a word begging climax

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Please Stop Writing 9/11 Poems

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.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

(Half-)Birthday Poem

I set alarms with my smart phone that wake me when I sleep lightest,
that throw open night time windows so the rain can clean my dreams.

It’s my birthday. I want some goddamn coffee,
but twenty-five years has brought two roommates -
one won’t leave until 11,
the other won’t leave at all -
and my good-intentioned 6 a.m. will disturb them.
So no coffee.

It’s a running day, but I can’t be bothered with the rain.

It turns out at twenty-five,
all girls develop teleportation powers that can only be used at great cost;
this is how your mother always managed to be where you needed her to be,
every time.
It’s also how she aged so quickly in your teenage years.

Most spend the years off their life on their children,
I’ll spend mine on you
and chasing nightmares out of your firstborn’s bedroom -
teaching her how to make shadows into soldiers,
the wolf in the walls into an ally,
the witch in the corner into Jesus.

I’d teach you but true love negates all monsters.

It’s my birthday.
I’m going running in the rain.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Invitation (6/30)

I drowned in the Atlantic -
oh you want poetry, let me give you poetry
with something I don’t care to admit.

I want to crawl into your bed and add whispers to the symphonies,
the sound of fingerskins brushing and your arms in the small of my back.

But the plainest English I know is silenced silence.

So I will go isolated islanding on the Bering sea
with the wolves
and the silence of heaven
breathe deep in a snowbank
and never come home.

The Offspring (5/30)

“You will be a great mother.”
The excess testosterone in my body at puberty not only dictated the jungle that covers it,
the breasts of permanent D-cups,
but also the hormones that will drive my body to addiction
and death
should the government dictate
I must carry this child to term.
No spina bifuda here
just a wandering Y chromosome
that fought too hard in utero and settled in my organs -
It makes a rare symphony of me,
And I compensate with fluted skirts, feminine pageantry
to distract from the rest of me.
That my well of patience is 3 shallow buckets reserved for holidays doesn’t help.

“You will be a great mother,”
breaks the bones I forget I have.

The day the OB/GYN looked straight in my eyes and said,
“There is a ninety-five percent chance you will miscarry,
and a seventy-five percent chance you will require medication -
medication that will cause birth defects and retardation -
just to survive your pregnancy….”

that was the day I chose publishing over family,
machine over man.
I love my children.
I will murder them when they are a cluster of cells
too small to register a heartbeat,
rather than with neglect
or a Lady Macbeth scene of out out damn spot,
out out damn baby,
Holding infant heads underwater
and sitting in jail all of my remaining days for a case of Alien Body Syndrome.

I am pro-choice because I love my children.

Not every womb is built to sustain life,
not every body is capable of keeping it.

I'll Eat You Alive (8/30)

tell me a story
I am greedy for them
want them to come from your lips to my mouth
so I can bite ‘em,
let ‘em juice smush on my cheeks run down my neck,
color my hands rainbows like five years olds eating popsicles

i want your stories to cradle in the hollow of my clavicle while I’m sleeping
a burrito in fleece blankets with your story
wrapping lazy around my eardrums,
curling nose to tail around inner ear bones when I wake,
setting my day off balance.

Tell Me All Your Loves, Love: A Conversation in Five Parts (7/30)

i.my love for you is an exponential marathon
of unstoppable anthropomorphic force that won’t stop until
there is nothing else to expand into:
sun's going away, it's getting cold.

ii.stop building latticeworks of cause and effect
around the notions in my head,
everything I do reminds me of you:
my love for you is a desperation because it's February.

iii.i love you more than electrons love the superposition:
new york makes me physically ill
and the idea of not seeing you for however long
is even worse:
I think I'm losing my mind.

iv.wandering naked in my house,
It’s February, I’m getting cold.
come here, gimme your clothes:
i love you more than sleep but sleep loves me more than anything

v.i love you more than i love breathing,
and i love you more than i love gin
but gin loves me more than anything