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  • Poetry

     
     

    My Mother’s White Shoes

    The year I ran away,
    I was only eight.
    I had never witnessed
    winter arriving with rage,
    hurling ice like curses.

    The burden of our immigrant
    poverty slowed my limbs
    like a cross or collection of sins
    and I could not adjust
    to the wingless ways of this country.

    Penniless, I took everything
    I thought I owned one morning
    and fled with a bible,
    used clothes from the Salvation Army,
    my mother’s white shoes
    which were half a size small,
    worn into tissue-paper
    and too many books.

    The weight of all those thoughts
    scraped black trails
    in the pages of new-fallen snow
    behind me.

    I was going to be a writer.
    Even then, I knew
    I had a weak memory.
    I was afraid of forgetting the world
    in the fog of its own winter mornings,
    of losing the rain in the sea.

    I sought the irretrievable.
    Mother, I wanted to go back
    to mangoes and palm trees,
    the passionate conversation
    of night crickets, humming
    threat of malaria, orange vendors
    and rivers that housed the sun.
    But these are the very edges
    of the country we left.

    More tightly than land,
    I have held the uninhabited
    world between continents,
    where immense clouds like white whales
    drift past our airplane window.
    It was in the sky that I realized
    the entire world is an ocean;
    we are forever adrift.

    From that time, I have lost
    the things I did not pen
    or put in poems –
    plastic combs, quarter-machine rings
    bits of seashell,
    mudpies, houses,
    entire cities float away-

    Even my name
    I have lost
    our first year in America

    From that time,
    all I have remaining
    is a faint memory
    of a dim street
    it is not possible to remember

    It is empty of walls and windows
    sound or signs, lonely;
    confused in its origination,
    leading wherever
    and erased in the falling snow.

    I know I set out upon it,
    that I cried as I walked
    and was afraid
    because I had nowhere to go.

    O Mother
    I felt as you must have felt
    leaving everything for everything.
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    My Twenty-six

    Spent my birthday in a waiting room
    six hours deplumed except thin sheath of scrub
    sands me down to nub Oh god but how I’m failing
    down. Flayed to the bone, I’m bone bare nerve and stone
    Nurse pokes behind the screen
    “Saturday, you jam like flies.” Inside, my bee chums
    swarm the surgeon praying for snipsnip
    to free us. Thirty green girls jostling for our tangled names
    listing on our plastic seats pinkblue, jampacked
    holding closed our sickness clothes
    Now swapping how we hid how much we had
    to pee or spit or scratch or faint
    at work to fake like big-dicked men.
    This floozy next to me wafts thick
    She’s something wrong I wonder if the prick was drunk,
    how she’s too young and shift my seat before
    the knocked-up sharp-nose heave-hos empty out my throat.

    Picketing outside you won’t hear
    how I was raped when I was five they spooned
    red pepper into my eyes. Barefoot in the pots
    I took up screaming. Or you’ve been here
    once yourself It’s not so bad
    They puppet your legs tell you slide down
    your easy ass. Further please, the very edge.
    They don dead fingers, snap-on-a-clamp;
    command you relax your cunt or count
    down. (The nurse moves rough: a metered stunt.)
    I understand there’s hundreds more
    to come. I lid my eyes. I’d hate to point
    my anger at you, bitch.
    A black man comes in wielding sleep.
    He’s pissed at me and stays icelipped
    (I slipped?) He tourniquets my arm
    ties on a rubber tight, fair shears it off
    jabs in a draught of night like that!
    no proses and I’m died

    Lightbulb: O Look
    the extend of my arm
    O swim this wave
    the leaving room
    two forms sit slumped
    OH DO NOT RISE
    and turn me off
    I love thee sight of mites and dust
    crevices I cannot touch o
    let me glove this dark

    One month past
    I haven’t ceased the bleed
    I’m cut, the blood flows thin
    I don’t believe in God
    I’m shut I don’t forget to wake
    at four amen, pine in the dark
    for nothing, no reason at all.
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    Song of the Hunger Artist

    i.
    If not but I loved food
    how I’d stop eating
    sculpt my belly concave,
    many meals wheeled by but I’d
    shake my head, No thanks.

    The way I’d say it though
    no one would know
    but that their fare wasn’t
    food enough. They’d fear
    to offer me their cakes
    and Salisbury steaks
    plump sausages
    obese with grease
    fresh from the frying pan.

    Oh to shrink
    my waist into the Guiness book
    ,
    shrink my eyes and look for nothing
    need no one- completely
    self suffice.

    ii.
    The news today is of cuts-
    taxes and troops
    the liberation of Iraq from Iraq
    Putin’s polonium and the Taliban.
    Ever genocide in Darfur, ever maurading
    Janjaweed; cops and coons and bullets.
    What news, what news.
    My brother rings to tell me
    what new monstrous thing Dad did.

    Sister I didn’t cry the time
    I spent in jail on Dad’s advice
    the beatings bloody, blows
    we watched mom take-
    these things did not cut.
    But this morning, he took my car
    keys away and I simply cried.

    iii.
    Paper is thin.
    Knife blades are thin.
    Ice can be thin.
    I can be thin
    or cut within
    Cut out my heart
    Cut off my ears
    Cut out my eyes
    Cut off my hands, please
    cut it out!
    No one will cry
    No one will care
    care for the holes
    cry for the cold
    cold as a grave
    grave as a song
    a hungry song
    a hammered song
    a beaten song
    a bastard song
    a so long, song
    to sing along
    or diet- you’ve got to
    try it- just be
    quiet.
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    Year of the Bald-Faced Wasps: a prescient poem for New Orleans

    It is morning at the Yamasaki place-
    9200 Fritz Rd. Maple City, Michigan
    blue-green planet Earth.
    Yesterday I had a crying jag
    in a restaurant close to here
    we walked in to white-only eyes-
    narrowed macula that split
    peas, subtracting me from my skin
    which is black.
    In that preponderance of prison searchlights
    I was caught and dissolved, denied
    as I have been so many times this year
    the year of the bald-faced wasps
    (a phrase from a conversation with Susan Yamasaki
    concerning the diminishing diversity of insect
    life in this town).
    But the crying began much earlier in the day
    and before I was born even
    it collected in Bronze-age soup bowls
    wilted the Mesozoic salads.
    It beat the roofs of the first slave pens
    as steadily as rain, washing away the ground in rivulets
    peeling back the ochre sand of ochre sand dunes
    revealing the earth of our planet Earth
    which is also black.
    I am not the first to barter passage in tears,
    many have won freedom thus
    clutching for a length of rope
    a tree, a hand, any stick stuck deep enough
    to under-stand; harbor a fugitive.
    For all things share the same breath
    as Chief Seattle said and I too know
    the racist will not weather this monsoon.
    Tears pelt him naked just the same
    leave him shipwrecked once-amoeba on a slippery shore
    to which he clings, undressed of gentility
    gasping for fair, mourning the wronged
    howling for no one, no one for miles- there is nobody
    that will ever decipher
    the crying of a newborn babe.
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    Noah and the Ark

    Find me an orchestra of elephant tusk horns
    bulrongs and drums
    I must have
    instruments of hair and string
    for last night I had a vision of a two-
    winged symphony O let us
    sing our longing to the heavens
    and grieving, they will bear us to forever
    where our clothes are not so dull We
    will be made of purple
    flowers there it is always
    spring There there are no kings.
    How much longer must we ring
    this blue bubble of unbroken bitter-
    leaf soup drinking
    where pain is measured
    in depths of laughter but laughter
    often hides
    regret of salt?
    I will build a house that swims
    a fish to net the world-
    a place to warble duets
    when the big rains come.