Everyone I know //
Hates the racist police & wants a revolution. // But we seldom
Aim the gun . . . Have you heard // how the bulletsSing their anthem // throughout the body?? // It sounds like
God shutting the door— Bang. Bang.
—Loma (Christopher Soto),
“[SOMEWHERE IN LOS ANGELES] THIS POEM IS NEEDED”
No one wants to read an essay about violence during the holidays, another writer suggests to me.
He is not suggesting.
He thinks he’s helping me understand the way the game is played. We are on friendly terms. He simply wants to know what I’ve been up to. As he always does, every month or so. Checking in. He politely wants to demonstrate he does not mean harm. I tell myself this often. Once he said outright that he cannot help being white and straight. I wasn’t sure what to say to that; I had no answer for that. We didn’t talk for months. But after November, he wrote to me again. That he too is being harmed since the day of the election. He demonstrates his disgust, even taking part in a protest outside Trump Towers—except now it’s the holidays.
He is politely concerned with my happiness. My mother often said the greatest gift I could give her is to be happy, and not to just survive. She and my father, after all, have so little, but they’ve had many happy years. I see friends. I spend time with my husband. I write. I feel happiness in a time where terrible things are happening. Terrible things have always happened, will happen, as long as people remain as we are. It’s just when others talk of change, I get confused. What change? Change for who? Who benefits? How would a room of people agree on the room’s color scheme, much less a country, the entire of humanity? This is not talk for the holidays. Did you hear? The writer asks me. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking over The Celebrity Apprentice. I play the trailer that he sends. Ripe for parody.
But the present is not parody.
This happened: Conan the Destroyer to Governator to Reality Show Host.
This also happened: Businessman to Reality Show Host to Presidential Elect.
Politics is entertainment is spin. Two illusionists, real policy. Life goes on. It’s the Holiday Season. Have you seen Macy’s windows this year? They’re killer. Don’t kill his holiday vibe. Rogue One has opened. The Walking Dead midseason finale had over 15 million viewers. Aleppo has still fallen. Not like Olympus. This is real. But the writer who told me no one wants to read about violence during the holidays is Headlines Tired. What are you doing for New Year’s Eve? Days ago, this same man was tweeting the last messages of those stuck in Aleppo. People are just waiting to die. As if their fate was his own. As if that feeling of despair would last longer than the headline running quickly at the bottom of a television screen. He says outright: We deserve to be happy. Suddenly collective, and we are friendly again. I agree. But is his happiness anything like my own? Sudden offer of safety, but all I hear is: mission statement must be read in entirety. Sudden scrutiny of my need to ask: is your mission my mission? What resistance? What is reality? When Schwarzenegger has been Mr. Universe, The Terminator, The Last Great Action Hero, gone Commando, has had Total Recall, has defeated Predator. Violence is entertainment is electability. But which guns? Whose heroes?
I’m here for you, the writer texts me, I know it’s been hard for you. His wife, he adds, has been rewatching Beaches; did I ever see the movie? Lifetime is rebooting it, did I know?
He thinks he’s helping me understand the way the game is played.
He’s just checking in, after all. It’s the Holidays.
But I’ve been elsewhere. I’ve always been elsewhere. Only now I’m armed with the kind of conversation I’ve been waiting for. We are on friendly terms. I want him to join because I want him to know where I am, where many are. But when I text him a link to Loma’s poem and ask him what he thinks it means that “we seldom / Aim the gun,” he doesn’t answer.
Now I’ve gone too far. Now I’m unreasonable, not playing fair in a game that I was meant to accept as reality. I’m met with silence. Something has been taken away. Not just from me. Again. Seemingly essential link to the conversation. Whose words? Whose resistance? Take a break. It’s the holidays. Tweeting is shopping is mirth is myth.
This world.
My world as his myth.
My world cut short in his conversation.
Tell me again: Whose violence? What damage?
“[Let the bears devour our enemies],” Loma writes. “We have no obligation/ To open // ourselves // for those who do us harm.”
