winter, that's all

Since birth

That I am a competitor

I blame my father for this

He once told me that he was expelled from every high school in South Texas

And in Oregon, when a white student —

A gringo he would call him

Yelled racial slurs at him as they played baseball

A boy and his bat

When the bat collided with the ball

in the same way a meteor might collide with the earth

I felt everything escape me

Whatever was taking refuge in my body

Had now found a new temporary host

But this time the ball did not collide with the bat but instead with my hand

The pain had nowhere to escape

I clenched my hand and held back tears

As my finger began to swell and brown turned to white to red to blue

The opposing team had begun to kneel

In perfect unison

As though I was the American flag

A nation

Proclaiming

That I was no longer a competitor

My body was the land and I was free

For the first time, I was a winner

A girl and her bat

The pitcher

Now possessing a stunned look on her face

Perhaps she was the host now, I thought

Her father exchanged hateful words with mine

Words I cannot remember because my father always taught me —

The importance of actions over words

That night on the field, we all shared a similar pain

Her hands, reaching for the spice rack.

The aroma of turmeric seeping through her skin, as my mother sprayed the house with febreze.

Ridding of any smell that could follow us out into the world.

Now it is sold at a steep price in every Whole Foods across America.

In the form of powders, smoothies, vitamins, supplements, and organic soap bars.

I want to bathe myself in it so that I can remember her smell and touch

and the way that her light cotton Sari enveloped me like a cocoon.

I stayed there, my nose nestled into the soft tissues of her breast.

The one she did not lose to cancer —

I want the earthy tones of orange to decorate me in golden hour.

I want to be a woman that does not feel aversion toward her body.

Like my Amma,

Made up of ingredients formed inside soil and then soaked up by my roots —

I want to be water, fat, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and curcuminoid.

So then why do you ignore your body when it is trying to tell you to take a deep breath?

If I could take apart every piece of my body

and rebuild it

I would

//

I think about my ancestors that came before me

The soil of their homeland stripped beneath them

Their bodies existing in one place

But their heart in another

The relationship between the desire to escape

And the desire to hate oneself

I don’t call it sleep anymore.

I’ll risk losing something new instead—

like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing—

a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined

fruit to unfasten from,

despite my trembling.

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.

Let me call it, a garden.

Maybe this is what Lorca meant

when he said, verde que te quiero verde—

because when the shade of night comes,

I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest.

My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,

hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion

beneath the hip and plow of my lover,

then I am another night wandering the desire field—

bewildered in its low green glow,

belling the meadow between midnight and morning.

Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising

and many petaled,

the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow.

I am struck in the witched hours of want—

I want her green life. Her inside me

in a green hour I can’t stop.

Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth

green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending.

Green moving green, moving.

“Fast as that, this is how it happens—

soy una sonámbula.

And even though you said today you felt better,

and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear,

to say, I don’t feel good,

to ask you to tell me a story

about the sweet grass you planted—and tell it again

or again—

until I can smell its sweet smoke,

It is the dream that took my great aunt away

It is the snake that sunk their rigid teeth into her skin

It is the feeling the morning after

Of melancholy and sorrow

Passing through my grandmother

To my mother

On a cold winter day in London

I picked up an old copy of Adam Gnade’s The Do-It-Yourself Guide to The Big Mother Fuckin' Sad from my bookshelf this morning. 

It has been 3 months since 2018 became 2019. 5 months until I turn 27 and 3 years until I am 30. I keep staring out of my bedroom window expecting to feel something. I have been watching this bird fly around frantically in the same spot for ten minutes now. I picture myself doing the same but without wings and years intead of minutes. Everything I have been writing lately is garbage but I keep reading that gabrage is better than nothing. Garbage is suppose to get you where you need to be.