like the ambulance by elizabeth tsung

Not the alien, although I feel like one too often. What does it mean to hate your father, and his father’s father? It was accidental too -- the way he refused to hold my mother’s hand, her butterfly heart shook as she birthed me. My name, a sting on white boys’ lips. You ask where I’m from. Why? So you can burn my syllables to a dying geisha. When you see my teeth in purple filtered school portraits, will you remember the overbite of hushed slurs? Or the rumors you breathe in my absence. I remember that morning in May. You move your face into the shape of pufferfish and squint at me. Come on, where are you really from? If only you knew the weight of creaseless eyelids and broken nostrils. How my bones can easily swallow me whole when your antlers straddle my womb, crushing the only slivers of carbon I have remaining.

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*out of all girls will not feel pretty at some point, Ugly Sapling Press 2016

Elizabeth Tsung is a writer and poet living in Queens, NY. For more poetry, check out elizabethtsung.tumblr.com or follow her on Twitter @ElizabethTsung.