girl song I
Honey, I want to write you a letter, a tonic, a poem;
but I’m writing from my sick (and sharp) from the repeat
in my head of the words to cancel that get backing, that are
allowed to fly and shred inside. I am not dead, my body
is tired, my brain limps, but the bullet was air, not metal,
larynx and air and lips that should be burnt not kissed. Lips
that came out of a mama, to eat mamas and girls, to eat
the girls of mamas, the babies of girls. How to tell when your
baby boy will grow up to try to wither girls like one you were.
My boys wouldn’t. Those men come from stunted mamas,
from a putrid flower center, yellow fuzz a deceiving puddle
of gook like pine green slime off a rotting leaf, they slip
and contort in that decay-muck to grow, and they never had
a chance. They come from mamas who would not want to
write a poem like this, who would never think it, too far gone
with head in a sack—like the vacuum with a human face that
threw a blanket over Eman al-Obeidy’s head in that Tripoli
hotel where she begged for better men to come forward, women
and men like herself, so in touch with her wound so as to feel it
too, their wound too, not one victim alone trying to meet eyes
to recognize, but many together wet eyes clicking, grimaced mouths
concatenating at the corners for unanimous, one-voiced wreaths,
to string the men who thrust and get hard cheering each other,
patting each other, whose eyes glitter, go wide as they watch
their cocks their buddies’ cocks grow to half-blown balloons
fittable in girl hands, to carol round them and then shoot out
like supermen: to cat’s-cradle their asses, a boa-mean snare.
I want for you a song that works, that does the bullet in reverse,
that rips open your chest for outpour of effulgence, that leaves
you in the shape of crucifixion, arms out, head back, back arched,
chest pouring wrists spearing radiance. The light is a bridge to all
in need, the light is freedom, it is power, not crimp. My mind fights
now for light, not babe with walking cane crook a-yank on neck, not
live cow with widest eyes in a voodoo ring, its organs wrenched out
its slit belly one by one by throng who chant and who should never
have been born, who should not be, who should not be, not girl grown
to pimp’s satchel and given the space of a stall to live like her counter-
part the beautiful sow; the pig is no kin of the pimp; the pimp’s mama
and brother are the snake and the devil, and no peaceable animal;
the mouse is king of the pimp, but it’s a secret, I tell now. (That secret
rotates, abides, to just a little avail or none, since the time of the
long away cross that bore the king both begging and utterly given;
pain invited if no other way, to not be, defy the opposite. Let me
not be what they are. Let me be with even one taken for bauble
by the horned group that names cannot, in full, warn from, that
puts out names, bakes duct-taped-carapaced dogs in ovens, cackles
at a whipping: the more so with pleas to stop, direct address, a try
to reach in There is nothing in: an inversion, the hurt that made
it forgotten, cannot be pulled up from primal chest by voice eyes
of Wiesel’s hanging child writhing in a slack noose in a Nazi camp.)
god if I could get that face that vomited words crazy bitch slut ugly
crazy, when I said stop, don’t look that way at my body, my body
is mine, and I am more than what you want to see, I am more than
what you have in you, than anybody who had a part in your making
has in them; anyone connected with a one like you is a failure: if they
condone, if they don’t see you like this, hand in hand with men-friends,
shouting down a girl who says I am more, my body is not cheap, my
body is all, it is sewn to the root of me, it is my transit to all good,
so I will keep it clean of your stares, that do not ask, that do not
offer, that flat-foot slap over, boot-kick, of blind eyes that stamp;
you think this is an auction, but I am free.
I want a song for you, baby girl, valiant, to not be taken out of
yourself for days because of men who do not take no who spit acid
at your cheek and eyes and the whole armature that does not help,
that does nothing for you but secretly like your place wish it stay,
as they imagine their separation from you with their teacup transplant-
vision, why they make your body fetish: the frantic flit of not being able
to see past theirs; or if women, who cower under one of the he who
gloats, practice clandestinely before the mirror his particular posture,
grin at girls panicking as they pull out the dagger the pen from above
an areola, joy over and count on their distinct, removed place, and do
everything, do nothing, to keep things as they are.
