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You Bring Out the Bronx In Me (excerpt in the style of Sandra Cisneros’ You Bring Out the Mexican In Me)

You bring out the Bronx in me

Not the Riverdale that my mother always says we’re near

But the Kingsbridge Heights in me

The up til three just dancing on the street corner

The smoke on the fire escape turned makeshift balcony,

the way the exhale carried all the heavy of the day from my lungs

You bring out the home in me

The hood in me

The “why take it home when we can fight right here”

And why say why that I’m hurt when I can call you a bitch

You bring out the bitch in me

The dog in me

The survivor in me

The bite and the bark in me

The leashed animal in me

We fight to the death and then sleep it off

You bring out the heathen in me

All belief in rebirth

All “if we can make it through today,

We can start anew tomorrow”

All “I can forgive you if you promise

Tomorrow you will wipe both our slates clean”

You bring out the optimist in me

The forgiveness in me

The pardon in me

You bring out the Jesus in me.

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Fly high

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What Happiness Looks Like In Theory Versus in Practice

In Theory

Somewhere in some timeline

I have found someone who

Looks at me like

I am

Coming home

Who kisses me like

I am a desert oasis

Like I taste like things she didn’t dare believe in

Who touches me like

I am a forbidden fruit

Like breaking my skin will ruin her

Like breaking my skin will teach her all of the answers she needs to know

In Practice

A woman with eyes like a calm sea

Asks me to read her a happy poem.

She means it.

I will look for one

Even if I have to tear myself open

To find it,

Serve it to her

Warm and raw

Heart still beating.

I think “what poem could be happier than this?”

I mean it.

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Breaking Down:

When crying it occurs to me that:

1. The source of me sobbing in the bathtub hasn’t changed for four months. I am still waterlogged and contrary to popular belief, sailing the same seas does not mean you learn them, simply that you learn the language so that the tongue you use to call yourself lost is no longer foreign.

2. My mother is always right. When it comes to matters of my heart, my mother can always tell when I come home without it. When I have performed open heart surgery with a kitchen knife and arthritic hands, my mother is always my unwilling ICU nurse. She has run my trauma ward for long enough to know when to stop with chest compressions. When to let the machine flatline.

3. I don’t think I drink enough water for this. When I have finally shattered into a piece that is too small to shatter again, I have to remember to write this down: drink more water, you dehydrated bitch.

4. It occurs to me that I am no longer interested in a life partner. Perhaps because my report cards always warned that I was no good at playing well with others. That I was not meant to be anyone else’s teammate. Maybe because life partner assumes that I have a life to share. That I will be living. That peeling layers of myself away for audience consumption will be sustainable.

5. Crying is an incredibly exhausting process. This is why I cut it down to once every four months.

6. I love you is a phrase in many nonverbal languages. Your skin is filled with I love you’s I have traced onto it when I thought you were asleep. I have nervously fed you I love you’s when you have come home to me tired and empty, waiting for it to be said back to me via an empty plate. I have brushed I love you’s onto your skin, laughed I love you’s into your shoulders, twirled I love you’s into your tresses, I love you’s have tumbled from my awestruck eyes and yes, bubbled from my laugh filled throat.

7. Contrary to popular belief, time does not heal all wounds. Some wounds are a slow bleed that take your last breath from between your lips.

8. I could write this poem forever.

9. But I won’t let this be the only thing between us that is for longer than a moment. I will try to keep this short and sweet like “I need things in my life that aren’t you.” I will not write you back. I will not write you back. I will not cave like I have done over and over again.

10. You are the second woman I’ve loved to whom I’ve said “I hate you.” Love is complex sometimes. Sometimes I say you when I mean myself, I’ve always been partial to scapegoats.

11. Sometimes I hope we end up together just so I can say I told you so.

12. When I am lonely, I wish she were you. Or you loved me like she did. Or I loved her like I love you. Or I loved me like you did. Or that any of it was enough.

