my mother gave birth to me
& i gave birth to her sadness
i wonder:
which weighed more?
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Viewing entries in
Poetry
we
demand compensation
for every kiss
you stole
from our lips
with your lies
support the author
there is no such thing as writers block
for a people who have been
forcibly silenced.
it’s not that we have nothing to say
it’s that we have grown so used to
keeping quiet that we don’t even
remember the words to explain
what happened to us
anyways
silence is not a coordinate on this body we can pinpoint
mark with an X
“this is where my father taught me to hate myself”
“this is where my people lost our language”
“this is where my voice died inside of me”
every word feels like a ghost of what i meant to say
does that make sense?
every conversation feels like a eulogy
for some person i haven’t even met yet
do you understand?
this is what happens when a body
is forced to rehearse silence,
to practice silence until it is perfect,
to hold silence as a daily ritual
so tightly choreographed
that when you do not hear us speak
remember
we are professionals
consider how many times we have
done this before
(bravo!)
so when you ask me why i haven’t been writing
i want to take you back to elementary school
where they showed us diagrams of our bodies
with lungs that breathe
and bones that break
but they never told us where all the feelings go
and i have been trying to figure out
ever since
clung onto man
and pen
and failed to trust
either
fell into love
and dream
and came out
with skinned knees
from both
so when the doctor asks me what’s wrong
i take off my shirt
give him a pencil
have him trace the muscles on my back
until he finds that point where i stopped standing up for myself when the pressure got too much.
draw an X there,
remember the spot.
how do you treat silence?
how do you prescribe that?
how do you teach a body to stop
speaking itself out of existence?
in this world a diagnosis requires words
and there are no words for this
there is just me
and this emptiness
there is just me
and this emptiness
there is just me
and this emptiness.
and that is enough.
maybe we are so silent
because we have been made terrified
of what we are capable of saying
because i don’t remember my first word
but i can tell you that every time i write it feels like i am speaking for the first time again
i have looked in mirrors my entire life and not recognized the face
staring back
until i wrote a poem and remembered what i look like on the inside
and i do not believe in god
but i have seen my own hands make things that i do not recognize with my own eyes
our art is a ceremony
to remember all of the feelings
we had to kill
just to survive
our poetry
is self medication
administered through the
tongue in lethal doses
consume it at your own risk
and until then,
remember,
you have the right to remain silent.
support the artist
when a birth certificate hijacks a body and tells it to forever hold its peace
we must ask:
what would it mean to say
that i was assigned brown at birth?
(& then came ‘man’ as the punctuation
mark after)
what would it mean to say that
after 9/11
my ?
became !
what would it mean to say that
the war on terror made me trans?
would you believe me if i told you
that i woke up afraid of myself?
would you believe me if i told you that
i have spent the past decade
flying away from man because
he brown
he !
would you accept me if i told you
that my identity is the inhale
yanked exhale
the trauma
yanked body
the violence
yanked gender ?
would you accept me if I told you
my gender came from violence?
because sometimes i wonder
if there would be gender if there
were no violence.
sometimes i
wonder if there would be body if
there were no trauma.
sometimes i
wonder if there would be brown
if there were no plane.
last weekend i smiled
when the security guard
patted me down
i wonder
if he was searching for my
gender
i wanted to shout “wait – you are right —
i am concealing a weapon down there”
how we no longer attempt
to translate violence into
language
how we have found ways
to make their !
? itself
how good it feels
to have them fumbling
in the darkness
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there is a photo on the fridge back home of me at
maybe eight or nine wearing a cardigan, a plaid tie,
and matching dimples.
this is the kind of photo
my family has selected for commemoration because it’s
a type of nostalgia that reminds grownups of words like innocence.
the type of photo you can mail back home across the ocean say,
“look how happy we are here” “we made it”
this photo was taken during my elementary school’s living history
museum where students dressed up like some famous person and stood like a statue until parents came and pressed a button
then we’d come to life and narrate our stories.
i chose martin luther king.
so when families pressed my button
i said something like
“long ago this country used to be racist but
then i came along and made it better”
all of them clapped – my family too – and they took this photo
and put it on the fridge because they were proud of me
for doing a good job
and i believed them
so when beatrice got suspended for bringing a knife to slice her pear
— the same day my math teacher told my parents i “might be a genius”
so after 9/11 when i found myself equally brown and ashamed
— the same day my hindu temple made a shirt that said “proud to be american”
so when i became the darkest face in all my advanced classes
— the same day there was a shooting at the other school
my father taught me how to tie a tie
and recite our
pledge of assimilation:
“long ago this country used to be racist but
then i came along and made it better”
when you rinse brown across a blue ocean
does it get lighter or darker?
