TENGO HAMBRE

13

A triangle in the bathtub
A bite mark on the arm

Do I want Vincent Gallo
to be in this poem?

Too late

Por qúe los gallos gritan todo
la noche?

Los gallos no gritan, los
cantan, y los catan porque

tienen hambre

I can only begin this once
I know enough not
to begin again—a bus engine

revs outside, keeping the masculine
time of streets intact, I seem
to lack something sufficiently

violent for this world

The painter’s name is like an elbow: Yves

I carve a boogie
of vectors from room to room, my hair
curling at the neck, itself gone

tingly at the acknowledgement
of his landscape, its silly distance
coursed by melts

in wondrous penumbra

Tengo hambre

14

Brilliant trilobite, this
form traced on cardboard

Everything happens
at once
but not only once

Here is a story: A man

descends into a silver portal while his wife (blind) awaits him in their wedding bed. He passes into the past, a time when birds ruled the earth. He barely doesn’t die for months, sleeping in magnificent trees, and one night, as he’s glaring astonished at the miracle of the stars, another portal opens up and returns him to the hotel only minutes after he’d originally left. He hears his wife calling out his name, frightened, and though he can’t speak, still inundated by the shock of his adventure, he walks toward her. She gropes toward his heavy breathing, still saying his name, and when her hands finally find his face, which is now covered with a dense, redolent beard she screams

15

I once knew the smallest
dog in Brooklyn and serenaded
her on our short walks: Millie

dog, Millie dog, small enough
to be a slop for a hog, small enough

to be a little watch’s cog, Millie dog

Last weekend I met an Italian
Greyhound named Bologna

Millie moved to Minnesota

where I once shook
a hologram of the hand
of the President

When I dream I am waiting
with a pregnant
woman at a French

airport for a bus I am
drunk and now it is already
noon, my hair

disheveled, becoming weather
as the MTA strikes and the wailing
of molecular discordances

is drowned out by
the whistle of the radiator or
the hum of the desktop or

the strings of the guitar
which tell you a melody

just by looking at them

16

Do I suffer only from abundances?

The latent choreography
of the body continues

to perpetuate the dislocations
of astonishment

Witches in Bikinis—
an advertisement on the miraculous
bodega storefront glass

I ate a balled-up
one-dollar bill and was sick
for two days

So if you will
gently tip the assemblage

I will breathe
my torrent once

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