Poem for my Empire
I am learning how to be weakness leaving the body.
I am licking citric atlas critic acid off my fingers.
Every day is keep doing my tasks keep reminding and head down.
Nobody minds the back kept slant until straight again.
My name are looking for rooms among all the names the
all the other names.
My Sarah looking for its girl among its mother.
A name is looking for more cells to burn.
I am learning to learn appropriating the hurts of others
Is the wrong kind of sorrow.
Doesn’t suit this age of me.
Doesn’t suit this plane of me, too flat, too full,
Too echoes.
I have viewed suffering as a sign of power. Why
Am I suffering at the edge of submission?
I just encountered a sharp ugly comfort
But it was not the product of my mind.
It is hard to want to die when everything is wanting to die
and hard to live.
Hot Yellow Room: A GhostPoem
I want to say: when you are a child, there is no escape. The hell is a silence. There is a hot yellow room. So you might as well as be hot yellow with it. This is the room of the dentist’s chair, the room that the doctor enters with his big needle. Where the kind woman in her glasses and her sweater will watch me play and make her studious demands. All this while, there is a temperate buzzing.
The room could be anywhere. Buzz could be anything. The point’s hot yellow. Shouts expand to fill our faces, sweat us like pigs. The nearby windows behold curtains and the sun flies in to lick my tired face. Assurances are made that the door is wide open. Transparency walks in and seduces before I know it is anything at all. And indeed there are doors here
there are windows even hidey-holes, but there is no escape from that great, piercing light, bright as a streetlight exposed in the raw hours before dawn. The light that detected my movements and warmed my scalp formed a hood around my head. A hood, but I was a child; the rest saw a halo. I wanted to scream.
*
(I wanted to scream. Beneath my halo, maggots, the maggots that led me to the playwoman her clipboard and gap tooth. It began when I plunged my hand into a bag of white rice and felt it squirm between my fingers. The rice was enchanted with maggots, cuddling their larvae. My father cooked the rice and served it to me with peas and carrots.
There are dead things in here, I tried to explain. Across the rice and vegetables laid a vague brown gloss, oil above the water. It bubbled and spat. It collected in small bubbles in the pan’s round corners.
Everything we eat is either fake or dead, he said. He laughed and I began to buzz and sweat. I was a fly. No place to lie
down.
It was moving, I said at the table, affronted by the oil dish before me. I said: The rice. The things in the rice. The same rice as here.
Just eat your food.
When I attempted to refuse he began mocking me and then when the mocking did not work he got angry. Finish Your Dinner he said. Italicized and with capital letters. And then again, this time said booming. When I didn’t Finish My Dinner he pried my jaw apart and scooped spoonfuls into my mouth. Too quick for me to spit. I had no choice but to swallow the dead maggots.
I did not look at the rice after that incident. It didn’t happen again. But the room grew hotter and closer and yellower. Bad things came up in me like whispers: cavities, moods. My appendix. And I was still too many pieces for me to manage. And to carry my whole self inside me and with me and on me and had me crouching, crouching because I was not only holding my own body up, but also the maggot-light.)
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