Forgotten Daughters Club

I am part of the forgotten-daughters club;

the middle children, last picked.

Grocery baggers, first teased.

I am part of a flagless nation;

the unplanned, deserted youth.

Shirt taggers, coffee-whores.

 

The in-betweeners.

Black plus white, but never grey.

Swaying like dandelions in the wind

back and forth till there’s nothing left

except skinned knees and frizzy hair.

 

I walk around with pockets full

of wooden nickels and synthetic hope.

A kind word for other club members:

“Bask in the light that shines through the key hole.”

The day may never come for some,

but there’s beauty in an endless night.

 

The club is faceless, yet you’ll recognize

the gatekeepers and the dream-weavers.

We fight with tears, and words, and

the relentless need to catch frayed edges

like unfinished songs

like what the moon says to the sun

when the day is done.

 

Los intersticios, I once read Gloria write.

9-5ers or college debt bound.

That’s us, the forked tongued 1.5ers

The less-thought of nation,

the mother’s daughters club,

the nowhere answers

are all a part of me.

The Namesake

My mother named me Samantha because her doctor said I was due on the Feast of Saint Samuel the Prophet. As a result I’ve always felt hungry, and just a little bit late. Assurances were sent: first, know that this new creature was not initially on the roster; second, we will not call her anything ethnic, anything the neighbours can’t pronounce. She will be named after the one who straddled two eras–the prophet, you understand, not the one from Bewitched who engages in witchcraft and shirks domestic labour.

Onomastics is just what it claims to be, I guess. As a child I used to wrinkle my nose a lot, despite being inappropriately fond of Venn Diagrams. These days, I’m not as certain to be overlapped. I still feel like I’m arriving just a little bit late.

שְׁמוּאֵל (Shemu’el) means “the name of G-d” or “G-d has heard”. Samantha can mean “the listener”. You know, I once read a story called The Nine Billion Names of G-d, but tell me: does He even hear the sublime networking possibilities of living on the cusp, equidistant from every boundary? Can He straddle at least two worlds (or three) with Lucifer heckling him from a nearby pie chart?

Born Francisco, my father moved to Britain and changed his name to Earl. It took me fifteen years to discover that. My mother said she told me long ago, but I wasn’t listening. What more can I tell you? I am highly sympathetic to the stories held by inanimate objects and I am trying to be better at listening. For some, I’ll always be a little too late. I remember that for my Confirmation, I tried on the name Ursula, the patron saint of orphans (and bears, I thought), but my father forbade me to wear it. I changed it to Amelia, the patron saint of bruises. Now I get wounded a lot, what with all the listening.

A Crush in the Cruelest Month

It’s not easy coming back from the dead

each year to lilac’s febrile pull, a wild

push of styptic plum & dogwood’s blood-plashed

petals—a press to mull: blemish, passion;

the language shoves, our shoulders put to: door,

cellar door, cellar door—can you hear it?

The most beautiful sounds mysterious

fidelity to our ears, we linger:

in linguals, to dentals, what gutturals

tunnel this radix of time & place: that radish

or wool, turniped but heaving the blue, roots

singing their long, twisted song the way it goes

Ode to 89

five years old, i was pooping
on the grown-up toilet
when i saw a raft spider creeping
across the white tiles.
it was orange, the size of a comb.

it didn’t warrant a scream. i asked it,
“Hello?” and to this day
i’ve never told anyone
what it said, because
it was so simple. she was running
from something. slowly, though.

i almost called out for my father
fairly certain he would have
killed it, if it needed killing.
but my feet were not even
on the tiles. they were up
in the air. i was small, not

small as a comb, but maybe
as a giant’s toothpick. i had lost
four teeth already. i was moving
to another world called Jamaica.
i could almost reach
the coconuts on the tree.

she was orange, and lovely,
in a bright, scary way, with more
eyes than she knew what to do with.
i said again “Hello?” and it said
something like “Don’t touch me.
I’m poison.” it blew me a kiss, like all
beautiful things. so i let it go
behind the radiator, and i finished
pooping.

by the time i grew up
i had killed my share of things.
mostly fat flies, a good batch
of mosquitoes, and once i watched
my girlfriend catch a mouse

to throw him away in a dumpster
in a closed bag. for that, i’m still afraid
of the dark. when a stranger says
“Hello?” and motions for me to roll
down my window i don’t,
and then i do, because i am still five,
but also fifteen, and twenty-eight,

which means by now i know
i have a poison in me somewhere, so
i roll down my window, and the stranger
asks for directions. i can smell
the alcohol on his breath, it is 9 AM
and i’m not lost, i’m in my car,
i’m here on planet earth.

the stranger wants to know
what i think, is memorising what i say
though my words are thin,
and last night i cried without end
about the same old things.

i do not want to see poison
in every woman, hair
wrought from wool, or silk, mouth plump
with sleep, forehead smooth
as a desert. even though her hands
could make a small life hurt.

i have monologued to several
sleeping women. i have woken up
late and run out the door to a place
i did not want to be. i’ve thrown up
on a big boat whose sole purpose
was to turn men into boys. i’ve poured
coffee into cups, one after the other,

for people whose names i did not
carry. i’ve been psychic about
the wrong things. i can reach
the coconuts. a weight sleeps across my chest
like a cat, but made of winter’s
hardest months. this may warrant a scream

for my father. i am rarely at peace,
my voice curdles in my throat, too sweet,
when i pass strangers.

now that i am bigger, i am small as a comb.
i fit in the pocket of a green afternoon.

a god i am uncertain of keeps running me
through her hair.