13. Do not trust me. I am a liar. Look at how I make myself promises every time. Look at how I trick myself into not replying. Look at how much I hope it matters. Look at how many times I will drown, hoping you can at least find a reason to keep around my corpse. Hoping at least it will float.

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Future

One day I will reach the point at which “she” and “her” are not you

And will you love it then?

When this is not a chronicle of your magic?

When you are not a hero

Not even a side character

When you are mentioned

Only in passing

As a backstory

To why I learned how to sleep

With the lights off?

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Rebounding

Rebounds are

Like skittles riddles

Mystery flavor airheads

Seltzer water which is

Whatever you want it to be disguised as whatever it is

so you are bound to be pleased or disappointed but only because of what you expected.

After all a rebound is meant to be disappointing.

Meant to cushion the knockout blow

The way “I don’t think this will work”

Takes the air right out your lungs

Bends you over at 3 am,

Stomach full of bad food

And bad liquor

And bad juju

And self loathing as bad as it gets.

Meant to remind you that you are better than crying to your mom after twice your inheritance worth of tequila

Meant to remind you that you can choose to feel nothing

That there is a world in which this bullethole doesn’t get deeper every day until it finally tunnels it’s way through your soft tissue.

Never mind that you use her body as a map through purgatory

Use her lips as a washcloth

Purge yourself of hands that haunt the softest parts of your skin like a specter.

Never mind that

You buried the past but not too deep

Just in case it was ready to come back to life

What did Jesus’ disciples do in between the time he was buried and the time they realized he’d risen again?

Did they find another purpose to serve in the meantime?

A hobby?

How did they kill the time?

You pass the time with her

You call her love

She calls you her baby

You call her whatever you can remember

When you search through your phone

Even it doesn’t remember her name.

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Home coming.

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How To Become Your Demons

When she says she loves you,

Say awwww

Do not reply with

Anything that will make her feel as if

You are a permanent fixture

As if you can be erected as a monument

To anything but your own amusement

At whimsy that calls itself love

When she asks you questions,

Give her half truths

Smother them in something sickeningly sweet

So they are easy to swallow

Pick a poison you can share

It will empty you both

Tell her you're busy

Do not tell her with what

She will put a name to your busy

A bio

Will say that you met on the cruiser

That you told her goodnight

That you told her good morning when you woke up next to her at 5 am with no pants and no recollection of the night before

She will spend every night looking at herself like an

Abandoned building

Slated for demolition

When she asks you for anything

Sigh

Then give it to her

When her voice gets smaller,

Let your sighs get louder

Let the pauses get longer

Let your voice betray how tired you are

How frustrated you were at work

How she is a shell youve outgrown

When she asks you if it was her fault

When things are hers

Or yours

When everything has been divided

Tallied

Paid for in full

When you have pried your name from her lips

When you can’t remember what she

Cried to you about

At 3 Am

When her hands found you in the dark

When you held her like you held the balloon

You got for your birthday in the second grade

Back when people still told you they loved you

Before they sent you off to school

When she asks you what she could’ve done

Right before the car door closes

Tell her

Nothing.

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Seven Responses/What My Mother Doesn't Know About Love

