I.
My restless, I wait for you
on the emerald lawn. My fingers
write a dictionary, pen your face
upon the streets until tiny windows
flay alive & fan the ardor of my mind.
What a lived body mine is—white cool
of milk on chest, red heat of the city
where light is citizen. I carry your
voice with me through sweating
avenues, hear it in the whine of street
machines & sky corridors, the voice
the greatest economy of I OWN
this plush shore, this discrete parcel
of time, the voice itself implying
a world continuing beyond its edges—
2.
Didn’t I say the body, how to contain
the multiples, what did they do before
pictures when everything had an exact
source in the physical world, no need
to recontextualize desire, small membrane
of love, a twitch of lip, a peripatetic eye—
3.
Between your eye & mine the pearls
that are your eyes, apart from him
from her my love is like a room
in a hotel that bleeds and bleeds,
Niagara of bed sheets, the pearlsupon my neck which glow, feeding
the birds with crumbs like jewels
in the mouths of hungry men.
Pray my restless that I may come
with bruise & aria, often & above
your body’s solemn balcony
a pearl inside my mouth, for I
contain so many selves, & death,
since age has placed the sea upon
your face, & hunger, dread, appalling
theatre of wars.
4.
My lovers are enigmas, I know
them by not knowing them, I will
wait for you on the plush shore my
multiple selves an unopened box
of bees, if I dream i see their
wings against the sun, beautiful
because of my desire to contain
them—not done, don’t leave—but
they are already in palatial rooms
learning the nomenclature of green.
Body’s ink, bright petal. Is it
the end of empire or the beginning?
Night dawns, day changes, variations
on I SING. May we be both past
and future: a seed.
Born in Toronto to Filipino immigrants, J. Mae Barizo is a poet, librettist and transdisciplinary artist. She is the author of two books of poetry, Tender Machines (Tupelo Press, 2023) and The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books, 2015). Her work has been anthologized in books published by W.W. Norton, Simon & Schuster, Atelier Editions and Harvard University Press. Recent writing appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, Esquire, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paris Review Daily, Boston Review, BookForum, among others. As a librettist, she is the inaugural recipient of Opera America’s IDEA residency, given to artists who have the potential to shape the future of opera. She is the Chair of the Undergraduate Creative Writing program and MFA faculty at The New School.