(your choice)
in 1958 my grandfather moved from india to pursue a phd in english
i wonder what his colleagues wrote in his letters of recommendation
how remarkable it was for a brown man to emerge from a fractured lung mistaken
as country and breath english so poetically
(footnote: why can’t the black people speak like that too)
in 1964 the civil rights act banned discrimination against racial minorities
(footnote: when you throw a piece of paper in a pool of blood – who wins?)
in 1965 the immigration act instituted a system that gave preferential treatment to immigrants with skills
(footnote: bring in brown to keep black down)
my grandfather tells me that he
always respected martin luther king
and was sad to hear about his assassination.
i have never asked him if
he left his library to the streets,
because i know the answer the way i
know my people
the way we are
too busy reading rather than revolting
the way we will develop theories about revolution
for someone else to fight
the way that we have been trained to
keep quiet,
smile back
when the white man said jump
we said:
how many grades?
said work harder!
so we had to cheat to keep up
stole the words straight from their tongues
said: "hello my name is martin luther king
and i have a dream that one day asian americans
will appropriate the Black struggle for our own advancement
and blame Black people for not working as hard"
almost fifty years later
this model minority holds a scantron like a mirror
recognizes that their body has always been filled in as an answer
and i am sitting in my gentrified apartment
in my gentrified skin writing poetry with big words that i learned in private school like
‘white supremacy’ which means that i could you tell about how there
is a long history of white people painting themselves black
but i am looking at a photo of myself from
when i was eight or nine and put on martin luther king
used the black struggle to legitimize my difference
to my white peers growing up
which feels like its own form of
blackface
press my button,
see what happens
bring in brown to keep black down:
when i speak about how my people were colonized by the british
but not mention how they gave some of their ties, titles, and guns
and we used all three against our own
hide all the blood we made beneath the
brown
bring in brown to keep black down:
when i cry about diaspora and missing my homeland
did not mention the countless bodies we
stepped on when we got here
just to get close enough to kneel
for a white man – dick or
degree is there a difference —
carry both on your tongue
bring in brown to keep black down:
when white people use one hand to give us medals
and the other to give them handcuffs
ask them why they can’t be as
hard working as us?
bring in brown to keep black down:
when we post facebook statuses about
how police brutality affects people of color
while on the block next door
a man two bullets darker gets arrested
by a night three shades
lighter.
what i mean to say is
go back home and look at the fridge
what images have the privilege of nostalgia?
in one story
black is forcibly transported across an ocean in a ship
as they put a collar around her neck
in another story
brown books the next ship out as they
put a tie around his
“long ago this country used to be racist (but then
white people brought us here to make it seem better)”
and we have done little to make them
think otherwise since.
You were eighteen when you first came out and left home and you have been running away ever since. Forget the sneakers, running is more about that feeling of constant motion. How you have refused to hold onto a warm body, let alone a city, for longer than a few months so that it cannot swallow you whole. Your parents always taught you to chew with your mouth closed anyways. Never let them reveal the parts you choose to let inside. How you rely on their destruction.
Which means that home has been something you have been trying to shed from you along the way. That place where you grew up hating yourself because you weren’t as beautiful as all of the girls they kissed, weren’t as white as all of the boys who mispronounced your last name, asked you to edit their papers, and voted you most environmentally conscious in high school because you had a big beard and even bigger angst and in this small town all cultures of dissent taste the same anyways. In Jesus’s Name. Amen.
Write it on your arms “IA MM O R ET H A NM YB O D Y” in permanent marker the type that will not rub out until at least three showers like the X’s on your wrists that night you snuck into the punk band show in tenth grade and sublet your loneliness for rebellion and it was a comfortable arrangement that worked out for both parties.
Write it on your tongue “IA MM O R ET H A NT H I SS M A L LT O W N” hope that over time the saliva will rub out the hick, the south, the plaque on the back of your teeth. (I am tired of running. I am tired of running.)
Come out when you are 18 scream it outside at that open skies of stars that blanket highway 6 “IA MM O R ET H A NT H I SS M A L LT O W N” scream it as loud as you can because it feels rebellious because it ran out of your tongue before you even thought about it.