My mother is angry because I have a tendency to take strays Without realizing how much commitment It takes to love something enough For it to be whole She tells me “You like projects, Thing is you're enough of a project That you don't need another Don't need another knot to unravel until Your fingers are too numb to Handle the rope at your own neck” Tells me that my hands paint pretty pictures Of saints while I consort with mortals That my muses are often not made of the Metal I craft their likeness in Response Number 1: everyone is a project I will always need to have hands Willing to knead away knots made from pain I did not cause I will always need to know how to hold things softly So I do not crush them in my own excitement I will always have to have ears attuned to hearing hesitations to pick up on if my partner needs picking up Response Number 2: When I was about 8, my stepfather tried to teach me how to swim so he put my head under But I was not used to jumping into things head first Was not used to ever believing in things larger than myself What does an 8 year old know about trusting? When you learned to ride your bike, didn't your mother tell you she was right behind you? Was she? Response #3: If I am to ever love a person I must learn to throw myself into ten feet of water to trust the lifeguard I must pedal with my heart in my hand And laugh without my hand in front of my mouth I must learn to jump into open heart surgery with my bare hands This is not a surgical manual This is simply what I've learned about loving another human Another problem Another project Response #4: When I picked up a kitten on the side of the road When she shivered like the cold Had seeped into her DNA Even after we brought her home When she cried all night When she cried all morning and bit fingers When she destroyed fingers and cords We never ran out of ways to love a Feral thing That clawed at ankles and Hissed at strangers that smelled foreign Response #5: When you raise a monument of a child, when you chisel a child out of marble, the greatest act they can learn is how to be something softer than that which they were born. To touch and hold and hurt. To bend without shattering. Response #6: I will always be a secret Sometimes a secret lover Of women Of sunset Of animated movies that make me cry Of poetry Of the way Handel’s Messiah sounds when i’m drunk and lonely The way Luther Vandross makes me miss dancing with my father Of the Isley Brothers Of the Bachelorette Of the idea of pizza Of hands of silk coated in teflon, Covered in thorns. Response #7: I am a builder of golden statues You are a builder of vitruvian men You do not see the dark thorny patches of my soul I love even when things are broken I hold even when things are hot to the touch You cannot fathom how I love that which hurts How I can paint landscapes of tundras that Look like rainforests But don't you love me? Don't I love you? Aren't we all just artists loving muses That don't always love them back? Sometimes they're sirens Sometimes they drown us Sometimes we have to learn to swim

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Another New York Poem (excerpt)

New York does not claim you Call you homie New York still wants you to Call her by her full name Of course she's a woman Every great thing was a woman Everything that put you on your ass Everything that told you to sit up straight when you were talking to it That told you that “You don't have to remember If it's the truth” Was a woman And she don’t claim you You're still a dub

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Black (Excerpt)

Zeus was black Fucking and looking for someone To tell him that he was human Fathering sons no one taught him how To father No one taught him Who could teach him... Aphrodite was black She is this girl on my block named Iris And she got green eyes and Every guy says they fucked her Every guy says she's a hoe How come y’all fucked her then They don't know She's so beautiful They didn't think you could do anything else with Beautiful things

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Milk Carton Missing

Truth be told, I miss them all When I am lonely, my heart likes to wander the parts of my mind that have been decommissioned On a mission to find missing people It follows footprints like Fido It follows trails left like snails It slithers slowly through abandoned pathways I end up missing people I haven't mentioned in months Some of their names taste like loss They are heavy Some of them I've lost even as they show up in my feed and my fear is that these are the worst Because they have forgotten me Their minds are mazes that I have gotten lost in My heart likes to linger, lost and lonely Looking for where things went wrong Sometimes I have to hold it in my hands and hope it understands that sometimes people say infinity when they mean in an instant and some humans only hold each other for a heartbeat.

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Discovering Religion

I see god in beautiful small things Like baby’s hiccups And the first raindrop I see it in classrooms and Laughter I see god in beautiful small things Like fireworks And birthday candles I see god in the way something Unfurls in your chest When I am near There is god in that In the way fingertips caress the skin On the back of your neck And the way silence wraps itself around my body, keeping me company and the Way I come to your body, Hungry and haggard Like a home.

Under expert hands, My tongue rediscovers holy Baptizes itself with the name of Our Father Who art in Heaven If a sinner utters a phrase In holy reverence If an agnostic utters a sentence In holy matrimony If I utter your name In holy ecstasy How then is that not prayer? My moans claw their way up my throat Like holy water I look upon you as my savior.

When your head is on my chest Like I am keeping you afloat When my breathing is Used for your buoyancy When your giggle sounds Crystalline I hear something Someone might call god In the dark With hopeful breaths And Something audacious.

