All the men I want are fallen fruit, not so much forbidden, as inadvisable to the salubrious a tad fermented a worm burrowing through dark spots and dull skin Not looking to play savior I am so fabulously saved, like red wine on a white shirt, like seeds weeping into black dirt, like a number in my phone I never called Do I want to be beneath the tree soft and tired like holed-up holy fruit I'm not addicted, but it's my favorite kind The stuff that's started to live why does live mean leave Why do I always compare the hairs on your chest to winter vines Why do I crave to make kiddush over your body Sinking deeper into the earth hope a distant, circling bird my mouth comes upon you hungry, tasteless animal But in reality, I turn the pages of the prayer book and wonder if I'm rotten
june bugs cracking open. basil weep and wilt. late night illuminated by fake suns, sticky air, water hanging over us like thick film, glow & smoke. the sun set and set and set and never left. under the moon, saw a fish drained. covered in butterflies. so sweet in death. so full of cold water. mouth leaking. finally after life the body tries to save itself. three fireflies & soft flesh falling off the pit. all tender things i couldn’t catch. the air is supersaturated, threatening rain and birdsong. the wavelength of a cicadas scream is now palpable. see that redshift wail in between the trees?
over the phantom trees by the back wood, girls find shelter in laps and butcher hands, which slip like river water. i remember that cold, that gray mistaken as exit wound, that girl who told me to keep walking through the billow, unsmoken bodied and hairstill. we bury the shrapnel like pearls as the thaw spits on the war exhibit with hail chips. the scythe squeezes a blue syrup in the sky and we assume this is the process of forgetting. we learned what parts of ourselves to kill and un-hue and how to nestle in other people’s mouths -- to lose the mass of your own ghost and the glints of family portraits that ricochets like a white asterisk. our bellies are filled with half-sharpened knives and apples throat-rottened and beautiful.
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND, 2012We take your blue Cadillac, paid for with a summer’s worth of minimum wage paychecks. Sometimes, the driver’s side window falls off its track and you lay on the hot blacktop with a screwdriver trying to poke it back up from underneath the door. I burn the backs of my thighs on the navy leather, turn up the dial on your cassette player, roll down the window and stick out my hand. For the whole weekend, we dine on sliced oranges and vodka for every meal. When we hold hands, our fingers stick. I walk around wearing almost nothing, red toenails bright against bare feet, and pay for my bravery with burnt skin. On the Seaside Boardwalk, you buy me an impossibly tiny cup of Dippin Dots, freezer burnt and deliciously pink. Astronaut ice cream, you call it, and in the 3 pm sunshine, we snap our eyes shut and imagine ourselves in the darkness of outer space, floating. When I peek, your eyes are so crinkled they have swallowed your long black eyelashes. Every last one, whole. On the amusement park swings, you are a blur of color: hand-me-down green t-shirt, worn blue jeans, white white teeth, red red popsicle lips. You are not mine but yesterday, my favorite song came on the radio, all sunshine twang, and you knew all the words. I turned around and in the backseat I saw that you had packed two pillows. You, brighter than white sunshine bouncing off cold May waves. ON LOVING A BOYWhen you love a boy who did not always know that he was a boy, loving him will be the most interesting thing about you. You will have endless answers but their questions are always the same. They want to know how long you knew, how his body is changing, how expensive it is, if you’re, like, straight now, and most of all, they want to know how you fuck. Even the ones who don’t ask are asking how you fuck. The sex does not really change but your hands do. They learn where they are welcome (the flat space in the middle of his chest, his ribcage, shoulders) and recoil from the places they are not (his breasts, the curve of his hips, the slope of his thighs). No one asks how you are but many people will call you brave. This is confusing because you are not brave, you are impatient. When it all began, he shut down so you gently corrected his mother when she talked about the side effects of taking “steroids.” You think maybe you never want to be a mother at all. They rarely thank you for the information and never ask what else you know. (On average, there are 613 seeds in a pomegranate. Virginia Woolf published Orlando in 1928. Girls love boys all the time, and he still takes his tea with three heaping spoonfuls of sugar.)
