Ten and half years ago,
I feel like I wore my red All-Stars.
I put my shoes on and ran to the parking lot.
I found Carolyn’s silver Passat,
got in the passenger side and we drove to Lovers’ Ridge.
We made it in time to see the second tower fall.
Dear poets from other places,
I know you are America’s heart
and the story you are trying to tell is relevant.
But this is not something you know.
This is not your gap-toothed awkward skyline ten years later,
in a false pubescence,
this is not your scaffolding and avoidant glances on drunken walks home.
The unbidden tears on the PATH when we catch skeleton support beams in construction lights,
the tracing of fingertips over our parents names on days when no one is looking.
A few days ago, someone posted online that they didn’t understand why New Yorkers get offended when politicians include 9/11 in their stump speeches.
I answered in the same way I have been answering since after the second tower fell:
Those are not my words.
People don’t like to talk about cultural appropriation outside of Asia or Africa.
As an American, most people say I have no culture to appropriate;
when those men flew
those planes into
Our Home,
they divorced New York City from America without our consent.
And we no longer live in the same country you do.
We voted against the Patriot Act, half of us are still convinced it was an inside job,
there was enough information that it could’ve been stopped,
we’ve read the 9/11 commission so many times the binding has broken -
You never knew that we smiled,
did you?
We’re hard stone-faced finance warriors,
nothing ever hurts.
hey we’re New Yorkers, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
When the ashes piled three inches high over all of lower Manhattan,
and the sky blackened all the way to the Jersey Shore,
where was your best friend’s father?
Ten years later when the first response teams are fighting for their lives,
fighting for money to pay the medical bills to keep them alive
because their insurance companies drop them and the new ones
call heroism a pre-existing condition,
succumbing to the permanent iron lungs in their bedrooms
where is your best friend’s father?
For all of your sorrow,
for all your perfect precious words
that stir strangers in strange lands,
Where is your wallet?
How much of your barista’s salary did you donate to the Firefighters Widows Fund this year?
Your words are beautiful,
and unlike the ones the politicians are still spouting,
I believe in the heart of you -
You think you’re giving a voice to the voiceless,
but sweetheart,
this is New York, believe me, we have voices.
Please stop writing 9/11 poems.
My culture is not a play for points,
my broken skyline is not the ace up your sleeve -
We’ve all sewed our wounds shut with yarn as best we could,
our best surgeons seemed to die in the aftermath.
We’ve scabbed and scarred,
started over,
we know our neighbours and their beautiful hijab-wearing children.
Please, stop tearing open our wounds.
Today, at 1 World Trade Center,
A 105-story building is nearing completion.
It looks just like a penis,
the politicians wanted to call it the Freedom Tower -
we told them that was a really dumb name.
Its scaffolding makes my commute more difficult,
its fences guard cranes and jackhammers instead of warped steel and broken dreams.
It will always be a redheaded stepchild to me.
But, I like to look up at the workers harnessed in,
sealing the windows at floor 102,
marrying New York to the sky once more.