You used the word heaven for the first time As in “This was another little slice of heaven” And in the trail of smoke that Reaches the sky and disappears I see something that Reminds me of when I was younger And I sat at the top of the monkey bars I remember the feeling of flying that I get from Looking into your eyes It makes me dizzy Your kiss gives me a Head drunk. I am imagining Lips on lips And skin on skin and Lips on skin and I see god for the first time in Your goosebumps and My goosebumps Making their acquaintance.

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The History of Darkness

The History of Darkness How to tell the story of ships that opened their bellies Made dandelions of mothers, spread their seeds far and wide. Left people sized holes. How to tell of shipwrecks Of bodies flung overboard like anchors. Of warriors who walked back home across the sea. Whose bodies were finally weightless. How to tell the story of feet picking their way through the night; the dance. The sound of air and metal kissing, the small gasp. And the sound of Earth cradling her cold child. How to tell my son about the way I could not teach him to ask for help before I taught him how to endure How I made a monument of a man. How I only know how to make trauma an inheritance. How to tell my daughter about The way she must Learn to walk elephant heavy So if she disappears, They will notice the lack of imprint and search for her. How to tell the little boys I work with About why their brothers cut their dreads, So that one hand is Samson but the other is Delilah. About why their mothers hold their hands Until their nails dig in like shovels Making holes the same size as their sons.

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Teaching the Steel Pan

This is the way the pan sounds when my Uncle plays it faster And faster. I Have heard it every day since birth, It echoes in my heart beat. It sounds like rain falling pitter Pattering on a galvanized roof like the one on my father’s house that my mom moved Into when she was sixteen and Looking for someplace where she could be her own. I am one part stubbornness and one Part routine. My father came home every day at the same time and my mother could feel the vibration Of his steps from meters away This is the music of my father murmuring Hopes into my mother’s flesh and the kicking And this is the crashing of the waves and the flurry of my uncle’s hands and the way it makes my mother young again And the way my uncle’s head bobs like a metronome And the sound of people laughing and gossiping and crying all at the same time. And it is my grandmother’s plane engine and my mother hearing her first train and wondering how Americans weren't deaf because it was so loud. These are the cuts on my uncle’s Hands from handling sharp oil barrels These are La Brea and the way Language is a learned rhythm from Several teachers. It is a song that We have made up the words to And this is the way my uncle knows The perfect note in his core This is the drum named guitar and The way my family’s vibrations Come together like a steel band All playing our own variations On the same notes.

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Exhaustion

You bend and I would like you to stay and hold the fort but I cannot trust you to weather the storm You are born of generations of reeds Generations of bamboo Generations of benders Of back tired of bowing Of jaws tired of smiling to hold it all in I am born of women with fire on their tongue Explosions I am born of field slaves Of snarls and teeth bared I am born of winter winds and frost I cannot understand domestication Cannot understand the dance that requires self effacing I cannot understand the need for patience I cannot understand pulling the reins of ones tongue I am electricity I am Mach 10 I am category 5 I register with Richter scale destruction I am tectonic I am rich deep decimation I am ugly I am rotting I am overwhelming I am ugly I am ugly You are bows on not presents You are thank you notes written in ones own blood You are tear stained smiles and Apologies Always apologies For thinking of yelling For the pin dropping to disturb the silence You are preemptive Precautions I am percussion I am drum roll I am cymbals crashing You are the inhale I am the scream I am the shattered glass The aftermath And I am sorry I am so impactful But I would rather explode Than implode I cannot understand the dance The shuffling The minstrel show The self implemented hostage exchange I cannot learn to hold my tongue Cannot learn to bite my lip and take whip cracks without threat of mutiny I cannot learn to dance on nails Perhaps this makes me less holy, Jesus died for our sins Jesus smiled in absolution and allowed himself to be the object of another’s will Perhaps I am not pure But I am unyielding. I am constant. I am tidal patterns I am sunrise I am resplendent I am phoenix rebirth I am sunrise I am sunrise You bend and I would like you to stay and hold the fort but I cannot trust you to weather the storm Cuz you are born of generations of reeds Generations of bamboo Generations of benders Of back tired of bowing And jaws tired of smiling to hold it all in