After carrying the weight of all this damage
for over thirty years, I wanted to be rid of it.
And not just the smell of it—all of it.
To remove it from my body like a malignant
growth or parasite. To deposit it in into
something: a jar, a forgotten account,
someone else’s body. To throw the shame
away. Into the trash. Into the ocean. Into a fire.
To archive the pain like slave schedules or
census records that no longer spoke of my
existence. This poem is a scar that reveals the
onceness of a wound, a curated show in which
joy, bitterness, and unknown patrons attend.
It is an elegy to mourn the parts that were
shamefully discarded like scraps and a song
to celebrate the vibrant parts that still remain.
It is unsolicited advice stuffed back into the
throat. It is a how-to book misplaced on the
shelf. It is an old family map passed down
from great-grandmother to grandmother.
My father told me to go this way. I didn’t
listen, thank god. What can one do when it
was her own father who once used the same
map and found only the weight of all his
damage at the end of the road? Too tired to
turn back, he built his house there: a wife in
the kitchen, two children at the end of a
leather belt, a small dog crying in the yard.
I ran away from home and found men who
ate deliciously at the good corners of my
body. I ran away from home where we were
predators and weapons and the wounded.
We became fluent in the small-necked
language of control, our house illuminated
with gaslight. Was it because we were the
daughters of a mother who told us, “At least
he provides for us”? Was it because we grew
up wishing that one day he wouldn’t come
home? Was it because men took us and ruined
us, and our parents—reminded of their own
taking and ruin—turned away in shame?
Rather than chew on the answers, rather than
revisit that house, I will lay it all here, in this
poem, and pretend it never happened: my
body, my parents, the men. I will bury it
under the fruit filling—I am mother now.
Everything must be sweet. Everything must
be perfect, clean. This poem, too. Still,
I hope my children read it. I hope they see
themselves reflected in the fine print. I hope
they know it’s not their fault.
Poetry
I just had the weirdest dream
This poem contains lines in Yiddish, with rough translations before and phonetic translations after.
i.
I just had the weirdest dream:
We were strangers in the land of egypt.
Fremde zenen mir geven in land mitsrayim
Hemmed lines in our hands gave way to mime
and we mouthed a thousand languages –
babel’s tatters gestured at our calloused feet.
Each brick was a tongue,
Yeder tsigl iz geven a tsung.
Friends at seder gummed their tile song,
made mortar in their mouths to pave
paths between wayward tribes.
ii.
I just had the weirdest dream.
Our tonsils were the sand of the Sinai
and our lungs were made of dust
un undzere lungen zenen geven fun shtoyb;
we wetted tongues with wine to mend our voices
delirious for want of water.
The blessings that we coughed
Di brokhes vos mir flegn hustn
Dust-ridden and bronchitis-stricken
pleaded with the sky for deliverance
in Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish and Bukhari.
iii.
I just had the weirdest dream.
Strangers were we in Babylon or Speyer or Toledo
I think. The scene kept changing.
Di stsene hot zikh shtendik gebitn.
The tree of life, etz chaim, was a witness
and we struggled to recognize one another
through pillars of smoke.
iv.
I just had the weirdest dream.
Strangers were we while inquisitors asked questions.
Strangers were we in Istanbul, Salonika, and Tangiers.
Fremde zenen mir geven in Lublin un Lemberik.
Huddles lined streets, friends landed like embers
and the air ticked colder
while they hid their clarinets.
v.
I just had the weirdest dream.
We had become a graveyard.
Zenen mir gevorn a besoylem.
(Our arms turned into soil like a golem’s.)
With clasped hands we begged others for asylum.
Strangers are we in Herzliya
Strangers are we on Long Island
Strangers are we in Golders Green
Keyner veyst nisht fun di tsores vos ikh hob gezeyn –
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.
I just had the weirdest dream.
