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Prom Night
Beneath your sheets, install our software.
Say you went there.
Produce perfect pictures to customize &
broadcast the best four years of life.
Add technicolor lights. Midnight in Paris
or Under-the-Sea-themed backdrop.
Glamour shot. Champagne toast to
still-life smiles with teeth.
Perform a past you can post about.
Black tux. Hot pink
sequined skirt. New Age Art to show
your kids. How to fit
in a cul-de-sac, it’s all about how
the light hits your cheekbones.
Glitter to gloss over grime.
As you flip through scrapbooks,
sepia still make you nostalgic.
After you remove the burnt bits
Open Letter to TSA
Call it random screening/foreign film with the sound turned off, no translator’s note to tell us what subtitles won’t/today, I slip on someone else’s skin/tells their story for them/forget what we say/just smoke break jokes amongst friends/besides, I didn’t know he was black/I’m colorblind/aren’t we all/one family/besides, I have black friends/call me spokesman/I won’t talk over someone/just test drive their tongue/call color a construct/dissolve the spectrum/even our words sound alike/say history’s relative/choose the Bible/leave the names of better known ghosts/ whitewash the world with inclusion.
Please comment and shares likes/dislikes/etc.
Speak up,
sweetheart, don’t stutter.
I’ve been told: I’m brother’s sister,
prisoner to genetic code.
Born into the body
with a blueprint.
Since he went to high school
first, I became his last name
I wore with pride painted on
as a medal meaning people
might address me. Because
being in his shadow means
I’m at least a footnote now.
At work, I’m asked to leave for
the man in the back because
I can’t be the tech savvy one.
So I slip on a stage-play smile,
I’ve been told, I’m better
as a backdrop hum.
Maybe there’s a mason jar
where my mouth used to be.
Watch me carve apologies
into the cracks in my spine
until you’re uncomfortable
with my quiet.
Say it’s my fault
they shout girl
on the sidewalk, girl
why can’t you just keep
your head down? But didn’t I
bite the bullet?
Place the barrel
between my teeth?
America, bring me the bedtime
stories where my sister doesn’t
belong backstage.
Stop asking my mother what
her husband does; let it be
a sign of respect
when she keeps her last name.
America, I know you will teach
my daughter about her body
as a bruise, but
I won’t let you–
temper her tongue/tell her
it’s a tight-rope tied to her
skirt-length/that her brother
is the bright one, because
you find it safer to place her
in the form of fiction is written
on a page she’ll turn
As my body becomes an ill-timed tap-dance, you
tell me it’s a choice. Tell me
I hold my own head underwater.
That I asked for this first
panic attack at age eight
in grandfather’s car, anxiety
became an unwanted birth-mark.
A matchbox I can’t scrape
my name from.
Inside a crash-test car,
I watch the body
become the crime scene and try
to escape. Each time my head
hits the dashboard.
Go ahead: Call me quick-sand.
I’ve known both strength and
setback and setback and how
there’s a tourniquet around
my tongue, but I’ll fight that
house-fire each day. I know
I was born a winter storm that
takes up so much room I keep
the whole house unfurnished.
Tonight, I will love myself flash-
flood/hand-grenade/heart-beat
turned trigger-warning and how
I still search skin for splinters.
But each day, I unearth
someone stronger.
Disguise myself as sturdy
to find it built in-
to my bones, dear,
watch me bite the bullet holes.
After they remove the burnt bits
they wrap pink ribbons in your curls
to twist them around your neck
Dear child: they tell you what it ‘is’
not what it ‘does’ and how you are
to be obedient. You are the polite sex
who does not offer to hold
the door in case you offend.
As you begin you learn to love
your mouse-trap mouth you
are told to choose between
bold & beauty between
black-rimmed heels and his pride.
As you remove them he does not
feel small & you can root yourself
to the ground. This is perfection:
an art form called shadow-play.
You try your hand at construction-
paper houses to be told: Hands
to yourself; your brother becomes
the bright one. Yet you can drink
embers. Your waterfall of words
turns severed speech. Then:
Sweetheart, no— don’t
pick azalea petals to crush them
in the palm of your hand.
