Against Yellow
When I see the child’s sky, scrim of blue
crayon, the sun’s untidy scrawl, the last thing
I think of is heat & light. Instead, teeth
antiqued by cigarette smoke. Instead, the wash
of bile across the tongue. The honey scent
of ketosis piss, starved body’s brightest rebellion.
Instead, my father’s eyes. Instead, van Gogh’s
last meal. The color my mother painted
the whole house when my father was drowning
in a bottle, believing instinct would drag him
like any good animal toward the light.
How he once tried to hollow his lungs
into our swimming pool & couldn’t stop
his body from surfacing, so he went looking
for a gun instead. I see a child’s gentle imitation
of the light & think first of all the rooms
my mother hasn’t painted over since he left.
The body of a girl lies on the asphalt like the body of a girl
after Ilya Kaminsky
and this does not bear comparison. The body of a girl lies
on the asphalt and it is not like the splayed anatomy
of broken fruit. Is not like a gaped wide mouth, throat
a stoppered bottle. Is not like the mystery of bird
-less feathers. Or the dull-eyed glint of a wishing well
gone suddenly dry, down payments on possibility
parching in the sun. Is not like a bent hammered nail,
or snapped bough, or the silence after a question’s heft.
The body of a girl lies on the asphalt like only the body
of a girl, & still someone will name her a man. No.
Perhaps, the body of a girl lies on the asphalt like
a daughter. Yes. Just like that.
Sonnet to be Printed Across My Chest & Read in a Mirror, Beginning with a Line from Kimiko Hahn
UNREVERSED (FOR REFERENCE)
I could not return to the body that
contained only the literal world: here,
where I cannot say reflect & not suggest
a bending back. Where back does not suggest
the fractured glass of me. I am told to
sever, with a pencil’s blade, the word body.
Taught that it does not belong, taught to cut
it away. But look, here it is, real
& irrefutable. Beneath the sonnet’s
dark calligraphy, what cannot be spoken
with a psalm-less tongue, music unhinged
from inside a gaping mouth, a body—mine.
& at last a poem that can’t be read without
it: crippled, trans, woman, & still alive.