Coloured Boys in the Suburbs Are a Novelty
On a sweltering Tuesday, me and Dylan pack into my beat up minivan and bump our stereo damn near to its limits, pushing out Lupe Fiasco and Nas records on inadvertent caucasian ears. The volume knob spins halfway backwards like our necks do on a double take when we see a cop car cuz police here don’t hide no prejudice. We go back and forth rapping along to Illmatic; Nas told us that the world was ours even if the white boys at school told me to go back to my country for saying I hate the winters here. We breakdance after school and play basketball in our off time. These are coloured boy territories, and here live all our homies; varying shades of rich mocha under Ecko and Fubu adorned battle armor. Every afternoon is a reminder that you gotta let your hair hang down in your face cuz a bandana ain’t gonna do nothin’ good for your image son. Dusk-caked asphalt drinks in the vibrations of our homebound running footsteps as symphonies of coloured mothers fill evening air with the familiar sound of hell no you ain’t gonna sleep over at nobody else’s house tonight. You know you’re close to home when you’re greeted by the bold smell of curry and garlic, filling up the block with a confidence you haven’t yet found for yourself; too many memories of plugged noses, cocktails of laughter and disgust as I open my lunchbox. Listen, I know all too well that people here in this suburb see my skin before they see I’m human, shit I remember that every time I gotta shave my beard before I cross the border or pops warns me about wearing a kufi to school because yes son it’s cool that Muhammad Ali wears one but you’re not Muhammad Ali and we gotta be extra careful ’round these parts. I think about the men who snatched the hijab off of my friends head, how they built up temples to conformity on the land they broke her down on, how god once gathered enough stardust to fill her form and how she is now collapsing into herself like a dying sun. Her coloured boy clan would gather around a lit backwoods like a campfire, telling stories of places where melanin wasn’t as potent a currency as here; countries where you couldn’t use it to buy clutched purses in the elevator like in this one. The coloured boy territories don’t have no border, they lie just beneath the ground of our neighbourhoods like a trench so you gotta stand twice as tall just to see your peers eye-to-eye. Suburban white folks like to say that they don’t see colour as their gaze meets the brown pine-box home of a dead coloured boy while my momma still sees coloured ghosts and you ask her why she can’t smile for you. She puts her head on my shoulder. Her tears run down my arm like a narrow stream and I’m grateful I can tell her that I’m still here.
I’m still here.
Portrait of the Author as a Field Guide Entry
Habitat: Thinks of somewhere she isn’t—
if it’s Alaska, yearns for Spain or Texas;
If it’s Cuba, wishes herself on the subway
headed to the Upper West Side. Rolls hiraeth
and saudade around the tongue,
lets them lodge between teeth and gum.
Family: Hates her father. Hates that he
is half dream and half ghost. Loves her father.
Similar Species: Affinity for reptiles, especially
serpents. Tal vez tipos sin veneno.
Recognition: Includes historical references
like a frightened physician shouting plague cures
across a river to a parish priest in Pasajes
Tendencies towards prepositions and interruptions.
Abundance: Commonly plans to write a haibun
or a sestina, but defaults to a dozen couplets in the end.
Season: Considers privilege and how no poem
she ever writes can be entirely free
of the benefits of white supremacy.
Changes the leaking bucket under the roof
anyway. Three cottonwoods blew down.
One pierced the roof during her first fall in Alaska.
Distribution: Rarely feels at home at home.
Remembers her father was restless, too.
Pound
One afternoon near the end, before
the move, we walk the green by the mall
and stop at the water wall, ever-raining monolith
amid the heat of glass-refracted sun.
Someone’s adjusted the knobs on gravity:
kites take flight, planes boom overhead,
grackles drop to the earth and graze the grass
for limp fries, broken chips, anything
left, even a fragment, they cry and yearn.
My own feet can’t get off the ground so I shuffle
on stone beside you, ducking out of the way
of a camera aimed at a girl in a grad cap.
We stop in a stone archway, getting misted by the falls;
a few yards off a man leans close to a woman.
—Beloved, don’t you see it? Spacetime’s curved,
and our gravity field’s cross sections bend
away, a hyperbolic paraboloid, a salty Pringle
that falls from the hungry hand at 9.8m/s2
and crunches beneath shoes and bird beaks.
The man is talking low. He gets down on one knee. Right
there. The grad girl’s photographer spots this,
takes aim. It’s sunny and raining. This space city
is one big pane of glass, high as a corporation,
a window wall to the stratosphere separating me
from something naked and flying, burning up
as it falls. I pound it trying to get through.
A year later we’re back for a visit and the water’s off,
the stone is dry, it’s just a big black wall. Cleaning it,
you say, or maybe it’s me, and the other agrees.
We stare a minute and wait for the Nordstrom cars
to turn into the mall and park themselves.
Those little ridges now dry, I bet I could climb
to the top, little moon man on a mission.
And then where? Pound. Stars burn out and fall.
A mouth yelling quiet. Love you forever.
