 This is called Ode to a Desiccated Olive. When the Greek farmer plopped you plush and pregnant into my palm, he explained that when shucked of your meat and pounded gently, your pit excretes a mild antibiotic. Instead, I carefully stirred you between rudder and wave of my churning fingers, then let you exhale on the countertop like a weeping battery. Beneath your crown of leaves, a pubescent froth curls and naps with an acrid cologne of wood smoke. Left to simmer above time's distracted watch, you dimple an age into an amber compass pointing like a nipple to the tongue's north star. I caress the grandmothered cheloid of your consecrated surface so that you may come to Jesus on my altar of breath. Remind this tongue how once an engorged earlobe was combination lock opening a soprano scale of moans. Unfold your map of flavors from vine to the secular intersection of oil and bread. Medicinal and mythical, you are a clairvoyant paragraph punctuated with blossoms of aspirin and eyelashes. If you take the place of my heart, let my veins be the roots of the tree that brought you here. I know. I know. This is like asking the rain in my lover's hair to fall back through the sky, all right? And the two oceans I'm going to reference in this poem, I was very fortunate to go to India, go specifically and hang out there at the beach. And then the week that I flew back within a couple of days of my flying back, I had to do a wedding at Ocean Beach and realize, wow, this is the first time in my life I've actually interacted with two completely different oceans. That's kind of like the starting point. And this is then called, before my friend's wedding reception, I stand facing the ocean. It is my second ocean this week. This one's waves gnashing its teeth in a grimace between laughing and chewing. The sky burdened and exasperated by fog. I am that fog. And I attend this wedding as detached as a ghost. Beneath these waves churned the surface of my first ocean, bathwater warm beneath a blushing sky. There the waves were littered with people like flotsam scattered after a storm. This ocean would eat the naked alive. Just now, a dog runs the length of beach like a jet nearing takeoff, his hind legs flaring red in joy. Somewhere, people spill from the mouth of a church beneath a steady hail of rice. Somewhere, people laugh in the presence of roses and the foamy ejaculate of champagne. Somewhere in the space between that previous ocean and this, someone floats forgotten and drowns. Blankets have been folded, and sand is being spanked off flat soles while someone bobbles their arms like antennas on a channel God isn't surfing. Their mouths engorged with starfish, their new tongues stuttering death's forbidden name. If I could, I'd swim out there and save them myself. But the drowning swimmer is me. No, this is not a dream. On the flip side ocean, I stand with green water belted at my waist, afraid of getting swept off my feet. I scoop up the loose nuts and bolts of seashells rolling beneath my toes, only when waves are inhaled away from the beach and the water level bows. Here, I stand weeping fog and sea foam, humbling myself to learn from a dog. He snatches meat, steaming in my chest, and runs for the horizon's mountains, a pile of discarded jackets, before looking back longingly as to ask, do you get it? Between these two oceans floats a bottle with blues lyrics explaining my life as an adopter's note. The bottle floats along the embryonic ocean like a jewel slipped loose. You know, I was once thought to have been extinct, and scientists were disappointed to find me alive. I was discovered using an abacus of sand dollars counting the inventory of waves. I'm going to lie down on this cold brown sugar sand and await the dog's return lap. With my luck, I'll be found having drowned on nothing. There'll be traces of two oceans in my system, my eyes weeping saline rivulets in different flavors. Ah, but first, the wedding, all right. The final piece I'm going to do purposefully runs long, because I think the person that it was written for would appreciate it that way. And for my family here from Cave Canem, the only thing I wanted to say is last summer, I wrote a poem that was basically about me treating myself to a slab of barbecue ribs that I pretty much ate by myself. And I wrote this poem, which was kind of cool, but I couldn't justify reading it to an audience, say an audience in Berkeley full of vegans and vegetarians who are just not going to be present with that. And I was like, OK, well, fair enough. And then it turned out, as I was rereading the poem, I'm like, well, you know what? It's not really about meat at all. It's actually about loneliness. So I shelved that poem. And then a few months after that, a woman at my office spontaneously died during a weekend when I was out. I took an extra day. And I came back Tuesday, and one of the secretaries was like, this woman, Linda, passed away as a Friday when you were last here. And I did not realize how much I thought over, cared about her until she was gone. In the same way, I didn't get to say goodbye to her. I also did not get to say goodbye to my mother. So that in mind, this is called tomorrow's sorrow. Tomorrow is not promised, Mama used to say. I think of Mama and now of Linda, who yesterday ran out of tomorrow's forever. Linda, office sugar bully, compulsive overshare, pollinating our hallways, break