We find out from someone in the morning class that she’s absent again. The third time in two weeks. The test draws near and no one is anywhere near knowing: interstitial cells, the makings of an ovary, et cetera. What’s the zona pellucida again? Joey says something about blastocysts but I’m too busy fixing my bag, another zipper left open. I pick up my notes from the bench and Cara says Let’s go eat. It seemed like a good day – I could see a few birds biting on some students’ leftovers in the corridors. They jump around and chirp. I see two cats walking by, eyeing the food. One of them makes a strange sound and I wonder if it’s mating season. No one bothers checking the classroom.
Because this was the poem I wanted to write for so long:
of things that made me believe
in walking in the rain with an umbrella
and being wounded when I least expected to, at the same time
delivering just the right amount of aching. This is what’s kept me
like this for so long, always caught up
with memories of you smiling, you
beside me: the inescapable inability
to understand everything that has gone between us. The inability to grasp
the truth: how you never really said “no” all those moments I felt lost
in your silence – waiting for a reason. Always
waiting and staying still, fetal
and curled up in bed, each facing
the other way. Is this what it means to feel
the weight of something far too late? Is this estrangement
the only thing we dared share with each other?
What do we call this? What name
do we give this failure to believe in our happiness?
Neither of us were wrong to have felt frightened
by this kind of wanting.
Do not feed it.
Keep at a safe distance.
Do not call it by its name, do not call it names.
Instead, say that it has its mother’s eyes or its father’s chin.
Such a thing is best kept
with its mouth shut and toothless.
It hits you all the same.
After Rachel Marra’s 2nd 6 Word Memoir
People care too much. Too wrong, is it? How much do we know
about things that we call necessary? No one ever talks about
what’s beneath the entendres we’ve effortlessly woven
into our daily lives. Is it because we have become so skilled, so used
to disguising what we desire? When I call you
friend, or, lover, what do I really mean
to say? Perhaps the question lies
in how what I could say would always fail, would always fall flat
in trying to amount to the things I attempt
at explaining with the shuffling of my hands,
the way I turn my head when answering your question
about the weather, how my smile is crooked in an effort
to match the creases beside your eyes. Here are the tiny details
that so painfully call to be named, things that ache
to be given something that could rightfully be called adequate.
Yet you tell me it’s not enough; it’s too much. What would it mean
for things to be enough when the closest I have been taught
about caring is that something has to give in
to the weight of being unconditional, even if it risks
being called wrong.
When the dead talk, it is under a patch of earth
where voices are safe and muffled. Having died,
these people know the countless failings of being alive. And the infinite
hazards to consider: what would it mean
if the ears of the living were to feel
the strangeness of something once familiar
ghosting at its edges?
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you could have been in 1927 India, an English aristocrat seeking
gold more than mythologies and its many-armed gods,
and my family had long left for a shore with tainted sand, a warm place
and yet they brought their valises and coats to remind their bodies
of a place they used to know as home. My family, leaving: hopeful and happy
in their hopefulness. Taking away
all chances of us meeting before they even found a name
to suit what I would become. The year could have been 1802:
I would have been a boy from Panama, wont to walking barefoot and unused
to the sound of the words spoken in your then-Chinese tongue, cursed
with a dynasty of characters made to replace
the feeling of being unable to contain what we mean to say.
Or we could have been a few decades ago: 1989, meeting
in a dusty crossroad, exchanging vows without care,
before heading to our mothers’ wombs, allowing ourselves to be born
and so easily, so quickly forgetting each other.
Or I could have been a princess of an age lost
to this one, sent to die
because my country could not withstand bullets with wooden spears
and you, a magician on the other side of the world, speaking in tongues
I would never taste. But we are here and now and does the year mean anything?
All I think of is how much you remind me of my father; this is why I am wary and slow
to let your hand brush mine, folding my arms- knowing
for the first time that we spoke before we were even given
names, before we knew the names
of these years we are made to live in, knowing that your smile
carried countless years’ worth of faces that were ours.
Because when I was younger I wanted
To be an elevator operator: dreaming
of stars- distant
Stars, things that cannot be taken
By the hands of scientists, of lawyers, or anyone who is a stranger.
My own galaxy, perfectly enclosed
In the four walls of this transitory room
Where you are but a passing passenger-
Don’t you see?
With the push of a button, I control gravity.
