 New names only larger Everywhere in new names curtains drawn over my desk a Lover plucks a name from sentient pages and crowns me The best names you can take off when the hour expires By today I have already forgotten who I'll be tomorrow New names like worlds only larger. I Give false names across borders and they carry me forward Tie one behind my back around my neck hang it up by the door when I enter New names like dry rot where I splinter Forgive the fracture made flesh give it a new name Rename the pain watch it simmer Rename the spite watch it glitter baptized by the brawn of the ballast song Flince the excess new names trenching underneath the muscle How close to the bone can you condone the cut if the true name lies flush to that which holds us up? Is it the bone that carries us or all of our names like perspective lines? To be crucified as to exist To be anything at all is to be a vanishing point But if I am the sum of individual imaginations is my body multiplicitous new names like sigma notations if my body takes work to name adequately is it industrious new names like beautiful machines inventing riots appendix of inflections Imagine you awoke to two moons hanging over your head This city once familiar twice bathed in light as if baptized as if newly named The old names may hold against siege, but the two towns they have split at the math New names like new points on an integer line There's a positive and negative zero depending on the understanding depending on the naming and Lost names me sweet in the mouth of silence. Is this a positive or negative nothing? My lost ones sing in their sleep giving me new names and the lost names echo back And I split and I split and I am infinitely divisible What is the Latin name for a being composed of fractions when my christening? New names like acid taps running all night every morning I am pulled through the eye of amnesia a song pushed through a mirror playing it back to be written and to write down our two songs a Birth-rattle is not a death-rattle and death not universal despite the rumors a Death is not a death is not a death in honor denied at the threshold a Name is not a name is not a name and all my names none in my own handwriting. I am haunted by the question Call me by an answer Solve for my split Will a scientific name be the pin to my butterfly wing? Must I crown myself with a name of thorns for it to stick? Must the name be the nail to make me an exhibit? So this is an excerpt from just a series of postcard postcard poems So selected postcards From Chihuahua. I have never seen the wolf take his teeth to any neck but mine This binds me by strange honor to follow my blood through the snow Blooming compass faithful rose from pleasure Season of appricity The wolf sleeps sound, but for his electric chair dance winter and I watch each other across the water Viento de la vida cuanto hay que esperar wind of life. How long must we wait sings Diana? We are measuring from repository The wolf is patient and patiently suggests the present takes precedence over the past over the phone over over I am argumentative. I admit, but I am no magician. I cannot saw the impossible oak the past and present are one yoke No eggshell to overcome Traveling away. I remember what a friend's daughter said after the death of her mother said permit my anger I want to feel this From no man's land Silence so broad it shadows time continuance Glaciers collapse in the distance dropping like courtroom verdicts No room for guilt this high Between borders I grow more inside myself than ever if I fail here. It is punctuation Mama, I can feel the soil falling over my head Fog draws the curtain before night can undress Give me your shiver Somehow everything that has happened feels unimportant Walk into the glacial lake watch the last month's submerge the cold shears a layer off Season of yellowed histories season of expiry dates Season of my body with your body temperature rising season of her body with your body rising Whose words were falsified and fossil first. I am not who was I before From Tagon it Stars are comets with their hair shorn off. No stars are all comet hair brushed out I saw my braid off with rusted blade Abdo rubs ash into the dogs flayed back the night gutted by that terrible music from Zakopana Amidst the pistol whip of mountain winds rye cuts my hair with real scissors her steady brown hands now golden spools There I think the less to look at the more free I am There's always something to see Always there is something to see rearrange until dawn's first bleed the more I see the freer I am the more I see the less to look at Head a golden spool memory winds itself back self-invented in retrospect Still portrait with glass eye The worst thing about living in cities is they way they make of you an antiseptic I do not entertain the woman cleaning her teeth on public transportation the way my grandmother might porch stooped in eastern light I ask only how she can behave so brazen hold open I know shame like an aperture for all my understandings my shame of vestigial limb I evolve backwards now. It is embarrassing how unanimal I am for this failure of mine I come to love my immigrant women, but most of all their mothers who do not bring shame across the border or ocean Or if they do it is not shame as I know it or is lost in translation I am heartened by this and fight against the city sickness of bleached mannerisms smelling of monolithic class polish shapeless And so I root for the public nail clippers my grandmothers and daughterless elders Most of whose hands have not seen a manicure hands too swollen for wedding rings And they are all my grandmothers and they are all my elders and who will sing accolades to their calluses And so I root for the meticulous shoppers moving inverse to the speed of light. I move with them I ask light to take a breather for isn't it corporate to move with such urgency is the urgency of my shame corporate then Who sold it at what price this culture texture made culture textile made too costly for hands that work the loom Forgetting a language is not forgetting in that language And so I root for the media connoisseurs that forgo headphones and hit play without scruple Raining public spaces with a million tongues none of them Anglican never looking up in shame But if they did their eyes would ask are you uncomfortable to not understand? Well good, and this is the last piece the iron dialectic It's after and Carson who has a quote that says how is a pilgrim like a blacksmith? He bends iron and love bends him the iron dialectic Rather than new imaginations. I