Whoa.

Found this in the personal folder on my computer at work and tweaked it a little then posted it, a little rant or journal thing I wrote about one of the young women I work with. Must be from about six months ago, when she first got pregnant with this baby; she’s gonna be due real soon now. She graduated two years ago, but I still see her from time to time at this alumnae group that we have.

For N, pregnant with her fourth child

You deserve a man who will put on a goddamn condom.

You deserve a man who, if he is so dead set against wearing a goddamn condom,
so needful of the feel of birth canal against penis skin, will pay the price of monogamy
and birth control pills.

You deserve a friend who will tell you this.

You deserve a man who will not spend his kids’ money on another woman. You deserve a man who will not stick his penis in both you and her.

You deserve a life that would’ve prepared you better for this, a childhood that would’ve grown you into someone better prepared, to resist, to live alone, to find someone better.

You did not deserve to be pried open against your will and impregnated at 14. You deserve sex of your choosing. Your first son also deserves a better father than him.

let’s go back to 2000…

Taking a cue from Ian, my cuz, I think I’m going to start posting some old shit every once in a while, particularly (in my case), old shit that maybe never turned into anything.

This is a draft from round about August 2000. The title is because I thought it would be the first of a series about this period, this moving, but it didn’t pan out that way.

Part 1

I don’t believe that anyone really knows how to pack. I’ve done it dozens of times: home to school, school to home, home to Dublin, Dublin to home, home to St. Petersburg. School to San Diego. It’s never really gotten any easier. Regardless of planning, regardless of items weighed in hand—give, store, or throw away—there are always the crunch hours when life seems impossible if just packing up and moving is this hard. It always descends into throwing and pushing and squashing coffee cups onto old poems, towels wrapped around books, stray bits of makeup and pens scraped together and chucked, afterthought underpants pressed into crevices like mortar. I didn’t know how much this house had taken hold of my shit until I did the last walk-through the sixth and seventh time today, trotted out with my armloads to my car already impossibly full, fuck, fuck, where am I going to put this, biting my lip and flinging through the back window.

The 12X8 trailer that Cullen rented seemed excessive to me until I saw with my own hands how much shit can fit into a space. He’s going through this day the way he does most things: word by word, banging it out, stacking things. He knows every task that needs to be accomplished before he can lock the doors and get in the van. His eyes are very wide and wild, like he’s changing their depth of field by force of muscles, like he’s holding every task inside of his head at once. I am just the opposite: I wash over everything at once again and again, in layers. All of my clumsy and loose-limbed qualities are out in full right at the surface. No object is safe from the brush of my hips and breasts as I pass, no glass is immune to my flying hands. My eyes are hooded and erratic. I take up much more space than usual.

Ian’s not going back to Ireland until October, but today is my last day. He helped us load up the trailer as if it were his life’s work. He left for his job late in the afternoon. He laughed and said that a quick goodbye is best. He didn’t kiss me until I called him back and did it myself, once, the firm fraternal kisses we’d become accustomed to. He pulled out of the driveway and I folded up on the back steps and cried like an exhausted child.

Cheerio betrayal

I was maybe four, and we were living on our old house on Brammell in Detroit. I spilled a whole box of Cheerios on the kitchen floor trying to get it down, the rings went skittering across the pebbly linoleum, and here comes my mom up from the laundry room, doom, doom, doom, up the steps, “Who did this?” –she demanded an answer, and I had to give one, and I’d be damned if it’d be me. “He did,” I pointed to my little brother, aged three, standing in the kitchen doorway, possibly in a t-shirt and a diaper at the time, probably in the middle of potty training. And the face he turned to me, the face that suddenly knew that this was possible, that your sister could betray you to your mother, even that such a thing as betrayal existed, that you could do nothing wrong and get in trouble anyway, and no one would find out–it knocked the denial right out of his mouth–I waited for him to protest, my heart begged him to accuse me, but the words wouldn’t come to him. It was already too late.

felicidades y família

When I first met my friend a couple years ago, he told me about his eleven-year-old daughter,
about the funny things she’d say, about what they did
last weekend, but after we became friends I asked him once,
“So how’s your daughter?”
He looked at me sideways and said,
“R, I lied to you.”
“What do you mean? About what?”
“I have another kid, too. A son.”
“You do? How old?”
“Fourteen. I just don’t always like to tell every body
every thing, you know?”
I told him it was okay, that he didn’t have to, but he felt bad.
He’d held back this part of himself and he didn’t want to anymore.

