son

work in progress, poetry slam piece

I could put it in another way.

You are a second-generation immigrant,

Sticky and syrupy like gulupa;

Hot-raw-ripe

Like the orgasm of late-night-jazz that

cuts the smoke in two just to let its brittle bones break

to let free nothing but magma,

fire and fire,

black and black,

heart.

 

A second-generation immigrant.

 

Not like me, your first-last-gone-generation-

Mother, so I forgive you if you don’t understand.

 

If you don’t understand the blankness which

Gushes out of lost languages, their sighs and cries

And screams who echo in crevices under silence.

Heavy silence. Your grandmother’s silence.

Overgrown, gotten over, forgotten;

Her legacy. Gone. Lush. Under alien skies.

Her immortal reproach.

 

I forgive you.

I forgive you the shoreless-ness of your world,

Which is a kind of openness only your waters can reach,

Flat, hot like the asphalt in August, only suspicion

Under my beige sandals you wear in.

Vibrant. Sultry. Young.

But I forgive you for not even grasping, blindly, the vastness

Which pushes under my old, my ancient

Ribcage, the vastness of loss,

How do you even spell that?

Mother. Home. Self.

It breaks under the pressure,

It snaps, the bones

Are nothing

But

Skin,

Her skin,

With all the wrinkles counting the years of

Not-there’s; the skin, my skin, stripped down,

Popped, rumpled, like hers.

Transparent.

 

 

I forgive you if you don’t understand.

Not understand the cost of aborting myself long before you could

Ever know me: as daughter, as sister, as me.

The cost of cold water every time I have run the tab,

In that one-room flat, the windowless kitchen,

Bent over the sink with all my birds spiked (not for the first time),

Scrubbing myself away; rust; sarcasm; stay strong,

Lips parted as if begging:

water, water, water.

 

If you don’t understand that water means tabula rasa,

Which means clean slate, which means clean.

Clean of colours, the yellow on working hands,

And the brightness of black in the eyes shortly before they tear.

It means clean. Clean ground, clean land. If you don’t understand

That it is this bareness on which your abundance

has bloomed,

but this,

 this

 is

 a

 graveyard.

 

A Second-generation immigrant.

 

The talented, the hybrid, the multi-colour, the dream.

And so you walk, crossing worlds, having conquered

Them by default. But I forgive you if you don’t understand

That this bridge, this stone-metal bridge you walk on,

Is nothing but a skeleton, my skeleton, hers.

Your grandmother’s (the one who would never know you),

And mine, brittle, and hollow, and broken in parts.

And if you don’t even hear the million birds

Trapped within, the million birds

Whose only direction

Is going back,

I forgive you

As well.

 

A second-generation immigrant,

A mother’s son.

The one who spills like laughter over my hot exterior,

Erupted, and strong, warm like dough in my hands.

Our meals on Thursday, Traditional Thursday you call it.

 It was never your fault.

So, I forgive you if you can’t taste their soul, baked, inexplicable,

if you chew and swallow oblivious. It is your way of moving forward, and we both

Know bridges stand still.

 So, I forgive you.

Outliving me. Forgetting what you never knew.

Only seeing this side of my Janus-face: the hard one.

Eating hurriedly, your eyes locked in the tv, calling it dry bread with no heart ache

and no taste of sorrow.

Counting time wrong. Never

before and now; back and here;

Here; here; here;

and

 

there

 

is

 

gone.

 

 

 

My prodigal son.

Eat. Eat now, greedily, unapologetically. Eat. The food I could taste long before

You were born. The food on the wages. This food on the one side: now, triumphant.

Earned with blood.

My swollen belly with a hole in the stomach on the other.

 The hunger in prematurely-dead eyes, with its colour,

Or non-colour, the motionlessness of metallic. With its hysteria, and terror and a

Neighbor who shares left-over’s.

Eat now. Devour it all in a manner

Engulfing opportunities, endless, flooded with verve: your bleeding mother

giving birth at the bleeding border, with that hell of a strength: the talent to

be gone.

My second-generation-immigrant,

Heavier than my losses,

Like a song. Mine. Hers.

 

For                          Do

                                You

                                                 I

Give

 

 

                   Myself.