Category Archives: poetry

My bones stay still when a man offers me the passenger’s seat of his truck; I accept and I am not even surprised when he brings me there safely, spilling details of my father’s elementary school bowl cut.

My breath stays level when the boy in my bedroom offers me the words “lovely” and “enough.” I accept those too, without crosschecking against white scars that mark each inch of my limbs.

Correction: I do not have scars. The basketball court gave me one across my knee once, but it healed. The blood creeped down my leg and I cried at the sight; the drop that stained the fog-colored pavement reminded me to be more careful. In the alternate universe, I never wish to see myself bleed.

The schoolhouse is built of red brick and no one is afraid that it will fall down with a tiny shift of tectonic plates. We open the bar-less windows in my house when we cook on Thanksgiving. Everything smells like sweet potatoes and tastes like vanilla ice cream. It doesn’t matter if I forget my house key because we have weak locks and I keep a bobby pin clipped to the pocket of my blue jeans.

People have faith in God and other uncertain things, like soulmates or their children.

I fall into the habit of loving puppies and girls with bleached hair without fear of their bite. I learn the word “slut” over popcorn and soda instead of over an empty stomach and a classroom desk. One matinee and one late-night show, a PG-13 film, a drought for bad dreams.

The train tracks are lined with sunflowers instead of suicides and all of my classmates live to graduate high school. We have to be home by dinner.

In my real universe, the small town sits in the bowl of my stomach, carrying borrowed nostalgia up and down five-lane roads, bearing the weight of all these overdue memories.

The bright California sun burns the space between where your
knotted hair scratches the side of your cheeks:
sweating tears.
Your throat silently screams for water, but your
parched lips have grown shut from mornings
just like this,
where his preaching plays loudly over sleepy memories of
the dreams you didn’t have time to write down,
and today your lips close like a dam holding back water, pressure building as he tells you not to
speak to him again.

But those lips were not always sewn shut like the bottom of your mother’s jean skirt you tore as
he pulled you over a barbed wire fence.
You came out of her shrieks in bloody sheets,
screaming in a language no one could understand yet.

You grew out of sundresses every month, barefoot under canopies of redwoods,
putting your face against the bark, breathing in pure oxygen.
Your lungs filled with cold, ocean air, so when you spoke,
it sounded like waves crashing, pulling in the body standing before you.

You were forced inland, where you sat in hard, plastic chairs, goosebumps forming beneath your
ironed, uniform skirt,
told to listen under fluorescent lights, breathing in leftover chemicals.
The other girls in ironed skirts reminded you of the pulsing in your throat in shallow
conversations, and you began to look just like them.
Your arms ached from raising your hand as a request to speak, and so the waves that filled your
lungs stopped in your mouth, leaving it salty and dry.

One day a boy looked at you like you spoke in currents again,
and you breathed oxygen straight out of his lungs, full of the smoke of his favorite brand of
cigarettes you promised your mom you’d never smoke and you felt anything but pure.
But you loved like an artist – painting every muse on the edges of your waist and the sides of
your thighs.
He covered every paint stroke with a new uniform that hid the half-moons residing in the borders
of your body which you used to love,
and you grew your knotted hair into two braids for each of the men that still wanted you to be
small.

So now, with the sun beating down on your disheveled braids, tangled after nights of restless
sleep,
you are sweating and crying a whole body of water out of you;
Empty legs in a tattered uniform sprawled on the clean sheets of a silent room.

But with every July sunrise your legs will stretch longer.
fill your body again with water;
and you will start to grow under a new canopy of oak trees that hold you like your mother on
warm afternoons.
Becoming, at first, in spite of him, and then without him,
beginning to paint again, but this time with words meant to send the storm back to sea.
You will fill a windowsill with every small bit of oxygen you can find in a nursery, so there is
growth in every corner of your room, and you breathe again with the tides:
your lips wet with anticipation by the end of August,
seeing before you every sunrise you will watch on an overgrown rooftop,
speaking to those whose words atone the washed-up parts of you,
and let the dam break
over a city who only knows new eyes

because this is the redemption of your voice.

Her veins are rivers and streetcars,
with their lurching lungs,
wood platted seats covered in the slippery sweat of thighs.
Her song in the night sounds like saxophones,
the drunk mumbles of warm hands on my thighs;
She plays it masterfully;
it croons around the halos of angels on street corners
and tumbles beneath the feet of visitors, moving across a dance floor.
She gave me a tattoo on my left knee cap,
so that Her gravel, Her earth could stay in my skin
when I am no longer curled into Her embrace.

She tries to wash off the stench of booze and cigarettes
alone in the shower,
but they are ingrained in Her skin, in Her alleyways, and in Her hair.
people see Her for Her wild eyes,
The way they shine under moonlight, glow on the riverbed,
for Her shimmering veil of prosperity and recklessness.
they do not see the begging hands sheltered beneath streetlights
and the freeways that slope up and down Her arms.
They call Her whore, She shrugs.
How can She take offense
When She is sinking,
Her people drowning,
Her struggles masked by drunken grins?
when the shinning beads have lost their glamour
and start to knot around Her neck-
how could She be selfish in a time like this?

She cannot wipe the water from the cheeks of Her kin
when they cry for reprieve from the storm,
unrelenting for thirteen years-
She cannot look them in the eye and tell them
it will be better.
Her roads are compromised with greed and empty promises
in which She has no say.
I wish She did; wish She could grab them
by white shirt collars, rip out their cufflinks, and scream.
She is mute.

She has fed me,
taught me and held me captive beneath the expansive branches
of Her oak trees, smothered in Spanish moss,
but I know She is not my mother.
I know I was not born from the same wellspring,
the same humid haze, as Her people were.
I will never hear the melancholy music
Her children were born with already in their ears.
when She kisses me goodnight,
I pray She can escape Her glittering noose
and run barefoot back into the swamp;
where She comes from,
where She belongs.

Featured in Edition 1 of The Dilettante.

tw: sexual assault

the touch of a man
is a heavy hand
resting on my thigh when I was fourteen
too scared to say no
but should I say no?
shouldn’t I like this?

that’s what the media tells me,
directs me, disrespects me
I was a child then and now I am not, but I still
wear these traumas like a heavy coat in
scorching heat

for a while I think that is
all I am, just
a body
but I am learning and growing
punching and kicking
yelling and screaming
silently
the things that were done to me
were done
to me

I am a person and
this is my body and these are my bones
these are my, my, mine
lift your heavy, dirty hands
from my tender flesh, marred by the
scars that try to conceal the
wounds you have inflicted over all these years
ugly reminders of what it is to be
a woman

I am not yours to have, to keep,
to conquer
I am mine and mine alone
despite the sins that have settled into my bones

Featured in Edition 1 of The Dilettante.