I told him yesterday that I got a good grade on mi exámen de español–he said,
“You’re taking Spanish?” I said, “Sí, en Wright College.”
He asked if they were teaching me el alfabeto, and I replied,
“No, I’m in the second class; ya aprendí para dos años en escuela.” He grinned big and said,
“You know more already than my son,”–his son who is fourteen
and being raised by his native Puerto Rican ex and himself, a Salvadoreño–
“He doesn’t speak Spanish?”
“Not one word.”
“How is that, with you guys as parents, and living in Chicago?”
“No se, but he can’t speak any.”
We were quiet for a minute, drinking our water,
looked out over the dance floor,
listening to the song that was playing.
“What are you guys doing on Sunday?”
“…Nada.”
“Maybe you can come meet him then.”

He said it easily, but I could tell
he was sharing a secret treasure, like a smooth lucky rock
from his pocket, unfolded in his palm.

prayer

Okay, so the internet is a wild and wondrous place. I wrote this a couple days ago, and somehow accidentally navigated away from the page, and, with a little high-pitched animal sound, realized I had lost it. Looked around, tried to get it back, to no avail. Gone. Gone gone.

So, today, one minute ago, actually, I go to update my journal, and what should appear but the journal I wrote a couple days ago…but not in the form I left it. It was a feedback loop of my journal ten times or so, messed up as hell, as well as a first draft of the same journal (much longer and more clichéd and self-aggrandizing) long since deleted. Weird, dudes. So here it is.

###

I’m having a hard time even asking for what I need. I’m not even sure what I’m asking for, really. It takes so much time to wade through the guilts, like different-colored wires, to wind them up secure them with velcro tapes and sort them in their proper boxes. I’m having a hard time even asking.

I guess the main thing is that I feel trapped, which is the worst lie, and that I feel like I can never go anywhere else, and I’m starting to even feel that if I stay that my welcome and my ruse will quickly wear out.

I don’t know where to begin. I’m so tired of feeling bad for not being happy where I’m at. It’s a damn sinking ship, and I’m tired of hanging on.

I know what you’re doing. I just don’t know what it looks like, and I’m so scared, I can’t even tell you, and there’s one of those guilts again.

Okay, I’m going to try and ask, and I’m going to try and not feel bad while I do it, and I’m going to try and do it without crying:
will you help me? Will you help me build a life where I can write a little and do some community work a little and not feel so trapped? Will you bring me people to help me? Will you help me to be braver? Will you show me the path? Will you give me the strength to work, to write my best and work my best regardless, and to take my paths when I see them?

I think feel a little better now. Thanks.

###

this morning

I jotted these this morning right after I woke up.

###

Irais, you are smoke and ivy,
shouts echoing through alleys.
Mayra, you are concrete steps up the side of a mountain,
that collision of cement and stone.

I’m really angry that they didn’t get invited.
I’m so afraid that no one will ever hear them.

###

I woke up this morning with a dream in my head
of me and a woman who looked like me
praying for a man who was angry
he was black and he was angry
and I remember he had a right to be
and it was a situation where prayer might have been considered
inappropriate
but somehow it was all right
and I was looking at the floor and sitting
and she was standing and doing the talking
quietly
and he stood between us and we held his hands and loved him like a brother
The floor was tile and green like the scales of a dragon
It was a bathroom and dark
I sat on the toilet and listened to her prayer and prayed along
in my head
and felt angry along with this man

###

re-edit of poem posted a while back

Some changes. Some lines added, word changes, section breaks, a working title.

###

fear of God

I just wanted to talk.
At first, anyway.
So that’s what it feels like…
That’s what I thought,
that’s what went through my head
when my fist connected with her pretty cheek
So that’s what it feels like
to hit a woman…
as the hot blood flooded into my skull.