A fitful sleep until it is morning. I forget about the writer. I move on, knowing he’ll text me again, without addressing the weighty question that Loma poses. The writer will text me again like nothing happened. Because nothing did. There are limits to these kinds of friendships because there is a limit put on the conversations. I did not set these limits. I move on. I get dressed and give a final exam. I make plans. I send my mother Loma’s poem, wanting to know her thoughts, and she calls me crying. They’ve never met, but Loma has touched a nerve in her that she’s tried to numb with work and taking care of family as a child herself. My mother would argue: Never open yourself at all—even to those you love, even to me. But of course this is not true. My mother opens to my father—although in her sleep, she closes off, closes up, again. Self-preservation has been too “innate-d” into her. Every day, my father waits to see if she’ll come around. Sometimes she doesn’t. She has “days.” She has days. She believes most of the world means her harm. But, or rather, nonetheless, my mother Esperanza Gomez is happy. Esperanza means hope. Whose hope? She says her children. She says my happiness is the only true way to honor her. She says achieve. She says earn. She says never go hungry.
There are times I have failed these commands, and yet even then I found happiness, many strange sorts of happiness in bursts of certain possibilities. I suppose you could call it distant hopes I grabbed hold of, and some I saw through. I think of our family all the time. There are members of our family who attempt and achieve happiness despite contaminated soil and water on the U.S.-Mexican border. Despite cancer, unemployment, prison, drug abuse. These hard, undeniable truths that continue in us, will continue, no matter how far I go, no matter how many times my parents say: don’t move back home; it’s good to have a daughter in New York. It’s good, they say, but what good does a Master’s in Poetry do for those hard, undeniable familial truths?
Don’t ask that, my mother hisses. If you fall, we all do.
But I’m asking. I’m asking outright about happiness and resistance and violence. I ask my father, who breaks down over his register at an auto parts store. I send money home, and that solves nothing. I solve nothing. His pain runs deeper than the swastika someone had formed in stones on our front yard just after the election. Stones from our very yard. How my mother tried to clear it in the morning before anyone saw it, my father included. Foolishly I ask: why didn’t you report it? When my parents live in a red state. When this has happened before. I text my husband’s parents in Hong Kong with the intention of telling them this happened, but it comes out instead: I miss you and I love you. Rarely the kind of things they say outright to each other, they’ve grown accustomed to my sudden outbursts of candor and shame. Why shame? Because I wasn’t there clearing the stones. Because my parents say: don’t ever move back home. Success is solitary as writing in my mother’s eyes. Don’t get too dependent on anyone. She said this when I was young. To love meant limiting her affections. At night, I hold my husband tightly. He tries to stay awake until I fall asleep first. Impossible. My inability to sleep through the night is a form of self-violence, self-vigilance. I am very much awake nonetheless. I am very much alive. I am here and I am elsewhere as I finish my next poem, wash the dishes, take a midnight walk after the first significant snowfall of the season.
We make plans, my husband and I, as I lean on him where snow has become ice, slippery and slick. Such evasive surface is so familiar and yet I am vigilant. Yet I lean on him. We can see our breath in the frigid air, in the thick silence. We don’t exchange a word on this street in a rare hour of night that few cars pass by.
Somewhere, our silence meets a greater silence of this midnight awakening. Perhaps demands are being made. Perhaps we refuse, we make not. Perhaps a weapon is aimed. Perhaps the violence within will catch like wildfire, singe the earth we need to survive, and the ideas of happiness will disappear, along with every measurement of what is most human: culture, discourse, the very languages that separate and keep us from each other, from complete understanding.
Somewhere, too, and just as strongly, I refuse to believe this awaits us.
Somehow I live in both worlds, and cannot leave one for another; there is no bridge between them, but a continual, painful exodus from the very human nature we’ve come to believe as irrevocable and unrivaled. My doubt is my belief; my resistance is my hope.
And it is in both worlds that I am writing openly / toward, writing just as openly / against, writing the very hopes that my mother would never let her name be.