I wasn’t with my sister that day, days, delivered,
the last day I would have seen my father.
She took an elephant to get to the hot brimming tree land.
The soup in Thailand was red and burnt
and still she encountered the whiteness of face.

  •

‘A dead man,’ you told her, to get her to come
to you. You said you were a dead man.
You are the reason why I float.
Are you the reason why I can’t see past my own
hands that made yours, never held mine?

  •

We are a broken chain. We are linked to each other’s purpose.
Can I solve what we did together,
what I only see bright red glimpses of
at the edges of the rolling current, oceans
holding all the spiked animals my mouth calls truth?

  •

When I get close to the maroon bone, saying it
cuts your ghost. I am 4 years old, protecting you.
I am telling my mother, hair curled for no good reason,
wearing a shirt with purple hands on it, mine splayed,
telling the thing that will keep you safe.

  •

Some objects bounce off ears, that bop
that lets us float and sing so far away
from the heaving wretches that still whisper in our bones.
I am like you in that you made me. In my breasts
I hold the weight of your white mother.

  •

I would have seen a broken man, still drinking,
letting his mind seep into the cracks of land
that never should have held him.
‘Don’t be nice to her. She caught me in bed with a hooker
and beat the shit out of me.’

  •

My sister came to him and a village girl, his wife—
younger than me, now— who had the promise of leaving her
small town. She had to send away her daughter
because of the things he did to her. Her
daughter was exiled because of my father’s hands.

                 There is no poetry in saying the truth plainly.

There are words that I still sing into your breath.
There are children unborn inside of me which I must
rid of sickness.
There are women in your family, sisters to you, I hate
that I must protect this from spreading.

  •

Their bodies lay fat. One of your sisters ordered two
dulce de leche cakes after telling me about diabetes,
after telling me about the Dring men,
after telling me what was done to her, too.
I hope her feet don’t keep swelling. I hope she keeps limbs.

                 And my mother. Oh, my mother.

Your corpse was burned in a pyre in open air,
the flames lapping along, heat brightening the face
of one of the other halfie children you’ve left on the way.
He’s twenty now, you know. Breaking like a maniac
on the internet, a little boy not knowing about eyes.

  •

The ground is supposed to be nourished by tears.
The day she left you, I sat in your lap and felt
big round shape, you, straws breaking,
voice, smelling the proof that you really never knew.
I was protecting you then, too.

  •

All the years on an ocean put a rift between you and the world.
The courage of the abyss lapping against your boat,
letting you forget the pillars of what others call white.
Even now, I envy those who can make something from nothing,
who can call the things around you wasted, hoist your own white.

  •

The boat took you and you were a wild song when we met.
But time makes people more themselves.
You had left two wives when we met, two children,
and had covered my sister in mud.
Where did you go, disappearance?

  •

What shadow covered the face of you, allowed you
to shed the nose of what one should and what one should not?
What let your mouth go, your fingers sweep against
a child so small? Who held your ears to cover from
the screams I was not permitted to bear?

  •

I slide my fingers against slick caves of longing
and think of the thumbprints every man has left,
more indelible than the women, somehow.
They keep me. The men are able to keep me.
I tear at parts of my flesh, all teeth, shining: a gift.

  •

There are no spaces that tell this story. We never
stayed in one place long enough. I wake up
in my back house hoping that no one takes it away.
Last night I dreamt I pissed the bed, something my mother
was proud to say her children never did.

  •

We control one another across the spectrum of an innocent thirty,
thirty-one years. I cannot forget your title.
We have made a blip in the machine
and it is always a choice to suffer but when the pain will not
let itself be localized it becomes an aching choir.

  •

You are a man who had his name tattooed on his ankle,
you are a woman whose face screams his name,
you are linked by the gift of becoming that he gave you,
he came on my back, and I was so small.
She answers to your presence daily, with prayer.