Misogynist's Lament

It is because I think they’re

dumb and biting and

cynical and weak.

It’s because their conversations

are the tired découpages of failed or

failing loves.

It’s because they sell their

limited stories too often and

for too cheap.

It’s because their best is so

often our middling.

It’s because birth and decoration

are their greatest achievements.

It’s because they have fought for these rights,

and they have frittered them away.

It’s because of Pinterest and Facebook and Twitter

and Weight Watchers and Starbucks

and toy dogs and salads and eyeliner

that I am so disillusioned.

It is because they are the moon and the earth

and they settled for a spray-on tan.

Our Fathers

We are not our fathers

with their apple throats

and burlap skin.

We are not our fathers

with their thick tongues

and monstrous hands.

We are not the young

men they were,

the sons of Vietanm

and segregation.

We are not their

moon-eyed faces,

looking up as Americans

filled the sky.

We are not the social

conservatives and union

sympathizers, the

cigarette-lipped children

of immigrants.

We are not reckless

and dying.

Unavailable.

We are not our fathers,

but we are their shadows,

and we stretch

tall from their

steel-toed boots.

Developmental Mathematics

I teach developmental mathematics.

In the 1990s we would have called it

remedial. In the 1790s we would

have called it cutting edge.

My students are the leftover students.

I teach the prom queens who no longer

have a kingdom.  I teach the tattooed

and the pierced.  I teach the veterans

who hold their pencils like detonators.

My students are non-traditional students,

students who have nine to fives,

students who leave my evening class

and stock the local Wal-Mart until

the sun rises.

In my class we factor, distribute, solve,

and simplify. We do math that, for many,

was done alongside puberty.

My students did not get it, or, more often,

they were not given it. And so I hold

them by their mathematical hands,

and we walk into the world.

My students think they are stupid.

They have been told as much by faculty,

friends, family, and every news report that

compares America to China.

My students think that I am smart

because I can divide, multiply, add,

and subtract fractions without so much as

moving a pencil.

Other people like that I teach developmental

mathematics.  They say that I am a good soul.

They say that I should be lauded for my effort.

I think other people like the fact that I teach

developmental mathematics, because

they like the fact that they aren’t enrolled.

They like that there will always be cashiers

at Taco Bell and people to change their oil.

What they don’t know is that one

by one I am building a small army.

What they don’t know is that the

prom queen is about to find her crown.

What they don’t know is that the

Wal-Mart stocker just factored a trinomial

without so much as moving a pencil.

We’re all climbing ladders here.

My money is on the ones who were never told to stop.

Thursday

I am the broad-necked
buffalo, the worm that
ate the fish.  I am an
untied ribbon, a cold bowl
made of porcelain.  I am
mails cut like half moons,
the concavity of the tongue,
a once and present star
in a constellation with no name.

Night in Chicago, May 2012

It is May in Chicago,
and we sleep with the
windows open.

I am on the east side
of the house; so, the
winds pull off Lake Michigan
and paint my
uncovered body blue.

I am cold, but if I
wear this heavy quilt,
I will surely burn.

Instead, I will lie still.

I will quit believing I
have a choice.  I will understand
that the wind is not a wind at all.

It is the world.

Chicago has packs of coyotes
that prowl the streets at night.

Cameras have caught them
on Jefferson, Ashland, and Kimball

loping through empty alleys,
looking for rats and discarded meat.

Researchers say that they are not
clustered in one part of the city,

they are as evenly distributed as
deep dish pizza or frozen yogurt.

But most have seen them
along the shoreline, near the waves.

I believe that coyotes pass on memories
like eye color or markings.

I can imagine what Chicago must
look like to them, the soft ground

a white concrete, the planetarium
some motionless animal in the dark.

The soft-skinned monsters in lycra,
running a hundred miles from the shore.

United 374

I always write a poem
when we are taking off,
when the flight attendants
are gossiping in the back,
when the pilots are
doing their penultimate job
of the day.

I always write a poem
when we are taking off,

so if this is the last flight
I ever take, I will
enter death in a kind of birth.