from GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE, and: Roll Call

from GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE

i go to meet the poem & it will not meet me so long as i believe i am owedi call it by the name i learned first which always sounds to me like without their vowels they are the same, the poem & my brother’s hairthese days the longest i’ve seen it since we were childrenit curls around his ears & for that sweetness i have no namethough i must still write it down because otherwise i will forgetas i have forgotten so many otherswords i mean & also the suffix built in to mark my laborsspecter, daughter, agent noun attached to the verb of my originsa sheet dotted with blood, a thumbprint against the dotted line& even if i am not tender i must tend& though i am only part water i wait & like any number i numb my vulgar partsthe word as i learned it first just means girlmy mother’s girl, grandmother’s grandgirlgarland of egyptian jasminewe call my grandmother’s grandmother nena which might not be her real name but i never thought to ask& before hers the names for me go silent & i do not know what to call those womenmy great grand others, my agents, my tender nounsthe name i am owed will not meet me though i fast until the corners of the room crowd with spectersthough my body swells with the volumes of this blood, though i spilled itthough i read that family honor is in the body of the girl, i spilled iti overflowed & was called a floweri grew up mapless & was pointed to a maple treei shrank my own body until the blood stopped cominguntil i dropped my every suffix & woke up to the sheets still white

Roll Call

  Troutbeck, February 2019

i wake before dawn to the distinct feeling of beingwatched   eyes soaking me in the dark

with their looking   i startle & click alive the little lampto find   of course   nothing   no one but the ghosts

someone else’s haunting   someone else’s ancestorsearching my face for another’s

later that night we circle with votives & smoke & justininvites us to invite our people   we meet fati’s grandmother

& her slingshot   hieu’s grandmother   never namedi invite ummi munira   not as i know her only in pictures

shown me when she died   slim-hipped & glamorousher thick ankles crossed beneath the flare of a skirt

i remember her instead as i knew her alive   her braidinsistent in its blackness   heavy and falling down the back

of the wheelchair   the wide insistence of her faceinsistence of the kohl painted around her eyes

fierce & strict as she was when i knew her   when i returnto my bed it is clear she has called the ghosts to order

& no one wakes me for the ten hours i absorb dreamlesslyinto the dark   & i wonder where she was before i asked for her

i wonder why i think of my people as so far away   as lostto me in my leaving   as if the dead have any regard

for the shallow geographies of the living   for the rootlessborders of the living   if she was in the ground

then she was in the water   if she was in the nile she was inthe mediterranean   traveling upward in the direction of her older blood

her own mother thought quietly to be egyptian for the cream color

of her capable thighs   & if she is in the mediterranean

she is in the atlantic   squeezing past the narrow corridorbetween morocco & spain   then across the open water

& onto the land   at the other end of the world   with me &outside the ground is covered in snowfall   which is

only water   frozen to little jewels   munira among them& i lose my coward’s geography   i lose my loss & lose

my being lost   i call upon my people & they arriveby snowstorm & rainfall & soft black dirt...