on intersections
because I could not model
how traffic proceeds at a four-way stop.
In my head, each car
arrived at the same time.
What happens when you yield
to the car on your right,
who yields to the car on his right,
who yields to the car on her right,
who yields to you?
No one goes anywhere.
The reality,
my teacher once explained,
is someone always claims
the right of way.
Four allies in four cars
meet at a four-way stop,
you know the one,
it’s over by Bob’s bodega.
The woman’s car on my right yields,
the woman’s car on her right yields,
the third car rolls a window down,
then I hear, Do you mind?
We’re in a hurry
for her OIT appointment.
What I call my disability
you call her disease:
treatable, curable, Thank God.
So that must be your daughter,
in the passenger seat?
She looks just like you.
CUSTOMER SERVICE IS
We take pride in serving the
We’re accustomed to servicing the
Please take the attached
Please answer these six
Please answer these eight
This will only be a quick
If microphones don’t reach, then
If ramps are required, then
If you need audio, then
If you need visual, then
We request one week’s
We request one month’s
All reasonable requests will
A flock of surveys is a surveillance.
A stampede of stairs is an architecture.
An expectation of elevators is a favor.
An “oh-crap” of crips is a caucus.
But I have an aunt who is
I had a friend who was
We practice best
We follow the
You have to see our
You have to stand up for
Your help is so
Your answers will be
SAY THE WORD
To be apart, I’m told.
To be asunder.
To be a privative, negative, reversing force.
To be reached only by oaths and curses.
To have black sheep sacrificed in my name
because I’m a god, yes,
as we are all gods on occasion.
To be bodied as I am bodied.
To be rich of earth,
which is to be chronically chthonic.
To be where the gems are—
underground.
To be Dīs. To be Dīs. To be Dīs.
To reject any pickaxe disguised as love.
POP
We call an unpuffed piece
the old maid
but she’s just the one
who read the fine print.
Germ and sugar curled
in her hard hull,
deciding whether
to shake out her sheets.
Sometimes it’s worth it—
pan, oil, flame.
Sometimes you must
hold the steam within you.
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH GEORGE CATLIN
“Generokee”: a term describing one who claims
a distant and unsubstantiated relationship
to an American Indian tribe.
If I’d only ever seen one Catlin,
this would be a different conversation:
the rich red and blue oil paint
of Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat,
Head Chief, Blood Tribe, which
the Smithsonian catalogs as
Ethnic – Indian – Blackfoot
Dress – ethnic – Indian dress
Recreation – leisure – smoking
Object – other – smoking material
Or the frank gaze and stacked beads
of Koon-za-ya-me, Female War Eagle
(Ethnic – Indian – Iowa).
If there was just one on the wall
I might find it my favorite, amidst
a nineteenth-century blur of bucolic takes on
waterfalls and Manifest Destiny
(Landscape – phenomenon – rainbow).
Instead, I rock back and forth
on the museum’s mezzanine,
trying to take in Catlin’s
Indian Gallery—a grid of faces,
all that specificity of name and tribe
hidden beneath a number,
which I may look up within a replica
of Catlin’s own catalog,
as if checking the price on a couch
I’ve admired off the showroom floor.
What I could have noticed, viewing
the display of “his Indians,”
is how alone each subject is kept,
their only counsel his admiring gaze,
or how portraits share warm, puffy light,
a hint of foliage, making it easy to hide
whether painted on expedition
to the Plains or to London,
where he paid his subjects to dance
for the gallery’s crowds.
And yet. And yet
what would we have, if we
did not have this? Here
is that “we,” cozy
as an infected blanket.
So much taken under the decree
of numbered days,
the promised dwindling of “noble
savages.” This occurs to me
not at all in 2002, when
(Ethnic – White – Suburbia)
I buy postcards in the gift shop
from a show I don’t enjoy,
but have been told I’m supposed
to enjoy. A push-pin’s
worth of heritage, and the claim:
One-thirty-secondth, I think.
Cherokee. Maybe Navajo.
BASS PRO SHOPS
Bass Pro Shops began as a counter for worms and bait in the back of a Brown Derby liquor store in Branson, Missouri. Bass Pro Shops now makes over four billion dollars a year. The one in Memphis contains two restaurants, a hundred-room hotel, and America’s tallest freestanding elevator. The one in Harlingen, Texas, has a twelve-lane bowling alley called Uncle Buck’s Fishbowl and Grill.
Uncle Buck’s BBQ sauce is available in the condiments plaza. There are plazas for grills, tents, sleeping bags, footwear, and thermal-lined jackets. Bass Pro Shops offers reels, rods, and terminal tackle for all of your needs. Bass Pro Shops carries Tracker, SeaCraft, and Kenner for all of your needs. Bass Pro Shops has partnered with Remington, Winchester, and Benelli for all of your needs. The shotguns are upright and gleaming. Perhaps this stuffed menagerie of deer and bear should haunt me, but I’m only tired and a little hungry. Once, at a party in Connecticut, I opened a closet and found two mounted zebra heads tucked to the side behind some coats.
In Bass Pro Shops, fifty cents will get me twenty rounds at the shooting arcade. A shooting arcade is another name for a catch-and-release rifle. I would like to understand the thing that broke in me when someone aimed not a gun at my father, but a whole plane. I can hear the broken thing rattle as I walk.
The secret to enjoying camouflage-colored jellybeans is to ignore how they look in your palm. Uncle Buck’s hostess wants to talk Happy Hour specials. The Harlingen Outdoor World has a tank fashioned like a cross-section of a lake. Perch, catfish, and bass the color of dishwater circle and gawp. Bass Pro Shops puts in five entrances and a loading dock and calls it the outdoors. Bass Pro Shops puts a roof on something and calls it a world.
NON-COMMISSIONED: A QUARTET
A Golden Shovel
after Gwendolyn Brooks,
“Gay Chaps at the Bar.”
I.
No one chose us. We
chose ourselves. What a
