(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.

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

Star Trek Senryu (4/30)

Commander Riker,
Deanna is a dumb broad.
I’d do you beardless.

Captain Picard,
Beverly is a dumb broad.
Your flute does not need holes.

Captain Picard,
if you and I were on Risa
I’d excavate you.

Commander LaForge,
injuries are common -
but this one... is new.

Double Rikers swing
double Riker dicks -
Yes, I should be so lucky.

Flower Tongue (3/30)

Yesterday English was not enough,
so I went to Brooklyn
looking for Creole or Haitian French
dark lips laughing near jerk chicken barrels
and sweet corn
knishes in the pizza joint,
dreadlocks.

It’s hard to tell you how much I like being in the minority.

My toes curl in my red converse,
houndstooth scarf hides my neck,
it’s cold but not too cold -
the men ignore me here,
the women ignore me here or
make nods at my hair they’ve asked me what I do to it
I ask them what they do to theirs
we answer at the same time,
“Nothing”.

It’s hard to tell you what being white feels like,
but it never feels invisible until I’m twenty stops in on the 4 train
crossing Eastern Parkway.
It never feels like English wasn’t my native language
until I’m paragraphs deep in island tongues.

If the eggs of my ancestors had not roamed,
I would be a very different person today.
I can hear the drumbeats of my great-great-grandmothers home
all the time,
hear her poetry and laugh on the seawind
as she wanders in britches on the deck of her husband’s ship,
but my feet don’t move like hers,
my hands can’t clap to find the dancing
the people who are my people
but will never be my family do.
How would you feel if some white girl showed up on your island,
saying, “Hello family,
teach me your ways because I’ve missed you.
One of your daughters was kidnapped and put in an orphanage by one of my fathers -
she had to leave you behind to escape them.
Then she married one.
Here I am, family,
I love you.”

I am the whitest girl you know.
I wear tortoise shell glasses, knee-length skirts,
I write poetry, am an athiest, and pro-choice.
The list of my bloodlines is impressive and inexhaustible:
Henry the Eighth, Charlemagne,  Jerusalem, Brandonburg, Mayflower, Washington Irving -
I can play six degrees to My Family Used to Own That Country all day
and never lose.

I am the whitest girl you know,
who is furious she wasn’t birthed two generations earlier
to carry her grandmothers bones back to her people,
that no one bothered to write down the name of the Cree woman
who married the fur trader as he passed through Saskatchewan -
arguing that generational racism doesn’t make it right in Alabama,
you don’t need hate to be a racist,
why the hell are Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben still on boxes and bottles
in bandana haircloths and string bowties.

I am a fighter because every time her grandmother calls you nothing more than skin tone,
I end up throwing kitchen plates at the wall,
I wear my skin as a badge of privilege,
so I get to say “No, other white people, you are not allowed to talk like that anymore
With your blueblood lines and Tory leanings and English paradise,
Kerouac-worshipping, Komen Cure running, Asians-aren’t-minorities-they’re-just-like-us households
Girl in the mirror, you aren’t allowed to talk about me like that.”

My badge is pressed silver gum wrappers.
It falls to dust and tears so easily.
I’m uncomfortable in it.
I cling to what blood of the earth I can find in me,
because my other blood built houses to find God,
and I found him first in the trees.

Yesterday, English was not enough,
so I went to Crown Heights to feel human,
to allow myself to be so much more than what you see.