Cradle Symmetry

Today I remembered that when I was born a baby, I was born alone.

I mimicked Frank O’Hara and in the most pressing emergency

decided to get out of there. I, too,

“chose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans”.

I looked up at sister, father, and nurse

As unwombed oxygen brushed my coal-coloured hair.

Doctor, mother, and a sweet epidural buzz

Clung to my cartilage like smoke.

I had no one to talk to, really, except a thumb.

Past my twelfth hour, I turned to my fellow babies in a row,

But they were so angry about everything. Like I would be, later.

I asked one, whose heart beat through her head,

What time she’d arrived, did she agree it was too warm in here,

Was she excited to be alive, etc. She howled at the lamps.

She was hard to get to know. Like I would be, later.

I asked another, who flickered yellow, if he missed home.

Did he miss the hose meals, the Billie Holiday,

The living out your potential in a bath,

Is that why he couldn’t quit barking?

I was getting delirious.

I had no other neighbours, save plastic chirping boxes,

So I balanced carefully on the edge of my incubator

And pled to the apeish faces behind the wall of glass.

The more I reasoned, the fewer listened. I turned back to my thumb.

Achy and shrivelled, it tucked itself into my hand.

I laid back down and tried to sing to myself.

And that’s when I, too, couldn’t stop crying.

It was just like it would be, later.

once more for the construct (ii)

they said i’d never know the word depravity
until i left you; so for the second time today,

i have left you for words. to be fair,
i’ve mispronounced my whole self into these knots.

one never wants her dreams to inhabit the linear world,
but since the ending is near, i cannot help but think it.

this one is for being. corrugated, listless wreaths and
flighty synapses still refuse to speak on the matter.

have we really always been
so permanent as that?

October

The eyes are falling off
One by one,
And then all at once into nothing,
Nowhere.
The evil maybe isn’t eyeing me as much?
Up and down,
As though I were a gross and violent creature.

The pomegranate is imperfect;
Some seeds rotted
Some seeds shiny and whole, but sour
Still, the ritual is homelike.
Homemaking.
Cut gentle grooves,
Invite rough quarters with my thumbs,
Broken, like childhood, into chunks.

The child is grown.
Atop a bicycle larger than one I would ride,
Or so whispers my oft distorted recollection.
His hair is locked;
I wonder if he remembers me,
Or how to say my name.

(The aching’s here:
This queerness, this only-loving-other-people’s-children
This poorness, this aloneness
This curious desire for selfsame blood and love)

The keys, too big for my palm,
Multiplying.
Stickers & colors,
Different locks on various doors of many rooms
Of much storage for the things of life:
The beer,
The boxes,
The money,
The mail.
The ice cream.

The warrior-body’s here.
Shielding, internalizing,
Shifting, disorganizing,
Changing.
Growing into authentic dignity.
Less threatening,
Uncomfortable.
Disbelieving that trust is worth it,
That faith is possible,
Or safe.
Trying it anyway.

Fall

Today, I am certain that I changed the weather.
It has been so hot here —
I haven’t been sleeping well.
I wake up constantly,
Taking a new layer off each time before falling back asleep.
When I do dream, it’s of my Nana’s house.
She’s still dead but I’m there,
Cooking, cleaning, hosting ghosts.
You were there.
You walked right in, sat down next to me and held my hand.
It was 95 degrees yesterday, but today it’s freezing.

the thousandth scene

there are some scores i must settle with myself,
namely that i will not be a part of you but as ephemera
at dawn, an echo winnowing from the lake & silhouettes of palm trees
marketing ‘just this once’ as viable pieces of time.

it’s after laughter and lightness and et cetera that time lies
somewhere between staying too long and leaving too soon,
sitting across from that absolute, conditional you,
bracing against flat-footed heartbreak.

please do not misunderstand.
to the one who harbors my poems inside them,
tangled in blankets–i would say
i love them, but “i” is far too strong a word
and “love” is not strong enough.

and she’s always been a transplant

the radiator is hissing
lullabies from the snake room
the house is shutting itself down
for the night
and i am under a down grey blanket
on the couch dreaming
of the little clay girl
who lives on the underside
of my diaphragm.

i imagine her sitting
on the sidewalk of my liver
dropping pebbles into balloons
just to see how many will fit
before the tear and the burst
send slow cannon balls
gliding down past her
reflecting pool pupils.

she likes to feel the weight of breaking.
she loves to feel pretty things grow full.

i ask, from her perspective,
how many pebbles does she think
the arteries of my balloon heart
can swallow before there is
no longer room in my chest
for it to expand,
before the tears start
to threaten bursting.

will it look like a piñata?
will she be too tempted to
strike and watch me explode?
i am stuck here, willingly.
my heart is too full to leave.
oakland, it was too easy to flirt with you
and mean it.

i still welcome you with timid fists.
i am still a misrepresentation of myself.

i know well
the complex heat of lying.

i know well
the complex weight of home.