Pound. It’s buy one get one. Product
of masses, inverse proportion of distance between them
squared. Once you said I wish you’d just
scream and hit me. Pound. Universal constant, order
and magnitude. My sweet glass eye take aim,
watch me flame apple red. Where else but down.
Spell for Misheard Sound
“7°F last night. Can’t stop singing Johnny Shines:
‘So cold in Vietnam, words don’t sound the same.’”
—Jake Adam York, Twitter, December 10, 2012
Last Night’s Dream was the same as any other:
salt filling the room crystalized and brackish. You
appeared with a keyboard, predicting your own
death: the words might never sound the same
the words might never even sound/ and yesterday
the murder ballads of the evening shifted before
sleep. A poet in a green suit says cannibal/ heard carnival:
the horse-shift of carousels gone dark. We are always
hearing what we want to and always hearing what
we don’t/don’t have the time to correct wrong/
simply the ear demanding its own certainty
like a god. Today I dream of a tragic green
suit’s misfit, the night’s snapping cold, an illness
we chase like a toy/ its own permanent elegy.
Rost, Metal Brave
-On a mountainside in the Nora Sacred Lands
A shadow rolls over the icecap,
smothers a lighthouse subsumed
by steel eclipse. Braids drape
the glass, solid cold so long ground
does not remember ground, the buried
do not remember the buried. At dawn,
hunger lapses, buds chrysalis out
of ash, and with a singular focus,
lush breeds lush in the warm hands of rust.
An heirloom, alloy, visits the grave, an exile
carefully forgotten. Like seashore air
biting brown against iron, against time, turn
your face to the sun and survive. The seed
sheds the scars of the father, the daughter
bears the scars for the seed.
Self Portrait con Valencia
In ninth grade I discovered chemistry—
intrigued by sodium, the soft metals
and all those
cliquey elementos that bonded so facilito
the ones that stuck together
while I floated in a corner like helium
invisible, less noble
my constant struggle
to reach a stable state
Expected to memorize every single name
I carried la tabla periódica in my back pocket
my gringa lips loving a challenge
repeating each element’s name in Spanish,
sequenced, according to its atomic number
that social value I figured out
holds everyone’s place at the table
my tongue whispered their names to my brain
litio, sodio, potassio, rubidio
each grouped by their capacity to connect
and I, xenón wondered about my own valence
still not confident with my outer shell
I observed los panas and los pelados
compounds and molecules
holding hands at recess
swapping electrons like spit
my fourteen-year-old feet felt stuck
in plomo, estaño, germanium, silicón
when my chemistry teacher said don’t memorize
the glamorous synthetic elements
like Californium, and Einsteinium,
no son estábles he croaked
But ¡tecnecio!— I didn’t believe him.
So I searched that table for a secret code
to unlock the power to attract anything
found exotic locales, heroes, villains, and
the ability to shape-shift. To glow like tungsten,
shine like a palladium disco ball, I
Newjerseyum dreaming of Europium.
I theorized, if a man-made element
like Americium could find a seat
at that table, between plutonium and curium
and feign an octet state, then
Molybdenium! so would I.
The Last Days of Paradise
The Last Days of Paradise
We popped pills that made us feel
like jazz, in our sealed, sub-nautical
scream. When the world came crashing
down, not much changed. We had normalized
lipstick stain chaos, shrieking at the sight
of blood but craving crimson. We welcome
patriarchal watchdogs with their murderous
offspring, for they brought paradise with them.
It was a dream, what we waited for—
so long for this world. We danced
all night long, not noticing that our marbles
had been swiped. We didn’t realize
that we had lost. Sometimes people
just need to dance and burn elegiac,
and that’s what we did,
an effigy to a life that never existed.
We Were All There
Down at the river’s lip
we strip and wheel
off the dock like moon-mad children, strewn
into brackish nights
with wounds we don’t want
to heal. Struggling and spitting,
we swim; we spoon
currents, rippling out
toward each other, grouped
in pairs like mating critters, yawping, flinging
baptismal mud, we loop
ourselves like Ouroboros,
teething on tongues.
Goose-bumped and cold, each takes their turn.
“Who here believes in sin?”
—our childish prayer
bewildering no one
but us, and off-kilter
we stray, careening back up the bank still set
to fail again and again, forgetting to find regret.
