From Blood, Sister

2

This is the memory I am making up of you, little sister From your photograph which uncurls like a plucked flower On my refrigerator door, your face like an apostrophe, such an open And tightened mark all at once—hesitating

To unwind, just on the brink Of telling me a secret. Do I not know you? Do we not bleed

The same knurled feet Walking along Bataan with our American soldiers, The same angled hands holding Poisoned rice before the thrust of a Japanese bayonet, Do we not both stink From the skin with fermented shrimp paste And glisten with sweat For the honeycombs of a soup of tripe? Do we not both bleed Of last names like an open mouth, Names made from tongues Pressing clamshells behind the teeth?

I am rolling it out as I go along, I know

I am pushing you open From myself, and you are so delicious to me, The plumped flesh of a spined head of shrimp I have sucked down whole.

6

Balut! Balut! We eat the developing body and I eat you my blood My sullied brown knock-knee, my sponsored child My limbs and bowed shins, my little squatter hemorrhaging into the river, darling Muezzin who calls me to a feast on your intestine— —Blood Sister do you hear me? I am crawling up your ear canal, I am the loudness in your pulse I am the dhole, the lynx caracal, who are feasting on your throat I am the hatchel in your hair, and at your elbow with papillote I am the eyeful, the fistful, the severed self— I am the countryman who has run, is underdone, and undone And I am the tightened asshole, the sliced onion And builder of all shanties; friend, I am your disease And I am at ease, and I am the tangle, the small ravel, The singing philomel, friend, and I am the knell The giant clamshell, the tolling city bells—sister! I am the Yell

—the yell In your stomach, your own yell

And I am eating you Because you take place In the streets.

You fill my mouth Because I am empty Of memory, birthright,

The bruise of begging, Empty And this is hunger, this is hunger.