I let everyone sleep while I pour over pillow stories, wondering if this is penance for greedy moments of slumber taken in lieu of coffees shared between friends tiptoeing around, foraging for snacks and coffee at 5AM slowly crinkling a Cliff bar out of its plastic prison I become what I hate ruining soft hours with incessant but quiet noise who knew it only takes six weeks to turn over a lifetime of public grievances; no rest for the modestly wicked sure changes people odd hours make you powerful the master of all sleep except your own, crawling into crooks of arms whispering “it’s time to get up” like the little voice deep down beckoning me to jolt awake and prepare the day for the sun to rise and strip me of my squandered magic
I AM NOT A BOARDER OF MY OWN BODYPreviously published in {m}aganda magazine, 2018, under the title “The Body of Lilith” They said my body belongs to my future husband. Be touched by another man and I’d be marked as impure. In high school, we were required to wear long-sleeved, loose blouses and long, plaid skirts; in spite of the rage of summer, all for the image of purity, enduring the heat and suffocation for the sanctity of femininity because isn’t that all there is to being a woman? A woman has to be pure until the day of marriage. There is no room to explore our sexuality—why would we even have to? We were created from the lower rib of Adam, molded to be a lifelong companion of a lonely male. They said my body belongs to the men I meet day after day. In college, I was told several times to lose weight. I’d look better with less pounds, they said. More men will find me attractive if I get slimmer, they said. No one wants a fat, sad girl, they said. There is a standard of beauty you must uphold: huge breasts, slim waist, small feet, round ass, flawless skin, upturned nose, perfect teeth—these are your keys to success. Life is so much easier if you win the genetic lottery. Take catcalls as compliments; at least someone thinks you’re fuckable. Wear something tight but decent. Let them see how defined your shape is, but leave something to the imagination. After all, you were made to become a spectacle that feeds the male gaze. They said my body belongs inside four walls, preparing dinner plates and doing laundry. I was not born with physical strength ideal for hunting. My bones and muscles were meant to carry a child, not the universe. Running a company, a country, the world—these are a man’s job. I ran everyday errands. At 20, I already get asked how many children I want to have, at what age I plan to settle. I tell them I don’t want to give birth nor get married. “What is the point of being a woman then,” they ask me, “if you won’t build a family?” Is the essence of womanhood solely to become a mother, become a wife? Can I not aim to fall in love with another woman, to conquer the world of art and science, to start a revolution? They said my body belongs a deity I cannot even believe in. My physical pleasure was an offense to my so-called savior. They keep asking why I do not pray. I keep asking why god is portrayed as a male, when the truth is that women are the ones birthed to create. I will remain agnostic if being faithful means having to kneel in front of one more man just for me to prove my loyalty, just for me to feel that I am alive. They said my body was everyone else’s but mine. I may be in charge of its function, but not of its appearance nor purpose. Life as a woman continues to feel like living in a room you cannot get yourself to call home, no matter how familiar you are to every crook and cranny, every edge and stain on the cream-colored walls, because something about the place still leaves you alienated, and this thing you just cannot come to grips with, the je ne sais quoi bleeding through the windows, it always finds its way into your little private space, painting itself on the walls and leaving you yearning for comfort from when comfort should be found in this very room. I am done apologizing for giving into the temptation to explore more than I am allowed to. Why am I even living within restrictions when I can own the stars? My body is scarred, exhausted after decades of thinking that I was birthed solely to become a subordinate. Women deserve more than this, but the problem lies in the sad truth that most of us were brought up believing that we do not have a say. Women must realize that our lives are a constant struggle, and we are warriors in defense of our femininity. There is a need to rebel, assert ownership of our own body, find strength in what they call imperfections. We are not boarders of our own bodies, and it’s about time we show the world who’s truly in control. MAGDALENELast summer I learned that victim was synonymous to sinner. I never set out to stand on a pedestal, be on the other end of an empty prayer but the sting of concrete against fresh wounds, of flesh burning did not numb me enough to not feel the way they held me down, force my mouth open to accept unwanted Eucharist-- words began to lose their meaning the way they robbed me of mine. I began to call abuse as experience because no one believes in demons anymore: how they claim women’s bodies as theirs, feed on their blood and turn them into slaves, insert themselves in places they only want to destroy. Suddenly whore became another word for survivor. I lived with violence growing inside my womb. I tried to swallow as many pills as I could just to make its heart stop from beating, its mouth from consuming all that is left of me, but I never got to undergo a proper abortion.
i remember when my dreams weren't about you, when i saw incandescent lights and pulled my own body from the river, bruised and rotten. now, i anchor you to the bottom of the ocean, where the water is red and tastes like blood and salt. we sit on parked cars that aren't ours and watch the moon grow so big she touches our hands with her tender blue warmth. i tell you i've never seen snow before and your laughter fills me to the brim, it's excessive, spilling in all directions until we’re both choking under it and i look at you but you've disappeared, leaving behind a soft silver outline and fragments of the memories we had together: touching sweaty foreheads under the blinding february sunlight, me tasting your apple cider mouth until my tongue felt sticky, sewing a gardening patch to the inside of your mothball covered denim jacket. come morning, my body is damp and weightless. your absence is reminiscent of my early-teen heartaches, thick and syrupy. when i dream again, you're looking at me with grief and joy at all once. i sew the image to the back of my eyelids. this way, i can keep you forever.
