Yelling out,
Where are you,
doesn’t make the dead return.
Yet you convince yourself
that the tingle on the back of your neck in the black
is more than just the ceiling fan.
You want to tell yourself that they returned through the steel veiled doors
but remember, you and yours,
When you’re kneeling –
Screaming –
Pleading –
On all fours –
They left in September and they’ve never left,
Always in the urn.
She was dead long before she stopped breathing.
Her sunken, empty eyes
held no hope as she sat idly
on the deck or face-down on the beach as the sun
breathed her in.
She seized her moments of clarity around their necks
and submerged them, whining in ether.
She starved her body of loving embrace
and recoiled to touch like she was toxic
and contagious.
And when her eyes fused shut when life burnt out,
she reached towards the ceiling for God to hold her.
I often wonder what moment
for you was the pistol
and what moment
was the decision to pull
the trigger.
It’s usually a split
decision that moves like
an indiscernible
brush stroke, uniform –
An obvious beginning
and end but no sign
of the climax.
I often wonder what life
you would have led
if you didn’t stay –
If you didn’t say yes
to a rock that was below
your worth –
If you didn’t measure
your life in poorly
assembled dominoes –
A uniformity doomed from the moment
you began self-medicating.
You were never meant to fall straight.
Would you have
remained
in the Native Land
with red clay to call
home and ground yourself
to ancient beings who never fell from the sky?
Who would you have become
if you stopped
holding on so hard?
I may have never been
but I speculate the sacrifice
would have been worth you knowing
old age.
In my grandmother’s kitchen my mother told me,
You will never get a boyfriend
with your hair parted down the middle.
Her cigarette burned down as I burned down to a pile
of inferiority.
Clearly, naively, innocently, I listened.
I heeded the woman
whose hair was frozen in Aquanet since 1984
that my romantic endeavors were reliant on where my hair
fell from the top of my head
and how delicately my hair sat atop my shoulders
and how I should probably brush out the curls because they look messy
You look messy.
Sloppy.
Knotty.
Untamed.
For years, I concerned myself with the aesthetics of my coils
rather than the intention of my character and the intentions that fell
from the bottom of my heart
and how loud my heart beat on my sleeve
and how unimportant my hair was but I could not see —
Could not see past my hair
past what I needed to be for my mother
in order to be loved by another.
That I was raised to be thin
to diet
to move
to try
to critique what I was
and not who I am.
To be thin and pretty God forbid I be a fat child and love my middle part —
Because we need to be thin and pretty.
My mother was thin and pretty
and blonde.
And tall.
And had sky-high hair and box dye status.
As an adult I could be fat and pretty but not pretty fat and ugly
and only after I found someone to love my hair placed delicately to the side
could I be fat and pretty or ugly and thin
because at least I’d be thin.
I could let myself go only after
I placed my intentions and the messy heart on my sleeve
delicately to the side.
I could unravel like my mother did and stand behind the kitchen island
and treat it as a podium and tell my daughter,
her granddaughter
You must change before you are loved.
So I walked the line of my middle part of
black and white —
Of judgment —
Of hope someone would fall in love
with my placement and one day I woke up too many years later and realized
This. Was. Dumb.
My hair coils and curls and speaks for itself
and spoke for me before I found my voice.
My body moves and grows and shrinks like my mane
and I am ever-changing
and always speaking.
Some days I may feel thin and pretty
or fat and ugly and now instead of dwelling
I release my hair
I appreciate the entropy
and whoever can love that entropy will love everything
I’ve come to love about me.
Smoke coiled through the seams of the car
and we sat in the back in the haze while classic rock blared
into your ears and you forgot for a moment that you were a mother,
that you were my mother.
Loosely strumming on the steering wheel,
palms and thumbs drumming.
Music maker child maker —
I wanted to be just like you.
I wanted to be like you until the sun went down because
when the sun went down the bottle came out
and there was dracula —
And the werewolf —
And you.
You damaged, fermented
Dragon Woman with hands that curled
to knotted tree branches and poison spat out of you.
We hid
I hid in my closet until the lightbulb died.
And I realized I never wanted to be like you.
But you taught me so much.
You taught me to be afraid
(I was afraid of my mother)
So I had to be strong
And you taught me to be strong and to question you
Question everything —
Go against you.
Your vicarious wishes of who I should be
who I was —
But I didn’t have a fucking clue.
And when the morning came that I watched breath escape
your chapped lips for the final time you somehow taught me right there to look Death straight in his face
and fear nothing because I already knew you, Dragon Woman.
And I don’t want to be you but I came from you
you created me — me.
I am the daughter of patricia —
Of teased hair and electric blue eyeliner —
Of wild coolness.
I grew up at the altar of an ‘03 mustang
With empty diet coke cans and Bic lighters on hand.
Bic lighters everywhere
fire always on hand.
And you drummed your primal ancient animal skin beat to the chant in your head —
Do no harm. Take no shit.
The final lesson of my mother.
It all must go to come again.
The tree, the soul knows
the turn of leaf, the letting go.
Each moment, memory dropped to earth
becomes part of something greater.
Copper hued ground, life returns
to the maker. 🍁
I call on old souls,
complex and raw.
Centuries old –
Millennia old.
Those that see the world
with new eyes and familiar feelings.
Gut warnings and wishes.
Lessons of parallel dimensions.
Learn,
or come back again.
We took a sunset hike
up the Algarve cliffs, sincere
and ancient and strong like our grandmothers.
Red clay marked up our legs
as proof we didn’t stop climbing,
all just to see the azure
from a new angle.
We were told secrets by seabirds,
perched on the eyelids of the ocean.
We gazed down into a cavern
as seawater pumped blue blood into the heart
of the cliff.
The sun, midday and sleepy
looked bigger than I remembered,
steady.
And I stood like the seabirds –
The beauty of how small we are.
New Year’s Eve was mangled
in heaps of bodies heaving back and forth
like an angry sea –
We beat the rain
but were stopped by the cover charge.
Everyone pushed around in such a way
where some were trying to make it to the new year first –
And others wanted to hide in bathrooms
and corners
and alleyways
and under lovers.
Abandon your purses under bars,
lose your identity so the spirits of the new era
don’t recognize you and you can start
with a new name,
a new mission.
Drowning in liquor and kisses from strangers
we spill into the streets of Queens
with her 24-hour fruit stands
and public indecency.
We wake up with our IDs tucked neatly in our pockets –
Hungover –
In places foreign to us.
But we are as we were only hours before
when we had more time
and less headaches.
I thought my 20s
would be when everything
made sense –
I don’t know what I was expecting, though,
since my 20s began with the death
of my mother
and ended with the death
of my limitations.
My 20s held funerary services
of who I thought I was –
who I thought was worthy of me.
It was the death of ignoring myself;
My 20s ended with me coming to life.