In second grade you started collecting erasers– the ones that you could get for 25 or 50 cents that you found in the couch before going to school. How you loved their elegance; how you rely on their destruction. How fitting it is that they disappear when they work too well. (You have not stopped collecting erasers but now you call them ‘men’ for short).
You are twenty-two now which means that you are old enough to have been invited to a high school reunion but too young for your parents to not ask you where you are going when you step out the door. And it has not only been five years but also two oceans, several apartment deposits, maybe a million heart beats, and over 400 new phone numbers on your phone which means that if you died in this moment and they performed an autopsy they would find new rings etched in your bones all over the blotchy remnants of erasers and still proclaim you “naïve.” You are back home in that town that you have spent your life running away from and it feels all too familiar – our lives that circle that you have been running around our childhood bedrooms, that place we learned our names and apologies (interchangeably).
You keep all of the books you’ve read in the study at the front of the house. In tenth grade you read this play called “OUR TOWN” and you hated it at the time and didn’t have the postmodern jargon to tear it to pieces so you recycled words from the thesaurus in your essay like PHLEGMATIC and DIDACTIC but what you meant to say was that it didn’t have the same drama, the same urgency, the same constant motion as LORD OF THE FLIES. There is a line from the play that you still remember because you can still see the faint traces underneath the eraser: “THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME.”
THE
MORE
THINGS
CHANGE
THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME
And you are lying on the same sheets, under the same sky, eating the same food, on the same street you skinned your knees and kissed your first girl and did your first SAT practice exam with the same brown body trying to erase itself again. So you call all of the same old friends and they pick you up in the same cars and drive you to the same houses and the same coffee shops and you talk about the same things. And you dream of pausing time and taking out your eraser and writing B O R I N G on the entire scene, tearing the country music at the seams, using your new smart phone to find the same old punk shows, scream “IA MM O R ET H A NT H I SS M A L LT O W N.” REMEMBER? (I am more than this small town…remember?)
But on the drive home you play that same death cab for cutie song and it makes you feel the same sadness and you cry the same way you used to and you realize that every feeling since has been the descendent of that same old loneliness substituted for rebellion that same tired story of erasing child and becoming adult and erasing adult and becoming ??? of existing in a world where we are taught that true happiness lies somehow outside of us so we COME OUT in search of it in different cities and bodies, so we run and run and run and run and run…
Don’t forget that when you were thirteen and visiting new york city you saw two men kiss each other every time before they walked across the street. One of them was brown just like you except the other one was white and they were both handsome in the way that you thought new yorkers could only be handsome – the sunglasses, the fitted clothing, the posture if it all. And you thought it was the most captivating thing you had ever seen in the world so you froze time used your eraser to tear apart the pixels and write “WANT” in a font less bold than Helvetica but still just as colloquial. Don’t forget how you ran away from this small town from this small body to become that. How you took a photo posted it on your wall and you put it on every apartment you’ve lived in since call it HOME call it IA MM O R ET H A NT H I SB O D Y.
Which means that your entire life you have not actually been able to see walking lungs around you because you have been running so fast that they just seem like a blur which allows you to get away with calling them dreams. Which means that you never have been able to view the honesty of a lover, a friend, a city too busy romanticizing it saying M A K EM EM O R ET H A NM YB O D Y, saying ERASE ME. Too busy throwing anchors behind you and pulling the weight of the world behind you as you run and you kind of liked it because it pulled at your skin, made the sharpie even fainter, how your happiness has always relied on destruction, how your love has always relied on destruction. How we spend our entire lives in search of something greater than our home towns but “THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME” that the entire world, be it new york city, be it london, be it the electric pulse of the club, the fever pitch of a rush hour subway, is totally and utterly boring (and that is beautiful amen) is repulsive and sterile and useless (and that is beautiful amen) is unforgiving, stale, and trite (and that is beautiful amen) because it is screaming at you as you run away saying I AM NOTHING just like where you came from and where you are going which means that COMING OUT was a lie just like the Apple Maps directions which lead you into an ocean when you typed “HOME.”
So maybe you should tear up that photo on your wall, so maybe you should burn all the erasers, so maybe you should crawl back into bed say I AM SORRY for leaving you say DO NOT COME OUT COME HOME TO ME HERE _______(insert a photo of your ugly, hairy, brown, queer, desperate body). That destination that is not a city, or a body, or a dream, or a politic, or a future.
That feeling deep inside a chest that is still bleeding.
The remnants of an eraser.
The constant pulse of their silence.
The destruction
but backwards