Ties That Bind i. two women talk and tie colored strings knotting unknotting the ends bowline loop short-end sheet bend for unexpected complications how to connect one thin piece to another secure yet easy to undo knot? like skilled fingers knitting learned movements answers are known yet unspoken things which is why winding conversation is familar to me they speak of binds of family and mixed blood thick violent as ocean continental divide ancestral drift and the silence one woman says I'm tired of living all the hard stories her past lies as slithering pieces cut and fallen or hanging still from her wrists she quits the task making frayed parts fit ii. two women my friend and my lover let silence hover like bad memories thought discarded until the tug and pull of remembering slips tighter around their necks how to slip free from this bind is as simple as swapping strings for cigarettes letting smoke curl from their fingertips they speak a language of long pauses and fingered objects there are no secrets here like the cut and burn of rough rope the tender tear is enough and as much as a woman's hand bound to my thigh and another to my breast and the weight of her touch feels like healing iii. in my disbelief I have told tangled lies about my past futile convolutions to obscure who I am and who I might become truth unwinds as threads of other women's survival and my own throw me a rope I will bind my body to your corded flesh press my lips to your smothered breath untie my past ungag my tongue I will speak our names we can live unbounded and let loose voices winded carried as secure faith against unwanted ties

Sublimation I. We crisscrossed the country twice, stitching together a geography of home from back roads and interstates and those mile markers between us. Along the avenues of Philadelphia, we were two palms pressed together, fondling renegade freedom in the cracks between what we'd been and who we'd become. We were intrepid, traveling winding two-tracks up a mountain’s steepest slope, until we slid into a snowdrift, and let loose our fear with laughter. Atop the world, we were gorgeous, flinging desire over crested hills into the fertile valley where we imagined a hearth of stone and fire and the fields we might unearth one day. II. With you, silence was easy as girls on street corners. You were a short skirt, bare thighs and belly rising, falling as you stretched into a single word. And you were all angles and dangerous ledges where one footstep might send me plummeting into the canyon and colors of you. How many times I shifted whole landscapes to be in your proximity, how many times you broke through mantle to crack the core of me, this is the sum of my wanting what couldn't be possessed: sky and earth, the trembling of our lips parted to breathe one another. III. You are water rushing over the rocks of me into a suddenly still river where we waded barefoot upon smooth stones. That we return and return to each other is evidence of faith only in what is. Wherever you fall, I will follow. Wherever you rise, I will break surface.

Behind the Camera I. She is a hard, round lens. And I, fair and feminine, wear a fake, cerulean flower behind a hidden ear. We’re near to one another, often mistaken for the other. But I gaze, she aims and shoots. Light travels in straight lines. But cast upon our delicate fingers intertwined, light becomes fine, untouchable lace, binding our shadows outside the still-frame. II. Behind the camera, she likes to think she’s in control, wants to capture me in just the right pose. Make love to the light, she says. And I do. I love it as I love her, how it illuminates the curve of her neck where I lay my head, breathing her into me until her heartbeat quickens, and she greets my parted lips. She relinquishes her camera, lets me kiss her palms. My gaze plays an afternoon light across her still-life body. I touch her smooth belly, and she becomes moving image. Desire blurs us. III. Let me show you something. I draw her in front of the mirror and stand behind: Do you see? Her eyes brighten like dawn from a cloudy night. Now watch, and I gaze into her eyes. Yes, she says. Yes, and she raises the camera. I part my lips the way she likes. Illumined, she focuses her vision upon my face, captures me once more while I make love to the light: my lover, my beloved.

Global Positioning System 1. Two points on a map and the shortest distance between measures the span and expanse: the space of us. Two points on a map and the shortest distance between traces the sand at our feet where we standoff toe-to-toe and head-to-head. Two points on a map and the shortest distance between marks the fine line and the clock’s time and the neither-reason-nor-rhyme that divide us into unequal proportions. 2. That summer we shaved our heads people thought we were twins, identical girls, when we were bald, colored dykes of different heights and dissimilar faces, which suggests how different races appear only in contrasts, like the photograph of us in cutoffs and boots. In black and white, we resemble stereotypes of dykes and colored girls. And though our worlds are far apart, we are often mistaken for each other, as if our mothers led the same life, gave birth twice to a single daughter. How different we are depends upon the perspective of our respective positions on the globe. For instance, proximity suggests similarity. Like, in the photograph my arm rests on your shoulders, and your hand touches my hip, and I’ve slipped the corn dog behind my back, but there’s no hiding the cans of cheap beer in our hands and we stand there together in sunlight, as if our drifts from different countries— you from India and me from Guam— were upon the calm ocean’s tides and gravitational in nature, as if the rifts between our landscapes were neither wide nor deep, as if being in the same place at the same time was somehow inevitable, predictable as physics, and as simple as parting our lips to smile at one another, as if in that moment all the other places we’d been on the globe were somehow transposed to a single geography. 3. You like to know where you’re going when you’re driving in your car and how far and how long before you reach your destination. A global positioning system is satellite-connected, and what’s reflected on the screen is digital geography. Even with technology, you sometimes lose direction, your position off the map, and the lapse of data in the system suggests parts of the globe remain unmarked and uncharted, except by the naked eye. I should know. On unfamiliar roads, I pause consider the shortest distance to my destination— the line that might mark my route to half a world away from where I’ve been—to the landscape of your location. I become a single point on the map—relative and relational to where you’re at—an unfixed coordinate, an inordinate mass, a moving body propelled by my past a global positioning system and map across the continents that divide us into two separate points.