fashion heaven after places. I have been Heaven is a question. I like to pose others as in what does your heaven look like? Curdled secular I mean the fat that collects over holy milk boiling clean. I Once believed heaven must be an airport terminal Whether I dreamt of arriving or vanishing is a good question a Good question is one that opens into a valley Did I dream of someone waiting or did I dream I was a sugar cube dropped in a tall drink of water? Watching others walk into their waiting while I dissolved in all the arriving Heaven must be the current that carries us back. I Myself am the first blacksmith in my family The women dress in beginnings and snap umbilical cords like loose threads, but are not very good at what comes next in July I spend the Flemish morning amidst van Gogh paintings Golf looked up to his lineage and immaculately copied the masters in the evening I take up the sword and start sawing off branches Women in my family are artistic with how they retire blood You have to admire our ethic. I study well that summer in vinegar bath Sharpening searching for surface a rusted blade is a shoddy mirror Lack of hostility does not mean an animal is enjoying your presence people don't get this Solitude is a heavy cream. I drink frequent even in good company I find myself studying the ways others see more alive than I The urge to dance strikes in my iron long after lights out The fire must be hot enough or I will not bend blacksmiths are experts in the point beyond consent when all that metal remembers is yield if We master our past history floats us One can unlearn sinking into the has been Broke and intermittently bitter. I take up residence in the bed of a Parisian who teaches music to be smarter No sex I say as he hoists me into his lap Contorting to make rooms for the young ideals of artistry as I reach for my pages his hands ask questions of my body Boundaries he says and again Every time the word is repeated. I feel its message deteriorate like Basinski's disintegration tapes You cannot step into the same story twice Classic fables may keep their shape in repetition. So a river keeps a river no matter how many bodies sweep through I Remember the rain over the canals how it looked like soft applause I'm not stupid enough deposit myself a thing worth clapping for I learned much about palms in Morocco Dates separate like soft brown hands Uncle Ami whistling hauling huge sack of dates come morning Biting in the taste of arrival The sky on fire the mountains on fire the women wear their colors. So the men do not know they are on fire We sit eating Tajin in the half light of each other When the kitten comes begging it is hurled onto the roof. I count down between its plantative cries like counting for thunder Picked up while surging for Tangier the young daughter of the family rents me out for the week for companionship My passport proof of sale when she smiles. I think of pianos at least my hands can yield to the memory of song Over lunch they ask about my father and I say he died a long time ago Her mother says okay. My husband is now your father No one hesitates from their meal The sword swings over their heads, but draws no blood biting down and arrival It is out of character to find myself out of words Who is machinery then? Hitchhiking I find myself often on an ocean of time not much to do but pick dead skin off memories an Old lover once told me I pull hearts. I still do not know what this means in Some cultures communities pull their money every month in turn one or another Withdraws a lump sum until they empty the chamber of the gun Does this mean I am looking for a greater return on love? Too much time trading in what I hold for higher value. I betray my craft a Blacksmith has only the raw of what is on their workbench The increase of value comes from the way it does not keep shape yet stays true to substance So a river is greater than a river for it can flood and remain a river For all the secrets it keeps in its waters about what is necessary for living and Dogs go mad even in cities. We love After barking up my moon the italicized after he buys me a train ticket and I don't get far enough The images are branded into me. What a good blacksmith. I am Taking off everything. I walk into the Mediterranean Sea where I remain for hours thinking salt thinking salt a purifier Under flood conditions a river will collect sediments and carry it off Eventually forming an alluvial deposit such a collection is termed to have little relief Over time all the sediment creates a new landscape all my sediment creates in me a new Landscape no matter where I carry it the river is greater than a river for the ways It does not keep shape yet remains a river washes its hands clean of by becoming more Its process of self purification is necessary for living forges new regions and the story of a thing The river is the first the greatest blacksmith in my family Women are so often overflowed my blood my flood pains begin to feel organic Heaven must be the current that carries us out of ourselves Yet must I sure there are good men in the story Take for example the nameless one becomes the namer. I Point to things and ask for them in Spanish El arbol el mar la luna hermosa We sit and watch the Sun bleed out as per renewable contract Across the Strait of Gibraltar the Atlas Mountains teeth the horizon a Kitten churns air in my lap and horses gaze around us seeming translucent in this ghostly place of convergence At night we take to cheap wine victoriously invent the future Busting at the seafront more wine hosing down the daylight The first buds of joy and how deep grief eats into the root of them He makes me peyote tea and I take my sleeping pills before the hallucinations wake from hibernation Bloom into the blueprints of my fears. I Remember the handmade Yadrassil hung around my graceful knit my disgraceful nape the vulnerable look of a man meant for moonlight Operating a paper minute computer at the print shop how I wanted it to stop this moment of convergence between a fever dream in an equation There is a long river between the romantic and the logician in me Ashamed I am pulling the man of reverie into the present ashamed. I am giving the man space at all. I Am a sugar cube dropped in a tall drink of water Will I be tried for malleability? Hemoglobin accounts for most of the iron in my body and a blacksmith works with their hands. I Cannot work if I do not bleed new names only larger out of the metal in me Heaven must be the current that carries us back Washes us out the impossible beacon Enough light and all you can see is oblivion