“Boomerang” & “pinkmania”
→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 33: FALL/WINTER 2024
Boomerang
Down from the chapels and
from the porticos draped in
star-spangled curtains hung like
sheared flesh, hung like gathered
joints and boasting loss of sight and
teeth—Her wailing seized
the valleys and riverbeds, and I felt
the tilting moon in the hills of Her palms,
in the hiss of the crowing dirge
we sang for flattened hearth,
for the girl in the pink sweater
with the wide brown eyes
and for the prisons and oceans
and the lions licking wounds.
I said
to Her:
“America, where is the
sovereign power that formed you
from pyrite, like my father’s father
promised me?”
I once prayed in the woods
inside a temple of
branches, and I felt the wind
rise and cease with
the waltz of my lungs,
and I knew She was alive;
I fear now that She has
fallen prey to
Old Sam’s silver tongue—
to glinting teeth,
shuffling and chiming
like silver coins in the hands of a magician.
I said
to Her:
“America, will you
sow seeds
of marble or parables of death?
Will your promulgations
be kind beyond Heaven’s gates—when the
Virtues and Powers raise cobalt fulminations
for silver-eyed ghosts, for the debts you owe?
Will you make
wine of bones or leave them
to evoke dreaming?
Will you stand in sinking soil
or raise bells for the
riven air, for the rose-gold
Dawn,
for the sigh of cicadas,
for the braying of crows,
for the Sight
that spells your renaissance?”
To be restless within Her
undulating arms is to quell the red chaos
of a hawk: see the blue in its eye,
the white of its claw, the winged stars that
fade but have not
ceased their drumming.
pinkmania
Lately I've been avoiding mirrors because my weight is on the upswing, and I know that I'm supposed to revere my body and be a good feminist, but I'm not quite there yet. It is Tuesday night, the 13th, and I remind myself that I am an imposter, that I am not cut out for the work of liberation if I cannot wholly embrace myself, if I believe my friends are far more beautiful and glamorous than I, if I hold onto some thin, valiant hope that I'll get that Valentine's Day text tomorrow (but if there was no birthday gift, surely it's all dead and rotting, anyway); and I ask myself, again, if I can really be considered a radical if I open myself up to the dying chambers of Good Enough, Acceptable, Regressive. Maybe if I spoke up in meetings, or observed less and existed more, or maybe if I lost the weight or turned myself inside-out-and-under-and-beneath for the hundredth time, I would finally understand why I am more-than-and-somehow-never-quite-enough. Capitalism stole him away from me like a witch in a picture book, and I cannot compete with her (singing siren)! Yet she crests the skin of my shoulders like a shadow, or a boomerang, or a phantom that haunts the attic and the basement and rearranges the jewelry and hides the watches to distract the gods from calling her back home.
