Poetry

in the living room again, i cannot conjure
even the space i inhabit. rain for several

Surely you stay my certain own, you stay
obtuse. Surely your kisses were little poisons 
gripping tight my lips, my arms, mapping their way
across my unsure body. Surely, this fission

system says we’re not in charge of much else
but this. system’s [planter’s raj] & the damn 
tea. the Brits sell us, Lipton sells us, Tata 
sells us. when are we permitted to unload? 

Lighted room. Man and Woman enter talking.

—I mean, we built the world.

—What do you mean?

If we were to go
           if the house fell in an earthquake

if fire, if fire

& in the mornings sometimes awoke so cold
—the wind in Iowa City was brutal—
those days of doubt, those days of troubled land,
that I did not want to get out of bed &

In Iowa City, the restaurant 
where I worked on the weekend, 
I befriended another waitress, blond & blue-eyed, 

I was washing dishes in the sink. 
My hands were wet. The baby was crying. 

My mother, teaching me how to protect my body: 
“When a man touches you here, yell I am a body
that will bear a child.” How was I,
a child, to understand that as the sanctity
of my body. How was I to know to say, 
the body without that potential...

Little wiener dog doing his best show horse, 
jumping one, two, three stumps in a row;
his boy is too busy scrolling to notice, but I smile 
all the way up the hill. Bitter cold