rooms with stories and memories. Linda, who never met a conjunction or run-on paragraph she didn't like. Her story ends in the financial district standing on a street corner, mid-thought. The phone squeezed in her sweating palm like a handle with nothing left here to hold onto. And how she just clicked off, witnesses said, as if some switch was flipped by an unseen in different hand. How death lands at your feet like a bird with a lotto ball in its beak. Now, I promise to let you go. Just one little thing, and this will be real short. You might find yourself like Linda, your body shivering cancer on a busy street corner. Then jump cut to a cold waffle thin mattress and a device sweetly named life support, filling your mouth with plastic instead of candy. There's no way not to be but slightly embarrassed by this. And yet anxious to force feed someone, anyone, your story, stuck shotgun on the bus idling behind you at the grocery store, I got to tell you. You think that's something, it reminds me of this one time. For all the stories falling from her like old receipts, no one would believe this. The one story she didn't share was when weeks earlier, while still at the office at her desk, mind you, she went hollow and immobile and spent the night in emergency with her queer office husband, left sitting bedside knitting patients with his eyebrows, knit one hour, purl two hours, while she bled out a child's load of questions in every direction, him unable to even stone skip a word across her flowing river of stories. Listen to this, let me tell you, and this was years ago, how she woke up on the operating table, spitting out anesthesia like sugar-free gum, rat-a-tat-tatting like Barney Rubble's Betty. What story was she reminded of waking up beneath the surgeon's steady timpani of fingertips and scalpels, himself mid-story, to an audience of annoyed anesthesiologists? Doc, you should see the look on your face. You know who you remind me of? Okay, I told you stances ago, this will be short. I swear this won't be a long poem anyway. Do we have time for my poem called Self Portrait in Barbecue Ribs? The list of flavors and smells I missed from home could fill a cemetery. I had no holiday guests beyond my own memory and pornographic greed and loneliness. Yes, loneliness. It's July 4th Saturday at the farmer's market rotisserie truck. I buy a whole slab of ribs for $30. The boy gifts wraps this zipper of bone as carefully as you'd swaddle a baby. I shove the two by four of meat into my teardrop-shaped bag then run to catch the bus home, the loud cologne of meat rising on the bus like an erection. And I sit next to this woman who couldn't be bothered with anything so busy she was staring into her phone when all of a nothing she jumped as for a car backfire or gunshot and wiped her seat for grease when what had happened was she caught whiff of my bag leaking rich barbecue sauce spices, like a loose hemming, like a loose hem on a ghost's wedding dress. But I said nothing and just smiled and rang for my stop and I've gotten off the point. I'll let you go, but you know what? This reminds me, sickness never makes a good story. Neither does loneliness. Loneliness, childlessness, read purposelessness. A hollow smile well-practiced to the point of affliction. It's a story I know too well. It's why I would walk away anytime Linda'd approach and start in on her old job or old friend or old story. That may or may not have even been true. She thought I hated her for her stories, stories she would tell anyway in a vacant room or hallway ricocheting her voice, her mouth busy as bird wings. Wait a minute. Did I ever finish my point about the ribs? Real quick, do you feel more pity for the animal that gave its life for my weekend lust or for the me standing at the stove alone, gently peeling back foil panties? Me dowsing intimacy with this braille of bone. It's scent hooking my brain's easy distraction. My mouth again, confusing prayer with begging when really it was searching the contours of air for gratitude. Okay, now to cut this off, I promise I won't hold you. Look, look, look. I don't know what it is to die, but I know the quiet deaths that kill us daily. For example, something in me quietly passed away while looking into my mother's face. She was strapped to a gurney in emergency, a hose shoved into her throat big as a water bottle. Right then was no time for my stage fright. It didn't occur to me then to tell a joke or story, though years later it occurred to me to scoop up Linda and her love seat body into my arm's mid sentence and hold her while her stories wept over my shoulders. Shed your memories like bird feathers, I'd whisper. My heart, your dream catcher. Tell me how you've heard this one before. Tell me how hugging can be a form of assault. Tell this story especially if you don't believe in God, the invisible wire strummed between people like everything that cannot be told or every unspoken apology. Tell my mother, mama, I had a joke that would have killed you, but I'm sorry for my dumb bedside manner. Tell Linda I'm sorry for my back and a slowly closing door that your voice mistook for hatred like a bird watcher mistaking a purple finch for a house finch. But can't you see, mom, Linda? It was just me trying to get a word in edgewise. I don't have time for this today. Maybe we can catch up tomorrow. All right, thank you very, very much.