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dapt-poems

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will melt, and there’ll be sudden blessèd laughter.
But the simple sonatina of typewriters
is only a faint shade of those great sonatas.
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
Many months have passed
since the diagnosis,
and you’re still grieving for her.
She’s not dead yet.
But she’s lost, like a child is lost—
her mind the ocean floor,
where she kicks up sand
and churns in the water.
Al, we call it, or AD—
never by its real name
as if mentioning the word would bring bad luck—
the need to cross one’s self across the heart,
throw back to the ocean half of one’s catch,
turn three times and pray to the East.
Papa’s and her letters,
written during their courtship,
are tied with a faded, red ribbon
and sunk in a safe deposit box at Bishop Trust.
Long ago, she gave them to you
for safekeeping. At the time
she exacted a promise from you,
that you would not read them
until she was dead.
We twist down the spiral staircase
curled like a strand of seaweed
into the cold room of vaults,
the heavy thud of door distinct as your sadness
following us everywhere. There,
you turn over the bundle of letters
in your hand like unbelievable money.
“I’m so tempted to read them,” you say.
When I was sixteen,
another tsunami hit town.
I cried to my daddy,
“Daddy, Daddy, please save me,
don’t let me drown!”
But he let go of my hand!
offered
at the crossing of
Phanh Dinh Phung
& Le Van Duyet
doused in gasoline &
immolated by 4-meter
flames the orange-robed
his heart refusing to burn
his heart refusing to burn
his heart refusing to burn
in the shooter’s
face, she recognizes
a wrong turn
down a logging road
tires tunneled
into snow
The news feed portends rolling blackouts across the state. I read over the last of my messages: A blanket request for a plasma donation, Sasha asking if I want a ride to the wake.
How much chemical disorder
can be survived depends on medical technology.
A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible.
People were called dead
when their heart stopped beating.
Today death is believed to occur 4
to 6 minutes after the heart stops beating
because after several minutes it is difficult
to resuscitate the brain.
However, with new experimental
treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac
arrest can now be survived without
brain injury. Future technologies
for molecular repair may extend the
frontiers of resuscitation beyond
60 minutes or more,
making today’s beliefs about
when death occurs
obsolete