I know the injustice, of knowing your worth, and not having it
sung back to you. That you know is miracle; you had something
in you, you had an ingenuousness that was so diamond it could
not be flipped; you could see before the fight found you. Purity
is a clear view, it will not be coopted, sold, made murky. It is
sooner the clown in its insistence, calling ruptures, tortures
graces: back not turned on truth of what it was to be at worst.
Oh honey, what there is to put up with. They do not believe
you when you tell. They deny it even if they know. I know.
I am with you and wish for you, if it comes to this, a separate
peace within, if they keep it from you in this world, if they never
permit breach, if you are too rare for many allies, if what is
common is the mob. They cannot read what swamps them.
You are desperate for more versed.
Honey, like you I still learn, my brain is tired now, I’ve been
walloped, I’ve been sloshing in the mindless and the cruel, and
I’m better than that, we are. Our humility has to budge there;
if it doesn’t, we may end up dark in a sack, following: stooping
to engage, for the rumble crouching, going blue (as air holes
shrunken to tea stirs: rhinoplastic sickle nostrils, or worse, no
mouth, holes poked into the scaley mask of an acid attack hecatomb
(to god of ego and mama I want now with shit in the diaper) (with
progress of time, new ingenuities!), when the flesh has melted to
one fused article, from a coffee cup filled with hell potion lunged
in midday), when even looking at them mars, when more nutritive
atmosphere is needed for you to gust the beauty you were meant to.
We may leave the girl we are alone, behind, go off with the pimp and
the not-woman-not-human in the Tripoli hotel who tried to hide
Eman. They cannot be talked to sometimes, there is nothing there
behind the human face. Or we may get too sad, forget each other.
Lamb, your pleasure is holy. Your pleasure does not siphon
another, it links legs and foreheads touch, and the other can
keep the breath in the body, does not get a mouth glutted
with shame to swallow down pride like swill of blood.
I love you. When you flash back to that evil and fog, or mind
as tacky gum, from which crystal can’t be culled (dumb is rent
from innocent, from paramount as is, when the will to win
a pretend war rather than sun next to, is present; and even evil
that calculates, grips scant sliver of what there is to know, of
what is topmost to know) looking on you singing your name
as curses, when air still feels material as sure as a true princess
feels the pea many stories down, gets dizzy from rotation of the
Earth, when you still haven’t mustered the pride to put the pimp
in his place—no the clarity—put your human, caution, quality
aside now—with them it is wasted, there is nothing there to coddle,
nothing to respect, a lifetime of this, on turntable’s spindle-snag
repeat, and of knowing self, what you are to the names they hail,
teaches class bumped by heads of those. Many would take this
from you, they would jump to: cynical wisdom is unknown to her;
but your love is not the put-on that gang’s is, for show, to a few,
by obligation (-love to sister, for she is not picked whore or ‘crazy
bitch’, bedlam grand marshal with broom for baton: she is called
family, rather, so a bar on choosing her, to lynch, to name, to hang
with placard), while really love only to their claim to take what is not
for them and to those who cheer their looting and spite-smashing;
I know the difference between your much and their flint. I am
embracing you while your body shivers to recover. I would snap you
back to center in an instant if I could (out scandal drone of salt wound
words, or circling trolls in walls of head- the buck tooth of their aiming
eyes, Goofy dog guffaw, but devils; even suited, slick, the anus scrape,
the wrong they are and portrait-pride in it). You are more. You are
the better. Truth (is a living word, its guarantor loss and unearned
hurt with eyes wide open) clings to your leg, hides behind your knee.
I see you, I know.
This poem is by Lianuska Gutierrez, a Ph.D. candidate in English and Gus T. Ridgel Fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
