Can You Describe Your Years in Prison?, and: Ode to My Hair

Can You Describe Your Years in Prison?

Over Skype, I try to document my mother'sbald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,and science has proven what it had to prove:every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother's first.Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood's crypt,where prayer is keyless as a foreign laugh overheardand on the Masjid's cobalt globe a ghost … an angel?No, no … who am I kidding. When I say God,what I mean is: I can barely stand to lookat my mother's face. So, what if I've never seenwhat she's seen. I took the shape of her two hundredand six bones—I did not choose her eyes. Did notchoose to masticate the ash of witness,her crooked smile disclosing a swarm of flies,Yes, missiles hailed there, named after ancient gods.Hera—a word of disputed root—maybe from Erate,beloved. And because my beloved is not a personbut a place in a headline I point to and avert my gaze,I can now ask: would I have given up my mother for an alyssuminstead of asylum? Or one glass of water that did notcontain war? Her wound isn't mine, yet what I needed mostwas our roof to collapse on her like earth around stones.Rain, the hard absence of skin. The silence of it—no gust in my goddess. No artificial wind.

Ode to My Hair

Exotic, "omg so thick," a rug, so to speak—black cortex, I can almost be beautifulwith you. Once, mother snatchedmy split ends like newly acquired moneyand named them Taliban Beard.I never wanted this much of anything,so I scissored you at the scrunchyand sold you all to the World Wide Web.In plastic bags, you were shippednext to different manes, the paststored in your filaments like fetusesin formaldehyde, fragrances distendingas if skin of people huddledinto the eyeless belly of a boat at night.Cut and alone, dark keratin lies coldin factory halls: congregation of wait,you're patient until you too are wanted.But when my spools stop, and the silence holds—let them braid you into other heads.Let them brush you for my funeral.Let those of you spared on hospital tiles,picked from lovers' teeth, and nestled deepin the vacuum, or shampooedbetween dirt and debris in drains, light up.May you glow with the weight of loveyou can only share with what priesout of yourself. Those stuck to balloons,left in brushes, escapees taken away to elsewhere—what is to be said of you? I won't be goneuntil you are. Heavy rootthat rots to bloom when I shrink—stay and conquer the sargasso in my tomb.