Mary Anne Rojas
after "Miss Celie's Blues"your’re right, I know nothin’
about this thing I call me--how I want to crawl out of my coffee skin full of yelling and show the world that love is a body full of knots, like tumbleweed, like a bag of barbwire. your’re right, I know nothin’ of home, where the dance of my body breaks like the tease of a syllable after the harsh wind lulled me to speak. I taught myself my name once. I found it under my tongue talking back to nothing, as if I owed myself something more, as if my accordion breath wanted to escape the music of my throat, pry open the wind with broken sound and left over accent. But-- your’re right, I know nothin’ about this thing I call me, a home where an empty belly bellows the itch of a fleeing name like a run away mouth, afraid of quiet when the windpipe is nothin’ but a whistle from a faraway echo. but-- your’re right, I know nothin’ of my name. October ☊ that is not true. we become full, crowed like a
bowl of rice. we become unconcerned with movement, moon over who we could be and do nothing about it. the mattress begins to obsess over your body. you let her. fascinated with how someone can seduce the stillness out of you. the fridge is empty and you are convinced you ate everything. in the mean of night, you roam the studio apartment like un espiritu left behind. you prefer not to bother the light with your inconvenience. instead, you contemplate your study desk like a surgeon ready to give bad news. the pages of poetry are just used instrument now, idle in a desert of pencils. one day ☊
one day i will have a good day,
enough to call my own doing-- my fault for everything going so well. i will call no one nor one thing a savior, but my courage. i will make me survive, become survivor of my mess and dirt. no more days to pick up a day of dirty work. i will be worth too many days for just one. one day. i will recall the teetering of a smile, sincere and relieved of faulty attempt to be mine. it will dance on my face like the hesitance of a tear, unafraid to admit it comes from broken, misbehaved behind skin, so i will let go—set awake a filthy wanting. to be a good day—unkempt and deserved. On Memorizing the Obituary
Mama opened the closet and pointed at the yellow one, esa —that is the one I want to be buried in. As if her closet is a display case of unfinished memories. The dress. The shoes. The scrarf. The lingering smell of kitchen in the crease of a shirt. We can tell a lot about a woman interrupted in her sleep—a fragile departure like the disappearance of a smile. She hopes to die quietly, like an uninvited wind through the crack of a door. She likes yellow. It reminds her of Sunday mornings in Las Charcas de Azua: barefoot and hungry. Like a dead mother’s closet. Like trying to decide what color lipstick should a woman wear when she doesn’t plan to return home. I should have taken notes the times she would button up my pale shirts for school. What a coincidence—getting ready for the day is inviting death without a time in mind. Mama used to wear a yellow sun dress, hemmed by her aging fingers. Her hair was from the fifties—thick curls dancing at her shoulders while my grandfather looked at her as if only the wind can complement her skin. How do we mourn skin? How does someone become unhoused from her flesh? I assume her bones need a dress, too. She used to be in love. She told me about love, how it consumes you, like the ache of a wound, inevitable to remember where it hurts. In the photos, mama wears a slight smile, tilted to the left, where my grandfather would always sit like a child running away with balloons; he took her smile when he left. Now, I search her closet, as if this is some kind of trick, like the whiff of coffee in the morning when you wake up alone—so familiar, as to imply company is permanent. This must be how an obituary is memorized—repeating the dress, the shoes, the scarf--the yellow one, how the words make sense when silence falls like a bed sheet over a mattress overwhelmed in evanescent shadows. I am starting question what mama would prefer to sleep in, a suitcase or a casket. This is not something we have answers to; we quietly just choose the dress, make sure the shoes can travel long distances, like an apology to the dead from possessions gathered in dust. But this is not something we learn to do—to open closets as if death is neatly hung on a hanger, waiting to be worn for the right occasion. We simply, get ready. For school. For a doctor’s appointment. For a wedding. And like a closet, filled with stillness—I wait for the day, to wear a yellow dress, like mama. I will accept that the day comes like opening a closet filled with memories on a hanger, dancing in dust.
