[late] National Poetry Month poem #1: RAMHEART

my mother caught every possible hint:

the alignment of family shoes

askew near the door was a lottery poem

only she could read: beware of intruders.

code lay under the rhythms of daytime ads,

god in newscasters' laden gazes as

they spoke of her hometown or ailments

my mother knew her centrality well

her brain a kandinsky of crosstown traffic

of clanging connections, every meal a divination

she tosses together garnished words

long after we've barred her from the kitchen

impious, i shut my eyes to pareidolia

see only moon rabbits when told how

find never messiahs but weevils in my cupboard

go unchosen & afterthought, hardheaded

all hints are enemies, the subtle too close

to dissembly. i return innuendo by twisting

a pithy meme into a conviction:

you cannot love me in a way that matters

venus in Aries, my ramheart

can only be pierced by a fire arrow

give me someone with a chest full

of declarations. i will hear nothing less

I am trying my best to not be a lizzo hater, but...

I doubt myself a lot; I probably always will.

I think a lot about the time a (female) interviewer told me straight out that she chose a (male) candidate over me because he had more confidence. Interviewers have told me I lack confidence multiple times.

I think a lot about the (Black female) recruiter who boasted of lowballing her client because her client didn't think to ask for more. "I just offered a candidate $85,000 for a job that had a budget of $130,000. I offered her that because that’s what she asked for and I personally don’t have the bandwidth to give lessons on salary negotiation." She said, and tagged it #beconfident.

Not all skinfolk are kinfolk, I know. But if it's feminist to use the “insecure” or “ignorant” as lessons in this way, then I want none of it.

I'm alive only because of the softness of others.

I also apologize a lot; it's ingrained in me by now.

I think a lot about the time a white woman coworker told me to apologize less and to say "thank you" more, "You should try that." I distinctly remember how certain she was as she told me—not suggesting, but commanding with an air of annoyance.

I think a lot about the time Lizzo, one of the music world’s loudest drumbeaters for self-esteem, angrily condemned music writers to unemployment because a (fellow Black female) music reviewer gave Lizzo a very critical review.

If that is what confidence looks like, I'd rather remain apologetic. I will apologize for apologizing, again and again.

i remain wary of unkinfolk, and devote my mind to the women, the black women, the black men, and the others who upheld my watery, airy self in interviews, as supervisors, as colleagues, and role models. i want to thank every one—gratitude inflates me & i no longer need to apologize once i am allowed to.

still, my brain returns to that ex-coworker and all the other shapes she may take. i wonder if she, in another body, told tell bell hooks to capitalize her name so that she doesn't look like she's downplaying herself.

i wonder if she told bell hooks to write her name in all caps: “other wise the world won’t take you seriously. otherwise, the world/i will can’t support you. Other wise I (the world) will eat you alive.”

a true allegory

I met the Devil the other day, in a dream. I was lost, looking for my siblings, and found him in an alley, among the boxes. He had fallen there or slept there--I can't remember. He was charming in that way of boys who are up to no good, surprisingly self-deprecating. He was red-faced, red-bodied, black-horned, and was he wearing a suit?

I asked to touch his horns, and he bowed to let me. I considered this a gesture to show him no, I'm not afraid of you. He seem to think it an everyday show of condescension, like he was used to it, like of course girls want to touch his horns, like it would win me over.

I asked him about heaven and hell, of course.

Heaven, he said, was like a never-ending game of make-believe. Everyone had power and everything was possible, but even that would get boring after an eternity. No?

My thought was that the creative would never grow bored. I'd love it.

Hell, I think was more of the same. He pitched it as more fun, if you attached to this world's "fun." He said the kinds of things you would expect a devil to say, like that's not me, that's all you guys and ultimately, God is the one in control. My powers are like a subset of Theirs.

He didn't sway me. I think I told him I was muslim, like I say to scare off missionary. And anyway, I had to get going. I was searching for my family. Wait, he said, me too. We're the same.

I was already moving to explore the California of my dream, but I asked why he was here on Earth and what he hoped to find. Ideas, he said, and smiled weakly like a Hollywood confidence man but I had no sympathy, none at all.

if a black girl stands alone in the desert, is she still black?

tell me

or on the moon. is she still black

without it passed to her?

without whiteness to delineate a cage:

this & this & this is you

this & this & are yours

only so big.

with all the moon, is she still--

even if the earth spins faster

and she falls so slow on that no-sky gravity

even with that curved horizon

she stands romantic (have we romanticism?)

rugged uncolonial ego

the i is the self she sighs deep, thinks

sleeps beautiful, ivied as Earth

draws new codes to switch to/from

new slangs and sounds, music and gates to keep,

new heights of conscious. her old generation

sleeps ignorant. we don't say 'black' anymore

they speak low recorded, microphone to mouth

crowd cheers from where sands meet sea

rings a first contact, as prophecy

tracks her cometfall

her splashdown, seed to sea

washed ashore to a wilderness

where the weekend tribal in camouflage & beard

greet & gape

is this not her moment of becoming

poems about insecure attachment

there was a hole in me where

Home should be, a childhood

deep & a mother wide

my filling is praise receipts

& prayers  names crumpled days

by the handful a

megaphoned song for anyone

digital lights singing i'm still hungry

the hole in me a lover tall

(i told myself) and burrowed

huddle small but

she was an ontologist who spoke rainfall

named as adam did the animals

unmade monsters into nothing

my absence into absence

once, each blink destroyed the land

--to a child, everything dies at night but me

but then she gives object permanence

brown & fertile

in two cupped hands

to plant.