What Sticks
This is not a poem of leaving
those velveteen branches or that frowning
hedge at the yard’s edge. This is not about the brushes left
unwashed in the sink. They are already
forgotten, outside the frame. But see how the yellow paves
the bristles like something wanting
to remain? Once, you reached for my hands
like you had just remembered
a name. And I think it has almost
worked—smudging the exile around
your eyes, blending the lines
into a brighter color. I want to tell you
how my hands have already changed.
There’s a song my fingers wrote for you
but my left-hand waltz won’t find lines
the right shade of purple. And around
the house I sprinkled allspice and almost
felt your wooden spoon, almost remembered
something you said about pocketed hands
and split seams. There’s a wanting
in vacant spaces the morning paves
with counted days and already
flavorless foods. Those couches I left
will never miss me. I told you about a frowning
city skyline and nothing, no one, leaving.
White Center, 1950
The figs, arranged in still life,
as if by Chardin’s quiet violence;
the house exists to hold them.
Bruised bodies beaded dark wet,
glisten pressed to porcelain in this
astonished kitchen whiteness, this
bewildered daybreak rose.
We know just by looking how
the mouth will form around them,
the subtle shape of promise
and of fleeting tongue-burst flesh.
Chitin Diaries
The kitchen full
of babies roosting
on high shelves
like cups for punch
one by one she
pinches their cheeks
sinks in the glossy
mud of their squall
*
She has a pen pal
who doesn’t write
back each time
she sends a letter
the top of the mailbox
grows more jagged
last time she swore
she saw a tongue
*
One time she
spun a revolving
door all afternoon
a fishbowl
leaking light
brass ring around
her neck the sidewalk
a leaping comet
*
After a bath
she is a hollow
egg the doorknob
sticks like wet
wool a spool
of moss down
the hall a velvet
vest of mold
*
In elevators
she pictures cables
rising like sap
in the dark
buttons slip
from the door
to orbit her hands
a flock of pocket
watches hovering
between floors
*
She was baptized
in the skinny wrist
of the river
by the interstate
popped fuses
of pine trees
her arms coiled
like water moccasins
fractured loop
of the on-ramp
their mouths soft
with spores
*
They come to her
in her sleep
each step a key
in the counter
a series of periscopes
in the morning
she picks bodies
from the bathroom
sink her face
in the mirror
a nicotine smear
*
One day last winter
she stepped outside
onto a small
bird huddled
by the door’s edge
its bones fizzed
through boot and shin
to settle on scalp
a calcium crown
*
Summer sprang
serrated wings
a prism of winds
she steams
in the bedroom
bound by cabbage
worm silk
fog crawls
over the carpet
up the stairs
the backyard flush
with weeds
her hair falling
from every nest
Vulgar Magic
We could live suspicious, breathing
to bleed—but my mouth had nothing for strange quiet.
I was too much, waiting to make my good news face down
on the bed, years ago. Our futures
threw white linen aside, burned cold and bright and displaced.
I was an upcoming birthday, mascara-bound and dazed.
My anxieties knelt to lavish that witch heart in me with maple
and iron—my throat forever this box
of sour faith. I ran, turned my back on rotting thoughts, unable
to apologize. And the music saw me, nearer, dusty on the floor,
sprawled thorny in blue tulle. I had to turn,
see the tarnish, my name enough to make me the devil’s moon
soft and forbidding. Under my smile
I wished for an ocean to take the hours, hostility let out.
This is an erasure poem. Source text: Andrews, V. C. Flowers in the Attic. Pocket Books Paperback ed. New York: Pocket Books, 2014. 295-308. Print.
Fathermark
I.
Unmedicated visionary,
full-time armchair operator—
he could turn a truckbed of scrap lumber
to a hen house squared-up enough no fox
could slide. Lucky roosters peck cornmeal
grain-by-grain off the earth—call it God’s stopwatch.
II.
Through my voicemail phone-static,
Mark jabbers his bus station Radio Shack
logic as bankrupt-outdated-short-circuit
mallrats skitter listless, shelling
their collective family peanut-memory
against spotlessly-flawed marble floors.
III.
Alabama River reeds hum
his floodname after a Gulf hurricane
watermarks all the downtown brick
buildings—for years, I was blindsided
by County jail phone calls, splotchy-postcards
signed love—the word was a phantom
licking stamps in the dark.
Dinner Table
We fill the void behind our teeth
with silence, the grinding
of wedding rings
against knife handles
a language of compatible hollowness.
