California Was Never Kansas

I can't tell anymore

where this valley ends and where my body begins

driving the length of California

I am shedding potentialities,

rejecting visions,

brushing off hallucinations from my lips and my waist.

not long until

skin ripping

from the contours of the buttes,

from this canyon like a womb

what they don't know is that

my body

is malleable, transplantable

and what they don't know is that

my body

absorbed this landscape,

acorn soup and antibodies,

poison oak immunity -

you would think I am native,

you would think I am what you are

they called me Mulan, asked if I am Puerto Rican,

but I am my mother's little brown Indian,

and I am told I can pass

even 6,000 miles away

our postman asked if I will be wearing only black.

the athletic goods store owner shouted that the problem is that all the Arabs have 10 children.

her husband told me the goddamn Arabs would never respect a Western woman.

he said, "You won't be in Kansas anymore, honey."

I cannot tell when I became from this place,

I cannot tell how many epithelial layers I share with these frightened men

who don't know that California was never Kansas.

these fearful men who don't know about sixteen years old and

"Wanna fuck?"

from a white man with a shaved head who thrust his penis at me and followed me in his car

these threatened men who don't know about early June,

a grin and a hand on my upper thigh as I walked a street in Hollywood in shorts

these men who cannot know

the relief of remembering that

my body will be a secret, for once -

I will bring with me

sycamores in a dancer's arched back,

the branches of oaks in the angles of flamenco arms,

creek water in my veins

but the men on the street will see only a castle tumbling into the sand,

honey eyes

coffee and cream skin

in a hammam,

a Moroccan woman will scrub every inch of me,

the caked and damaged cells

will drift down the plumbing of Rabat.

I will be raw and new.

I will tell my hair, "Listen! You cannot speak in that tone to the air."

at night, we will whisper to each other

about the things we've seen while hidden

and the things we've heard while quiet

la poesía de otros

I've spent a pretty big chunk of my life reading, listening to, watching, reciting, memorizing, and thinking about the poetry of others: the poetry of Rubén Darío in my father's declamaciones, the ballads of early 1990s Jewel albums, my mother's reservoir of questions, my father's garden, Pablo Neruda's Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, the soft and dappled verses of Naomi Shihab Nye, the flamenco performances of my teachers. Yesterday the rich voice of Robin Thicke, today the new sounds of Arabic.

Sometimes, I think I am too caught up in theory, ten-page papers about 18th century literature, all-nighters, this assignment of 'critical analysis.' I remember the people who have told me that I try too hard, that I need to relax. But fortunately, I eventually remember that I'm caught up in all of this analysis because I do love la poesía de otros, because I want my own words to soothe and bite and bloom, and because to make strings of words that will do so, I have to explain the poetry of others first.

So here's to la poesía de otros. See my brief piece on the death of the wonderful human being Facundo Cabral here. See my (academic) analysis of W.H. Auden's poem "Spain 1937", which won second prize in the Emory Elliott Memorial Prize competition, here.