Conceited Gesture/Translation

I. Conceited Gesture

I am sifting through roadside boxes of ash.

Look! A rabbit’s foot bound to a key ring.

Look! A box filled with feathering blankets.

Shhh ... ​it has a heartbeat (listen).

Shhh ... ​It is Saturday and I’m dead-hungover.

My box contracts as I heft it from the highway’s shoulder

into the front seat of my car.

My heart is a box of soiled blankets made homely by pack rats —

My heart squirms erratically and chews its paws.

My heart holds in a palm of shredded photographs

a fresh litter of six pink runts.

My brother is obsessed with decorative skulls.

As I pull into the garage he is siphoning bleach from a jug.

I walk past him spilling the midden of my heart onto the workbench,

counting the pink nodes who fall out onto the corrugated table.

II. TRANSLATION

I open all of the doors in the house as a corrugated sun

climbs hand over fist through the cypress.

A black Ibis probes the weeds with its hooked bill.

I write in my celibacy journal,

the moon is drunk in a mineshaft: sick of all grief, and then cross it out.

My brother dyes his hands red in a bucket in the darkroom.

Duckweed grows in a vivid slick on the veranda and

the sky shines the color of oil and black tea.

I love this movie. The violence doesn't bother me.