with title taken from Hala Alyan
what it must mean / that someone lost their kicks to the telephone wire / or was it relinquishment? / was it banishment? / were they freighted by birds? / was it the good dead who had since then died? / ghostly air jordans / my dead were not yet dead in those days / see: the beak of the granite bridge that birthed me / but was neither granite / nor life-giving / embankment of concrete / spandrel arch / striated with memorial tags / always so incidental / in the foreground of all my photos / the sex toy shop that shuttered its doors / to the eventuality of time / the pit bull shredded by coyotes / the graffiti rabbits and all my favored taco shops / the coin laundromat / and with it, reams of quarters / rolled in paper / I thought / isn’t it better to whip our coins / at water / that will act upon us / and answer our prayers? / at church, I grew fathers / my fathers grew fathers, conjoining / I became churchly / I stooped to inspect the possessed / their slippery tongues / I soon learned / to ignore God’s word / in both languages / bored of it / I invented new containers / for my earthly relics / dodging services / scribbling in reverse / unfurling coin wrapper rolls / so that I might be presumed devilish / or wrathful / or too secondary to save / so that I would go ignored / and get to watch / loved ones leave / without reciting / en el nombre / de su Cristo / why not Jesucristo? / am I misremembering? / did I really say su every time? / inadequate mouth / even then / appointing all those fathers / to other / better-suited daughters.