on Listening
as if I watered your mouth to grow. like an empty page
your chin curtseys to a vacant room where silence is a child’s first word. your tongue, a wrinkling pride, how it gathers dust in a body of air. you borrow your breath tonight from past winds from your past skin like a promise to live one more day. you, the courage to sing me the blues of guilt, the song of a dead bird’s windpipe, plead for affirmation, for the humidity of my presence to be real. I am listening because I, too can pretend there is nothing else to loose, humiliate myself in the convenience of sound. Difficult to ignore your separated teeth like lined up soldiers, you become your own target, a shooting range lost in smoke. I must forgive your stories of street nights populated with metaphors: after the blunt, after the fucking, after the car accident, after the women you bruised, after blaming me for everything I did not have. I listen still. during hot tea and fishbowl eyes, I stuff my skin with grief, save it for later, like skip opening the curtains today, like half an orange, like a new dinner table, like an I love you to grandmother-- like what is frequent laughter after seventeen homes, as though honesty requires more than you. Your lips, dance like the silhouette of a bird’s wing amidst a fog; who will you be after this, after the air has cleared from the attempt of your voice. So I confess a foreign smile to you, one given to me far away inside of me, one that thanked me for taking it. do not thank me for listening. thank you.
|
you will want to avoid it ☊
you will want to avoid it
but someone you love will eventually hurt you you will want to hang each breath on a clothesline watch the sun exhaust the effort each gasp came from but this will not be enough to calm the wound, to stop the weeping. You will believe every part of you is a plane crash, midair against thousands of birds- each feather will need a funeral. in between prayers for air you will remember how you brought him the sun in tea cups and late night massages, how the wrinkle of his smile resembled the circumference of a sliced lemon. he will not give you a straight answer to why your company is not needed anymore. but you will not accept it. you will remember how you fight for your black skin, protect her from the evil world of oppression. You will travel back to your first rally, how you chanted vigorously for a better world-a different kind of love, a new love that would sustain everything around you. and for that, you will remember you need people. he will suddenly look like a people. the mirror will try to convince you that you fail to love another. you will disagree. the clothesline suddenly will stop quivering and you will call him. you will fight for the good love. ask for an answer. and remind him that you love yourself more at that moment. and hope to always know when you need to love yourself, bring the fear out of each tear like the spill of blood from an opened cut. you will not get aggressive with silence, but stand above sound like that something that wakes you up each morning without an alarm- your body will know when the light arrived. Somewhere~
across country one day,
we will hear of your fingers travels, a piano on fire, and frozen night whiskey shots-- you will remember me when the smoke happens, when what is left, a neglected smile tilted to the right in effort to swing a note stuck in the crease of your cheek. on a cold night, in the middle of a fire, the wind will remind you of poetry, of how you wish you had my words again, in the middle of a bar full of slurred speech and sweaty fingers—I would have invited you for coffee then, to make music out of ears and a mouth full of words ready to give you a new note for a new wind while the world cried around our smile. Smoke would have happened somewhere across country. I suppose I am not music to your blueberry eyes and egg yolk skin whose fingers dance like white and black tuxedo on the keys of a piano. I want to tell you, I taught myself a music note, tucked it behind my throat like a saved breath for a night with you dancing across the wind of this country as if all music was made out of our fire. but continue. keep playing for girls who-- do not have my words, and mistake the sound of smoke with a frozen night. on Showing
morning’s waking eye,
stuck to begin the again of day—like the courage of window plant flutter and green. lemon squeeze kiss, and mama lights the kettle with freckled palms and onion eyes, she hands me her habit-- a kitchen graced in olives and cilantro, the Sunday tea is a crooked syllable waiting to walk away with a word—she teaches me how to show I love you for the first time. a smile, a brief vacation from loss, fleets her mouth like a flock of smoke, dangling in some ally orange peel of sorrow, where the bruise spreads like tablecloth with accent hands, a surrender that saves her from humility, desperate for voice, her body hugs me like water-- a hold out of rain and tease. I drink my tea with kiss, please. Mornings the wind pulls the smile from face; I stand with skin up straight, unknot the wound of silence, woman to girl-- mama is how I show. |