Language Barrier I begin beneath your earlobe, along the hinge of your jawbone. My lips press softly against that darkened space.   I whisper stories about my ancestors, speak this common language, so you might understand where I come from.   From your tongue, sounds slip, seductive and loose, those three words we have come to believe can say everything.   I know little of Telugu, your native tongue.   Only enough to comfort you: Buji. Baby. Na Na. Sweetheart. Ma Bangara Condaloo. My golden jewel.   I repeat these words   when we make love beneath the sun, straining through the slats of the window blinds   or when we talk on stormy nights as thunder punctuates our sentences.   They are never enough.   How to tell you the language of you inhabits me?   How to tell you  the pulse in my wrist  beats the rhythm of your name?

Stars on Alabama "We lived our little drama. We kissed in a field of white. And stars fell on Alabama last night." ~Mitchell Paris The moon creases the ochre sky tonight, and the taste of red clay in the cracks of my lips returns me to you, to the dim room where your mama’s quilt dressed a sentimental bed, where the smell of scotch and weed wafted like your brown fingers along my pale skin. We slow-danced the blues, our lips pressing together the secret between us so the colors of love wouldn’t be beaten off our backs. But we never spoke of this, only met as the quad tower tolled the library’s closing—you, gunning your daddy’s red Ford, and me, breathless laughing, running to catch up. You drove us to that field of white blooms and plucked one with your dark, scarred fingers to reveal for me the stubborn seeds nestled there. You gave me something soft. And hard-pressed between your naked hands, I shuddered white stars in a black sky. You cradled my head in your neck, chewed on a grass blade while I inhaled the woods of you, and together, we let it be.

Linger I. How you lost the keys to your apartment, I never remember. Only you half-naked and draped across my single bed linger. In my insomniac psyche, your head tilted ever so slightly, you look at me wanting the space between your parted lips, praying to possess the first syllable when finally you sacrifice silence to longing. The number of times you mouthed my name, I couldn’t tell you. How many words you used to explain—how you didn’t want to kiss me, how you wouldn’t slide your tongue along my reddening lips, how you couldn’t let it slip you liked it— I lost count. You talked a lot between kisses. Your hands framing my face, your lips pressing an urgent message: must we talk about it. II. It wasn’t a question, so I took it as a rule. How your body moved, certain and seeking, beneath my trembling hands was a secret. How you said my name and came to me, your mouth wide open and sounding out was a skip on the record player. Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. Ain’t nothing like the real thing. We slow-danced on the fire escape. Beneath the cloudy moon, our shadows moved, dark curtains parting, coming together again. I wanna do something wild, you said. You unbuttoned your shirt, gyrated your hips and sang. And it began to rain, as if even the heavens were willing to abandon restraint, to shed shame. II. Because she was hungry, I waded a flood from my apartment to the pizza hut with a puny umbrella and an overdrawn checking account. I bought a six-pack with coins and stole sandalwood incense from the corner gas station. I half-dragged her—drunk—along the city sidewalks while she stumbled, slurred how she loved me. I held her long curls while she retched adolescent excess. I undressed her, bathed her face, her neck, her hands and arms, and I dressed her with bed covers, colored pink, announcing springtime and girlhood. Her alcohol kisses, mute promise: she loves me. III. For her, I was kisses behind the storage shed where we lengthened beneath the sun, our shadows, two tongues, dark twins against corrugated metal, our half-embrace a mere trace of how tempting the forbidden lips the color of ripe cherries and the candied taste of our mouths. I was her one bad habit. She toked on me. Slow-burning, I was smoke she drew into her lungs and momentarily held, exhaling me, a grey cloud and then letting me twist from her fingertips. And I was a whisper in a dark movie theatre. My involuntary hand sought hers. Stop, she said, softly, and smoothed my still palm, as if pity might calm my restless breath. Don’t make a scene, she pleaded, later as we walked along the deserted street: I didn’t mean to lead you on. I seized her arms with both hands then, held her beneath the streetlamp: Look at me, and mean it when you say it, I demanded. And she did: I’m sorry. I’m sorry, and she kissed me again. IV. How you lost the keys to your apartment, I never remember. Only you half-dragging my grief along abandoned streets linger. Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.

