gravel

too white for how much blood haloed out,

his body so untwisted I can’t imagine

how anything could wreck so clean.

Loose spirits make them uneasy, men

phoning their brothers to come—

there is no ambulance to call—

and whispering a tractor without brakes.

The closest keep a safe two-foot margin

between their shoes and his almost-dead body

but even from far I can see his shoulders

pushing against the pavement. He needs

to be cradled, to have his wrist touched

at the pulse. But Taylor’s hand reaches

for my scarf, and we follow

the sound of the driver

when he tells us to walk past, to sink

back into the wooden seat and be carried

to the temple in silence and shame.