478 Identity poems

Bubblegum lip gloss kissed,                Our lifelines, our mirrors, I was never a singkil princess            These are Luminous Mysteries — Knuckle cracking, polished toes,        Our notebooks, our language, I was never a Santacruzan queen      To witness, to make way, Black eyeliner, push up bra                  Our thirst and our wedding bands — I was never a curtsying debutante    To fill stone jars with water, to wed, Loud, gum-smacking babygirl             Our glamour and our armor. I was never a tiaraed Miss Fil Am     To transfigure, dazzling as the sun.

With razorblade eyes                       The Filipina is most sincere With too much water And will make a very good wife. With animal teeth                            The Filipina is a loyal partner, We sometimes kill Deserving of all your love. With splintered hands                    The Filipina is the total package, With too much life Much more than meets the eye. With ribcage unlocked                   The Filipina is not for you, We wither your roots If  you cannot handle her claws.

Richer than mother's milk is half-and-half. Friends of two minds, redouble your craft. Our shelves our hives, our selves a royal jelly, may we at Benares and Boston, Philly and Delhi collect our birthright nectar. No swarm our own, we must be industrious, both queen and drone. Being two beings requires a rage for rigor, rewritable memory, hybrid vigor. English herself is a crossbred mother mutt, primly promiscuous and hot to rut. Oneness? Pure chimera. Splendor is spliced. Make your halves into something twice your size, your tongue a hyphen joining nation to nation. Recombine, become a thing of your own creation, a many-minded mongrel, the line's renewal, self-made and twofold, soul and dual.

I come from Inuit oil money, From instruments of chance and divination. The most loose, shut in, wavering mind, Recording my day with recitations, antennae, Narration and figure, my phone might die. I'm walking dirty. Shop and mob cops, not to touch my mother's breast Or the queen's royal crown signature Izzy Juju—hijacked, forsaking all others. The untamed scotch is mine. It cost the picture a fortune To say nothing of my turban, costume copies Of topaz bracelets, the umpteenth translation. Did you ever know Micah, Gay Sunshine, Grace Cathedral, Coconut? I went from heels at Barneys to the depths of the bins. Who could be like dropping in? I'll fold both my hands In gloves and wait, Hope Diamond peeking out.

No chain link fences leapt in a single bound. No juke move Nike commercial, speeding bullet Skittles-hued Cross Trainers. No brown skin Adonis weaving trails of industrial Vaseline down a cobblestone street. Heisman-shucking trash receptacles. Grand jeté over the little blue recycling bin, a prism of clouds rising beneath his feet. Nobody all-fucked in boot cuffs wide enough to cloak court appointed tethers. Or slumped over, hoodie-shrouded —sheepishly scary according to one eye witness. Definitely not going to be your Louis V Sweat Suit red carpet fashion review, coming at you live from E! & Fox News outside of the morgue. No chance for homeboy in the peekaboo boxer shorts. Homeboy with the frozen wrists. Iced. Homeslice with the paisley, Pretty Flacko Flag flying by the seat of low-slung denim — no defense attorney gets to call me Gang Related. Tupac in a mock leather bomber. No statement taken from the Clint Eastwood of your particular planned community, saying he had the right to stand his ground at the Super Target. Because my flat-billed, fitted cap cast a shady shadow over his shoulder in the checkout line. No, siree. See, I practice self target practice. There is no sight of me in my wears. I bedecked in No Wrinkle Dockers. Sensible navy blazer. Barack Obama tie, Double Consciousness- knotted. Stock dandelion pinned to the skin of an American lapel with his head blown off.

I take off my shirt, I show you. I shaved the hair out under my arms. I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair on my legs with a knife, getting white. My hair is the color of chopped maples. My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south. (Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills) Skin polished as a Ming bowl showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet. In the night I come to you and it seems a shame to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man. You recognize strangers, think you lived through destruction. You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory. You want to know what I know? Your own hands are lying.

Except another black girl was with me. Mother. Always lonely. I am always. Mother those girls. Forty-two. March summer. Light blue. Vermont. Endless crescent. Invert as a tyke lake. Fernet Mother, I'm grown. Forest. San Francisco. Lone cold. Stone turd. Talk three or none. Kidding. Kidding.

They shut me up in Prose – As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet – Because they liked me “still”   – Still! Could themself have peeped – And seen my Brain – go round – They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason – in the Pound – Himself has but to will And easy as a Star Look down opon Captivity – And laugh – No more have I –

It's true: I have it though I hardly approve of anything it does. Supposed bend of light or smudge where two odd angles cross. I hardly see— can hardly do a thing with it. White zone of no flesh pressing into no. So low, I can’t scale or measure it. I used to think:OK! A clean sharp place to keep. Or:I'll grow a thing! to keep, for me! But no. It's just a ward to mark & mount, a loop I lope around with, so I count myself a realm of realms. I vote & vote. Turns out, we agree with everything we do, almost. We sweep the precincts of ourselves: the rooms between each rib & under them till we reach the fat red condo where our blood leans in. We live here now. Half heart, half townhouse. Come on down. Turn on that sweet TV. Our mise en place, our rugs & nooks: we’re full of stuff. We paint the furniture we couldn’t live without. It’s true at last: we have it all though we hardly know what any of it does.

Once, I tried to banish them all from my writing. This was America, after all, where everyone’s at liberty To remake her person, her place, or her poetry, And I lived in a town a long way from everything— Where discussions of “diversity” Centered mainly on sexuality. My policy, born of exhaustion with talk about race And the quintessentially American wish for antecedents, Eliminated most of my family, starting with the grandparents, Two of whom stayed Chinese to their final days, Two of whom were all but defined by their expertise On the food of the country I was trying to excise. It canceled out the expensive center Of an intense undergraduate curriculum And excluded the only foreign language I could talk in. It wiped out my parents’ earliest years And converted them to 1950s Georgians Who’d always attended church and school, like anyone. My father had never paused at two water fountains And asked a white man which he should drink from, And never told his children what the answer had been. My mother had never arranged a migration, Solo at seventeen, from Taipei to wherever, But had simply appeared in Gainesville out of ether, And nothing about their original languages Had brought them together. Their children Had never needed to explain to anyone Why distinctness and mystery were not advantages When they were not optional, and never wondered If particular features had caused particular failures. For months I couldn’t write anything decent Because banned information kept trying to enter Like bungled idioms in the speech of a foreigner. I was my own totalitarian government, An HMO that wouldn’t pay for a specialist, And I was the dissident or patient who perished. The hope was to transcend the profanity of being Through the dissolution of description and story, Which I thought might turn out to be secondary To a semi-mystical state of unseeing, But everywhere I went there was circumstance, All of it strangely tainted by my very presence.