Mr. West Read Free

on a chalkboard for him, day after day, and erased,
with my finger, the holes for the pulmonary veins to come in, to
    fill the left atrium with the blood we could not draw? You recorded a song.
    I’d love if you’d recorded a song. I almost forget again that your heart
    looks like mine. You’ve heard the pulse in your ears then. You know
wush is not a foolish way to describe it. You miss her and I miss him but
    surely I cannot say if, when you think of death, you, Kanye, think of the heart.

I WANT A HOUSE TO RAISE MY SON IN
    1
    I feel common.
There are people who want the house I want.
    And if my desires are not unique,
what is?
    A combination of my desires and my face
and the mud in the yard I don’t yet have?
    2
    It’s the worst time to be feeling this way,
when my legs are getting caught
on chairs and other places
I try to leave.
    My hips just aren’t able to hold myself
together anymore, so ready to bear
    his terrible head—as when terrible
was used to describe God and Godly
everything.
    3
    I can hardly make it through.
Sleep comes and bends
my hands into positions of habit,
pinching the fluids that should move
like little fish through my wrists,
and shit. Shit. If I were my hand,
I’d be drowned. My hand is one
more part of me, maybe the last,
to realize I’m deathly ill, in that,
I could die from this.
    4
    I have made Noah promise he will save me over the boy
if it came to that.
    I’ve told no one this.
    It is my one non-maternal act, my one feeling
that reminds me of the selfish child I was
when I thought how I would have spit and peed
on the Torah if I’d been a child in the Holocaust,
if it would have saved me,
which, only as an adult do I understand,
could not have saved me.
    I think I will be damned, killed, struck,
for not only admitting these betrayals,
but writing them down.
    I’m afraid I will be a horrible mother because
I am a horrible woman.
    5
    Can I write anything after that?
Can the poem continue?
Can I return to my love for my son?
    Can I tell how I imagine burying my nose
in his soft, small belly,
how I imagine making him the best room,
the best crib and chest of drawers?
    One day we will redecorate his room as
he wants. And we
will play basketball in the driveway
    at the house—
the house I want so badly for him.
    6
    I lie in bed, as I can hardly leave it now,
and read books about Kanye. I page through
the one about Kanye’s Glow in the Dark tour.
It reminds me of my son’s bones, glowing white
in ultrasounds, in a more wretched darkness.
    Donda made it seem easy in her memoir.
To love Kanye. To unconditionally love him.
She even knew he was a boy. In utero.
    My son remains my mystery.
The ultrasounds revealing him
well-formed. No clubbed foot.
Black stomach means he can
swallow. Black bladder means
his kidneys are working. Heart
    can be seen in detail, valves,
deep inside me. His hair grown.
His nose like mine. Arms, legs,
moving. Everything moving.
    7
    I want to lie in the grass of my yard with my son.
Every part of him in the sun. Every part of each of us.

ON NOVEMBER 10TH, 2007, DONDA WEST DIED
    On November 10th, 2008, you were between shows. November 9th, Dublin, Ireland. November 11th, London, England.
    By ferry and car, the journey from Dublin to London takes about eight hours.
    By plane, about an hour.
    I have to imagine you flew. But maybe not. Maybe you spent two hours, three hours, on a ferry.
    The journey between two points is such a straight line.
    Maybe you needed to be on the Irish Sea. The blue of it. The blue looks miserable.
    The very shape of the sea is like a face, mourning, gagging on a moan.
    And it must be salty, like all seas.
    Though for a sea to leave cliffs instead of beaches.
    That tells me it’s killed its fair share of mothers.
    The Irish stop clocks at the time of death. They stay with the body day and night until the burial. They recite poems. They sing. They cry and drink. They kiss the dead body.
    Given