If Spring Were a Lover I. Nubile, green, still wet behind the ears, she wears the prettiest flowers. Upon her chest, she presses dead leaves and young grass, pushes up against the cold expanse, shadowing her. Budding bulbs in her hands, she dons pants made of slick, wet mornings. II. She flirts a lot. Dripping colors, she makes a brief appearance to greet the guests, to say hello and make them love her again, begin to depend upon her presence. Then she retreats, takes with her a flirty smile and warm breath. III. It has been two hundred and seventy-three days since I last saw her. She showed up when I wasn’t expecting, knocked on my front door and asked, What are you doing? I wasn’t doing anything, but I didn’t want her to know, how I’d been doing nothing but waiting for her return. I wanted to be busy. I’m working, I wanted to say. I’m too busy for you. I wanted pens to fall from behind my ink-stained ears. I wanted papers to be stuck to me. I wanted to shout, I’m writing. Leave me alone. But I had been waiting, for when she would show her face again, for when I would see her and thaw. IV. She’s beautiful and messed up. She says all the right things— I love you I missed you I didn’t mean to hurt you. But she lies to herself about her own limitations. She can be around only some of the time. It’s her nature, who she is: the girl who never fails to make me ache, the one whose name I take upon my lips, the word that slips from my mouth, the dark, fertile hands on my hips, the face I forget is more beautiful than I remember. V. On the twenty first of the month, she knocked on my window. Scared the wits out of me the way she was suddenly there. Smiling and goofy-looking, she produced a hand spade and clippers. Let’s work in the garden, she suggested. It’s too early to work in the garden, I complained. She ignored me, began to cut away the dead stems from the flowers, brushed back the leaves covering the budding plants. I put my hands in the dirt, dug around a weed and pulled. Why are you crying? She asked. VI. She pushes up the beginning with her hips, holds me there in her heat, pulls back, and lets me cool off, only to do it again and again. VII. She will leave me and return when I have lost all belief in warmth and lengthening days. She will offer me wild flowers and weeds pulled at the roots, dirt dangling from the thin, threaded knots she’s wreaked havoc upon. She will laugh at my reluctance, remind me she has only so much time. She will frame my face with her soiled hands, smudge dirt across my cheeks, and smile. I will follow her into the garden.

Illuminated I. Beneath an absent moon, we wandered where girls danced to driving beats, made love in dark corners, and shimmied in sequins or posed in black leather. I blended, but you shined blonde, flecked by light and colored as the eventual dawn that woke us, holding our bodies in the rose-orange palm of day. Our arms and legs intertwined in rest and then restlessly opened, we tongued breasts and slid down bellies, we mouthed unspoken promises of second chances, coming inevitably as the train whistle in the distance. II. When you finally confessed to fragile lies tangled with threaded thoughts of your dying, my belly ached for your mouth once more so I might reveal again the swatch of dawn that forgives mistakes made in despair. You refused absolution, even as daily you swallowed bitter wine, drew blood with blades cutting your wrists, and roped your body to yesterday. You sacrificed yourself again and then again upon altars for what you believed couldn't be forgiven or saved. III. That first time, your hair splayed across a pillow. Above you, I hovered, eclipsing the morning sun so you might see without squinting. You are light, I insisted, and I believed if I said it enough you might remember how shine reflects off of you. But it would take years turning upon dark days and long distance calls during darker nights before I heard you laugh aching tears, and now you nap in late morning, your hair tangled in sunshine, and I write in another room. I ache for your beauty, your light, for what never left you.

Insomniac Night When the insomniac night finally ends, I am here as I have always been, watching light break the dark horizon, trying to keep time with some rhyme and reason. Should I let go and abandon this dreaming? Or dare I walk towards the dawning of a new day measured by the sway of my uncertain movement towards a vague destination where I might find some tangible sign for living like the pulse of a lover waiting for me there. Incessant is my desire to name these dark roads, to scan the landscape of my vision so I might know if I’m coming or going. Incessant is my need for what I cannot name, for what’s been lost, what’s been gained. Feel the sacrifice. Fear. Passion. Power. I am helpless against this blinding, limitless, unceasing need. There is no map to mark the wanderings of a soul made restless by insatiable desire to stay the winding course towards what eludes it. Incessant, I will die if i must, but I will not give up.