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The World Begs for Transcription

My mother leaves a voicemail asking I work back-of-house when I can.

I haven’t had a parent call afraid for my safety since 9/11.

Close to where I live, a couple books a hotel, purchases paramilitary gear, pays
off a credit card, in order to hinder my life. The news refrains from describing
the white couple’s terrorist act at the Capitol. I wonder if it’s not a question of
the act but who feels it. Who has a good way to respond?

I’m going to distract you.

Nanay calls on Monday night to try out her new tablet. She alternates between
I’m beautiful and you’re beautiful. Beauty, meaning a pair.

We admit to gaining weight, and Ate Bernnie congratulates my well attended
Zoom meeting.

(Lots of repetition.)

Nanay wants to show that her hair is all white.

I’ve yet to find a term of self-reference that does not equate to ornament.





Someone I don’t know mispronounces my name—worse—someone who would
like to know me.

Be good and kind, they say, or else. But I am not good or kind or else I would not
look for retribution.

Cardinals and squirrels before summer when I don’t want to be responsible for
their nests.

On a podcast, a poet I love names the many accountability groups she’s joined
this year. I am jealous of her self-discipline and the word accountability, used as
a term of self-discipline, but that is not what I want.

I insist on protection. Pick up an omen the last night of the year. Foremost sin
in my mind, the one not worth confessing.

Beloved, if it is the year of the comet, do not look for the comet.

I stay so long in one place my hair lines the nests. I don’t know how to hold
down what I love, but I’ve eaten so much fruit trying to lure the animal to me.

I go to the grocery store. Two men open the door for me.

I cannot stop them.

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Tonight, a Woman

Asked not to put language in the garden

                                                                                       I could not.

Tonight, a CNN reporter was arrested when an officer refused to hear her
credentials. He repeatedly asked, Do you speak

                                                                                English. Now I fear I may be told I

speak nothing.

              Ignore everything I have said about care.


                                                                              I say it twice to negate.
   

I have heard someone I love speak around someone I love, like English is a sieve
for catching one another’s cruelty.

                              Catch and hold.

If people keep saying they love me





                                                                                                    maybe they love me

                                           and don’t know what else to say.

The earth is an emotional wreck.

                                                                           The earth is Eden + sin.

We are alive in an era of firsts we don’t recognize. A co-worker takes an ugly
photo of me in my favorite dress, and I have no redemption arc.


                                                Only a lovely speech pattern.
 

I had tried to say something about the garden. I had tried to say something
about myself.

                                         Plants that grow like weeds are popular cultivars.

We know the aftermath.

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2

I want to go home, which is a concession—home isn’t here. The opposite of
possibility, to give up possession. I often think I am losing ground.

When the passport office closes, I cut my hair.

The passport office opens. I grow it out again.

It is possible what belongs to me doesn’t dictate where I belong.

Once, at the beginning of an important friendship, we pointed at our flag and
joked, Can either of us write anything sincere about that?¹

____________

1 (Attempt)

A flag can be colorized as a second flag to represent the smallest
faction of people or to celebrate a holiday or to make a statement
—and the flag is still recognizable but now means the United States
during Breast Cancer Awareness Month or the United States
of Police Officers or the United Colonized State as Mark Twain
once described, proposing a flag for my mother’s country,
We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted
black & the stars replaced by the skull & crossbones.
Of course, my country is my mother’s country. She insists, love both!

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Different

AISA
No.
My time, my love, my body—they’re all
just as valuable as yours, magnificent as you may be.
I won’t keep saying yes, stay loyal,
remain a wound for your salty tears.
Just because the world beats you
for being Black doesn’t mean
you get to control me for being woman.

Aisa grabs Dorian’s hand and
places it around her throat.

AISA (snarling)
You want to control someone?

Aisa sinks to her knees with Dorian’s
hand still wrapped around her throat.

AISA
Fine.
But don’t expect love.
Don’t expect me to stick around,
to upgrade you while you drain me.
Don’t expect surrender to grow
where you’ve planted resentment.

Aisa tightens Dorian’s grip.

AISA (snarling)
I am not a game, Dorian.
Don’t. Play. Me.

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Proposal

DORIAN
May my love for you meditate across my tongue
like a perpetual prayer. I want every part of you,
perfect and loud. If you open, I will enter,

a willing participant in this sorcery, this explosion,
this body built of blue and bone. May the map
we draw together lead our children home, a compass
tattooed in our smiles, our joy. I cannot scrub you
from my pores, now stained with your magic.
Take me from this Earth
if ever I should try.

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Roadmap: A Family Name

DORIAN
The blueprint for the house where love lives
is stamped on my DNA. My skeleton is the rebar
in the walls, my blood the mortar between bricks.
I learned love from the bodies who fashioned me,
whose choices funneled through generations.
They are my roadmap. A family tree
strewn across street signs and construction zones,
etched on the insides of my hands. I follow
the tire tracks back to the first acceleration.
Whose bones broke to make mine?
Watch.

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A Child, a Shot, a Name

THE NOVELIST (once silent)
…
There are Black people in the future.

They grow up. They grow old. You have a choice—
will you love him now, when he can still smell
the flowers you present, or will you only love him

later, a hashtag for the cause, another morsel
stuck in the bloody teeth of white supremacy’s maw?
…

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Past, Present, Prophecy

DORIAN
…
I’ve been looking for joy
in books and lovers and television
for as long as I’ve known how to laugh.
I won’t stop being scared,
stop wondering if Blackness makes me
predisposed to violence, frailty, and loss. It does.
I know that now. The problem with politics is
you can’t avoid them when your body is political.
I was born with this skin, this fire, this target
painted on my chest. How privileged to not get involved,
to go back to your lives and forget about this flesh
lying on the pavement, one more parent
who doesn’t come home, one more funeral,
one more reason to send thoughts and prayers.

Don’t send them. We can’t use them.

Trauma is the fabric of America.
We love violence and call it human nature.
But I will not sacrifice my beloved
to fetishists of blood. Instead, I will raise a child
with clean hands, who learns what harm looks like
in the fingerprints of others. I want a new tradition
of pleasure in my children, reckless abandon in the name of beauty,
a map drawn in the pursuit of sustained disruption for justice.

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Allegory With Human Host

Trust me like the little dog has to,
having been so denatured.
Having so little to do
with a wolf. Follow me
to a sinking city
where the weather hums,
where the leaves grow monster-wide.

I put my faith in larvicide
and lizards, in the tongues of frogs.
I built a house from salt
and fossil shells.

Outside the bullfrog sings
for his bride, for the mouse
and the limp-tailed rat.
The tail of a cat or some animal flicks
at the slats of our bedroom window.

I told our boy, in so many words,
the fate of foxes.
I told him the tree frog is a friend—
that even poison has its place.
But still he woke with a red ring rising
from his side.

A ring of roses is either an amulet
or an ornament. Either way
I hung a wreath outside our door.

I said trust me like the little dog has to.
Trust me, son, to be the mother
that all soft animals require
and the little dog laughed.

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My Body Writes Me a Sonnet

Having coalesced around you, how I love you.
You are the one I breathe through the night for.
I take flesh in my mouth each day and chew
it into something that serves you, something more
than I can give you. I try to teach you what I know,
adopted child, about the past. The bone-bent grief
of the people who made you to survive in snow
you’ve never seen, to bare your teeth
at anyone getting too close to your kids
or your sweet, soft life. And all the times I endured
your laxatives and relaxers, I knew that you did
it to protect me, to make less of me to hate. Be sure
that I love you. And, of course, that I’ll outlive you.
And you haven’t asked, but of course, I forgive you.

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