*
The neighborhood mutts carcass
another roasted chicken,
our wordless bonepile
jangling in their mouths,
as if nothing can choke them blue.
*
I haven’t forgotten when I knelt—
there was so much husk
at the back of your throat,
you wept instead of saying
I do.
*
Like the word erosion on an endless loop,
the sound of your breath
is a kind of satiation,
a crater you dig
to hold me when you won’t.
*
Remember my lament
when your backhand
pattered blood across the window?
What birds could you hear
singing in the eaves?
*
The gap in my teeth
was my vow—to hold
each morpheme in my mouth
and bleed it, limp-tongued
like a partridge in a hound dog’s fangs.
*
The plate is a votive
for the moon’s guttering;
this is how our table speaks:
from void, a whisper at the bottom
of a hole, I mean a home.
in praise of a night of perdition
& what do we say to the boy
digging the sand to find his love?
the earth is for grief and its fullness thereof.
for some strange reasons, a part of him
is enough to build a tower.
gracelessly biting his tongue,
he provokes the blood out of its hiding.
in the canal of his needs, he leaves
the language of want redundant.
across the crimson,
the flesh exposes itself to light.
this hour, the stars are trumpet sound.
& there is a river throwing its face
against the bank.
& for every rain, there is a betrayal
for waters lending the soil their body.
& for he will fill every emptiness
with wings. even air will lose its skin.
he transits into a weapon.
he rules out the boundary.
& the beast wanders out of his palms.
but who is the boy?
spinning the dust into a song,
he preludes his knees with feathers.
one time he is a bird, another time,
he is a reed.
his throat unhusks.
he has many rivers for a voice.
To Say I Means Alone
Emma and I drunk took a bath swimming as a sloppy fish
on another night that we’d never recall in full detail. Wildness overgrown
enters the spine turns it from flour to bone. The photographs
of how she and I moleculed one another lost. I dive lakes covering the entire
mountain afraid water will dissipate. Another man means another bed
means: they see me but don’t see into me, the jaw bone of confessions
waiting for cloud-blue apparitions. Handing over my fragile objects
to anyone who will take them, air tastes of spit, walnuts and tobacco barns:
my ribs exposed and far-reaching over the hood of my car, a man on my back.
We are swimming. We are swimming. Nothing stops me.
self portrait as asa akira’s face on google images when searching ‘asian women’
MY LINEAGE ETCHED IN PIXELS
MY BODY TRANSLATED TOO MUCH
FOR ANOTHER MAN’S EYES I LIVE
UP TO MY STEREOTYPE, WILL,
LEGACY, ONCE MORE: ETERNAL
A CUM THING, BUT WET & NOT WET
IF THEY CAN’T FIND MY CORPSE THEY’LL AT LEAST
FIND A BODY (I CRAFT)
IN A SPACE // ALL MY BIRTHMARKS OUT
OF FOCUS // OUT OF FRAME & IN
-VISIBLE MONIKERS GIVING
A NOT LOVE BUT A RISK WHICH WILL
FOREVER BE MY FUCKING NAME
360P HD ONE WAY MIRROR FOR GIRLS
SO LUBRICATED ON ALL AND BOTH SIDES
(LOVERS, OCEANS, NAMES NOT THEIRS CONDENSED
ONTO SKIN) THEIR EYES REMAIN HALF OPENED//
EVEN AFTER DEATH: ALL OF THEM
WHO DID IT STILL, NAMELESS, REMAIN
Eve, creator
Half a day’s pushing couldn’t shove me into the world, so they snipped me from her stalk. The doctor tossed the hot potato to my father, who couldn’t find the penis he’d promised himself. He delivered me to my mother’s breasts, where I wouldn’t taste her offering. I.V.’s take best to babies’ heads, still soft enough for molding. But glass boxes can’t hold cuddles, only holes drilled for her fingers to brush mine. We can’t leave our grief rootless—we have to point our blame. When I stretched my toes, they pointed at her. Her first had spread back into the womb, dark and formless void, deaf to her questions at the ultrasound tech. What had she done wrong this time?
It was the first attempt to save my life, successful enough. But we bear our birthmarks—a sidestep from perfection, her constant reminder to give praise for what will mourn. The doctor told her it was a 50/50 chance I’d live through the week, lower still that I would grow into the girl who patted her next beach ball. “I remember being there. You fed me apple juice,” I whispered, feeling for kicks. “She’s full of apple juice.”