My mother told me she was a witch She would prove it on the cribbage board A game never lost She hid herself behind card games Pick up five, queen of spades One word too far and she’d let tears fall And the blame would rest on our cheeks Like the freckles we stole from her Her teeth, the white chipped peg of my childhood She casted spells over us Quickness to anger Rounded nose A sadness that lives in our blood Conjured in the womb Her heart-hope festered in us Swaddled, we never stepped far from home My mother told me she was a witch
you don’t always want The Poem to grab you by the jaw and kiss you hard or gut you like a fish or show you the face of God or even scream I LOVE YOU in the pouring rain. in truth, you like it best when The Poem takes you to a little farm with a wildflower field. you like that it picks you up at noon on the dot in a used Toyota Prius that smells of take-out Cinnabon. the trunk is packed with a baby blue picnic blanket and plastic champagne glasses. you both drink Evian water instead of pinot grigio. you like that The Poem hums the melody of a romantic-era choral arrangement absentmindedly within earshot. for a moment its world revolves around appreciating the apple orchard. for a moment it is overcome by a silent sky-gazing daze, it has gotten lost in the middle of the summer scenery. it politely pays you no mind, and you suppose it is forever lost in reverie, but then you catch its eye and soon a rosy smile blooms between the Granny Smith trees. it doesn’t command attention on purpose, it’s just that natural Mercury conjunct Venus magnetism. this aspect shows in the way it speaks. the conversation is always a bedtime story. commentary is proverbial. it explains things in the tone of sunday school sermons with the passion of an overzealous conspiracy theorist. The Poem compliments strangers on their superhero backpack pins and red lips, messy buns and waterfall braids, loud laughs and eloquence, like a totally tipsy girl at a house party named Taylor. (although The Poem is entirely sober.) it prefers to solely wear the same three sweaters with the occasional genuinely pretentious beret. you find it funny that The Poem tries to be vegan. it orders the salad instead of the prime rib. but it still eats the brioche. it is the monarch of social butterflies, yet it identifies as an introvert. it attends a knitting and baking club with a gang of groovy local grandmas and makes the bed with fresh rosemary and lavender scented linens every morning. during autumn and winter months, The Poem hosts informal soirées in which she personally serves every guest her father’s homemade vegetable soup in handpainted ceramic bowls; in summer it prepares cake bites for brunch. The Poem is written to be played affettuoso legato. it plays Prelude In G, Opus 32, No. 5 by Sergei Rachmaninoff on Sunday evenings before it goes to sleep in a silk eyemask, under a pink princess canopy at eight. The Poem loves you, and shows it. it is not self-aware in the least. in the best way.
ODE TO NAANI AMMIone two beads strumming down her pink thumbs & astaghfaar astaghfaar she sings for her fears are all too real. My naani, her anthem of bliss is for me. Her moonlight of the times when she lit up the cowfat lamp. Her beeping radio sound before blackout Our veranda flooded in eulogies whispered by naani. she gifts me talismans she kisses for the umpteenth time before bed. her poems are mercy. She calls me mercy. calls me soothe. butter ghee. calls me the warm oil she floods my hairline with. Her touch - all feeling Now When the gappaywala wails, wait wait, let silence brood the air & this is harbinger, she is that autumn tree I'm preserving. Don't you see She is me. She/me thumbing tasbeehs I collect pearl lotuses and embroider her sapphire necklaces. her tinted hairline down the equator ON BEING FAT & DYINGEmbrace me in dying light no whispers, no moving jaw. sealed mouth you carry me – in your quake singed with all the powers of manhood/perfection. The first time he called me fat & sick & useless like the Chinese leftovers, Trump and armpit hair. He meant it. He meant it when he staked chemo faggot through my pelt. I blame DNA like an unwanted reality, like that surgery scar kissing my belly. My war prize. 46 chromosomes and my dying light 46 chromosomes & nowhere left to go. He meant it when he pushed me down the concrete sidewalk, smell burnt tyre & sugar spit like it’s heavenly. like chomping down nails is an act of god. He asked me to shake the dust & I prided forever. in sap, skin – all the flesh & this saturated oil in everything in me. No blood, no room to call home adipose a native city. Plump, yet mellow Whisper in my skin & love me no more
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