Watching you fight, I recall The White City

The city left is not the city

met, bright in formal whites,

in Sunday best. Monuments restore

beneath tents. But history rents

the skyline, exposing the scaffold,

the What If

City of ships

that didn’t launch, plagues

that didn’t brood within the bowels.

Underground, spring is the most intimate

violence. Bulbs mole. Patient

tubers metastasize meadows

beneath winter’s

hide. Every city

that lasts entombs its own

ruins. And cancer is only growth

without respect for border, building

code. Prophesy foretold a city

white as sails, glinting just behind

the horizon line.

La Cuidad Blanca

midmorning. Sunstruck.

Tideleft. Like a whalebone

corset, its walls cuff the current

of commerce into whirlpool

of shoulders. The city made

flesh. The city’s

hundred tongues

slugging up your dress. Change,

like every disease, begins with a few

strays. War is always declared

a day too late. When they began

injecting chemo into your spinal cord,

I pictured Kahlo’s

“Broken Column.”

Braced. The pain inherent in trying to stay

the same with that molten spring inside.

Over Frida’s shoulder, the empty slopes

suggest what is lost                   stays

lost. (A crocus beaks through frost.)

Immolation Lessons

“Let these wives first step into the pyre, tearless without any affliction and well adorned.”

-Sati Hymn, Rig Veda

A finger’s width is touch enough to tender

a girl unused to glowing at the center

of attention. She’ll fill that space, a show

pony hoofing inanities in tight dressage,

until something in her finches, dizzy with

insistence. The prick of a lit wick.

Before Sati was an untranslatable act

she was a daughter who defied

her father for a god too cool to notice

her devotion, until it was consummate.

Like a girl in the wrong shape

for between class skirt-flips

who wears one (back of her knees:

upturned palms) each Friday, she dressed up

in an asceticism as extreme as he

wanted her to be. Now she knows better

than to look at what their eyes are

mouthing, keeps her shoulders stiff,

as if the touch is unwanted or wanted

too much. It’s a slow-dance with a wind

she’s half afraid of. Each feathery fingertip promises

quill, tickles like boys on Holi when girls on purpose

slow their strides. Nothing’s worse

than to be uncaught. As trip-wire Chakras

explode her spine from coccyx

to hairline in controlled demolition,

Sati cries Papa, I enter his heart

in a suicide vest. In a vacuum

a feather plummets at the rate of

I can’t take it anymore. Such surrender,

is it strength? I’ll cheat and say that it depends

on what it’s too. We’ve adorned our flesh

to keep the spirit clothed.

We’ve burned the clothes

to let our spirit show.