See, it was the Sunday night
before Martin Luther King Day—
we didn’t have to work the next day.
We were stopped on Orleans,
me and my boy, and this fucking
moreno, he bumped my boy’s car a little
and we stopped him, we got out,
just to talk it out, man to man, like.
But this guy, he wouldn’t get out
of his fucking car, right?
And he’s on his phone,
and I tell him to get out,
Roll down your fucking window
I tell him,
Roll this fucking window down right now
or I’m gonna bust it out.
And he doesn’t, and so I, like,
spit on the dude’s window—
that’s what my boy tells me, anyway;
I don’t really remember that much—
I guess I was probably afraid
to break my hand, ’cause that’s what happened
the last time I punched something.
Then I catch sight of this girl crossing Orleans all alone,
and I start walking over, you know,
just to talk, like,
Hey, girl, what’s going on,
But she had to be all fucking bitchy, like,
Look, I’m not even tryin’ to talk to you,
sweetie.

It was the sweetie that really got me.

I just wanted to talk to her.
And she turns away and walks faster, and this fucking pink stripe
she got in her hair blows back and up,
like a, like a, pink piece of flame or something.
And I start to walk away, but I think about
the dude who won’t get out
of the fucking car, and my boy waiting,
and my spit dripping down the window,
and I hear her heels going clik-clik-clik
and her cute little ankles crossing back and forth,
and I just turn back around
and don’t even know what I’m going to do
until I do it, and I get that rush,
that rush that you get when you’re doing something bad,
something bad that you really really want to do,
but then all of a sudden you get terrified—
like when me and my sister were real real little,
and I’d lose my head and pop her,
and in about a split second the satisfaction wore off, and the fear of God
came into me, otherwise known as Mami,
knowing what was coming.

Well this time,
the same thing happened,
except after the fear of God,
there was no punishment.
Nothing happened.
I ran up on her,
I punched her on the side of her face,
ran back to the car,
but no one came to help her,
no boot up my ass to teach me a lesson.
She yelled, hard,
What the fuck is your problem, you fucking cocksucker?!
And, I don’t know…
this is gonna sound weird,
but if I didn’t know better,
I’d say that she wanted me to come back.
Come back and fight, or explain myself.

I don’t know, though.
I can’t say for sure.

Excerpt

This is the first part of the first draft of a poem I’m working on.

###

You stood in my kitchen doorway
while the rest of us cooked dinner
chattering in English
and I asked you, in a slightly lower strata of voice,
“How old were you when you lost your brother in the war?”
“Fourteen,” you answered.
“Fourteen? Goddamn”, I said.
“You must have been pissed.”
You laughed a little, as though you had tripped and fell.
“Yeah.”

I wanted you to forgive me for something,
but I wasn’t quite sure what it was.

pasando

I can be okay with music alone, with alcohol alone, with one emotion-tapping stimulus at a time. But put ‘em together, even in moderate amounts, and estoy perdida. I’m lost. Meltdown.

Went to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs with B and E, and spent most of the not-even-particularly-great opening act crying, trying not to cry. In the middle of the crowd, the all-ages crowd. B and E took turns hugging me, hugging me like I was a falling-down building and they could hold me up with the sheer force of their love. B kept tugging out the hem of his black t-shirt and holding it out for me to wipe my face on, like a little hammock for sorrow. And B kept saying, Be here with me, be here now.

Karen O had her fingers dipped in something shiny and black, and her hair in a short kinda slick little Dorothy Hammill cut, and this Cheshire grin, and her arms swung and swayed out in these elegant slow little poses, but the best was every so often the elegance would just slip from her like a shawl and she’d bounce and dance and windmill her slim little arms over her head and she looked about ten years old for a minute or two, then stomp and wail like a factory machine stamping stainless steel parts. And then it was back to all vampy glam.

You’re leaving. You’re never gonna come back.
C’mon, I’m gonna come back.
(Sure, sometime, but maybe not to live. And maybe not. I won’t be able to talk to you or see you whenever I want, and maybe you won’t be at our Bible meeting every week anymore, and you won’t sit at the kitchen table while I cook dinner anymore, and maybe B won’t have someone to play Madden with anymore, just like that.)
(K, you won’t be there to tell me to have some tea, to go to sleep, to go put on some sparkly eyeshadow. Maybe no one will tell me what I should say the next time that mean person bothers me, maybe no one will help teach me to take care of myself.)
(We help each other feel more human, all of us.)
(I’m afraid.)

R?
R_grace?
Be here.
Be here, now.