you have never been so sick, the first night

that silence cups your feet, runs its fingers across your face,

and all you have is your hand opening and closing

where before there was only her.

what does it mean to turn love off like this,

to unspeak the light?

how do you withstand the rolling earth, the nausea

of you own unredeemable thoughts and desires,

how do you fall,

and get up,

and fall,

and get up,

and still never escape the knots of her hair?

do you remember—of course you remember—

her hand under the table, how you have never found the universe,

so vast,

so conspiring,

as you found it there, on the tips of her blue fingertips.

so what now, when there is no universe,

and there is no hand, and she is a smell and a sound and gone,

and you are unbearably tangible,

unforgivably concrete,

unspeakably here.

Valparaíso,

How long you’ve been so sick—seasick, clinging to

This torn edge of the earth’s last rock by your

Fish-bitten fingernails.

Wounded, wrapped in shredded love stories,

Your blood gleams on your drenched thighs

And rolls into the sea that won’t let you sleep.

Flea-bitten,

Feverish,

Lying between dogs and broken bottles,

Excrement and rotting melons and jeweled houses.

In your insomnia you dream a little—

Fever dreams, silver fish streaming in the ocean.

My love,

Blood of my root,

Your own broken body scattered across your hills

To each and every direction, your endless

Steps of cracked spine

Tossed and turned by this angry world and you,

Relentless

As a Titan, chained in the salt and sun

And rain that chills even your oldest ghosts—

Your trickster heart always good to eat.

You’re always good to eat, and

In your confusion you nourish multitudes,

Including me.

You live despite the prognostics, which is why you

Mourn your malignant mass with so much laughter.

Known by your fish-skin hands and your knife,

No one has ever gutted anything with as much tenderness

As you open up your decaying beasts of mansions that

Rattle in the wind,

Hollow,

Such sublime skeletons with their rheumy fists raised

Against your suicidal coastline,

All peeling wood and blood wine that

Consecrates your most broken things.

You condemn all who love you to suffer the

Warring factions of earth and sea in

Your split chest.

You cry,

You cackle,

You sing to your trembling hills

With an unforgivable art that turns their pains

Into your most shining parts.

It is, in fact, your beauty that is so shocking,

Or maybe sinful,

Too-sweet and too-much and too-sorry,

So is it any wonder that so many turn away from

Your missing teeth and your old sea breath,

The blood on your thighs and your fishnet knuckles

As you wander screaming at no one,

At everyone—

Just another interpretation of God?

Your dead lie forgotten, entombed on the edge of the sea,

Their names erased by your own briny finger,

And they walk only at that time of night when

You belong to the seagulls and the dogs.

For how long have I known

Exactly what your ships say in the dark,

For how long have I tripped on

Your rain-lit streets at night

Only to see my eyes in your face?

i struggle to forgive myself

for both the consequential and inconsequential. For those of us who cleave tightly to perfectionism, a mistake can feel less like a mistake and more like a referendum on who we are as individuals.

I did not grow up making mistakes. I mean I did, of course, but in the things that were most easily quantifiable–like school and grades–I didn’t. I loved learning, and yet my enjoyment of the process was always tempered by my terror of messing up. I remember getting one D on one assignment and crying at school. It was the only time I ever cried at school.

I’m not sure if this inflexibility came from being the oldest, or the quietest, or the one who always needed the least. When I did make a mistake, I tried to fix it on my own and resisted asking for help. Part of this could be due my sister being born with lots of physical challenges, so since I was about four years old I have tried to require as little intervention and attention as possible.

It has served me well in some ways and very much hindered me in others. I am always my most difficult critic, and if it is exhausting to live with someone who nags you incessantly, it is even more exhausting when that person resides in your own head.

I wonder how to open myself up to radical self-love, including my faults and lacks and shortcomings. I can say the words and post the memes and believe them for other people, but it’s a challenge to believe them for me.

i remember the last day of love,

how we slipped from each other’s hands
like some too-heavy thing.
so, so far gone, love.
it was sunny,
do you remember?
you were smiling,
you are always inescapable.
i felt you crack open my body.
even after erasing every centimeter of you—
your voice, your fingernails, your right and left hands,
there is some orphaned spirit of mine
that i have not yet found,
that i suspect still lives in every centimeter of you,
and it is i have become the broken thing,
the incomplete thing.
i do not think of you except for when i think of you,
which happens more or less often
depending on how much I am prepared to endure.
and i do endure.
i endure the memory—
half-invented, half-summoned—
of our hands peeling each other apart,
pulling each other apart,
how we tore each other apart
and i would never wish us on each other again.

vacancy

Because I have left you with nothing but these half-stringed afternoons,
Poorly cooked,
Because I dream of you,
Because you know I dream of you and we find each other so faintly,
Because I sit here abandoned
In this deserted house far from the sea
And your footprints blow across the the floor,
Because of the so many and so unfortunate things I have given you,
My fear,
My nausea for this upheaving world,
My rootlessness—
Especially when it comes to you, love,
Always you,
Love,
Because I speak with the impersonal “you,”
And I mark a cross on your back,
And you know my weight on lost evenings,
Because the fan in the corner is our only witness,
The weary witness of our endless small fatalities—
And sometimes even it covers its face and turns away.
Because I am as I have always been,
Mute,
Struck deaf and dumb,
My body broken on the intimate rack
Of this most unforgiving paralysis,
A body born claustrophobic,
Darling,
Because your eyes are my eyes,
Because you took them from me like the sun takes the sky,
And your eyes are my blindness,
And my blindness is your hands,
Because of this metallic distance that makes us sick,
The distance I have loved and held instead of you, love,
A distance that rises and falls and I know it all, love, I see it all.
Because of you,
Embodiment of my loss,
Blood of my bone that leaves no place
For anything or anyone,
Only the possibilities and futures
That we have invented and destroyed,
The worst type of art.
Because it is not your fault, nor mine,
Because there is no fault in these endless turns,
Because inertia is agnostic and this is where we sleep now,
This is how this love is,
A love where there can be no reason and no relief,
A love that understands nothing but itself
And speaks only in tongues,
Because I have so many names,
And you call to me by all of them and I don’t answer,
I never answer,
And you look at me as if we have never met,
And then we walk away from each other
And the light goes out from the horizon,
And once again this dark house,
This hollow ocean,
This broken door,
This cold summer
That is my body,
That is our exile,
That is a flaming sea in the dark
Where you will not return.

when our bodies find their way back and

we fall into one another, when we become sea and

spill in and out to shores so far away and even

when they call our names there is no one to hear,

when we’re pulled apart and find ourselves

scattered across the seven ancient wonders,

gritting our teeth and singing through

the bone-level pain of a phantom limb

all i want to tell you,

if i’m honest,

which i always am with everyone except myself,

is that i have loved you since an afternoon

i barely remember, or maybe a night sitting in a café

in the rain, with the streets burning

wet beneath the lights of distant ships.

i love you and i have been running from this love

for just as long, but why tell you that

when you know it so well.

i’ve crossed oceans and years and i think of

each and every one of your flaws and that

your love is a flower that opens when you’re asleep.

you’ve haunted me in the kitchen and the street and

even places I’ve never been but that hurt me,

and the worst part is that you hurt me,

you hurt me because maybe

this is the only thing.

i feel some of the old wounds from 2016 resurfacing as

bernie sanders enters a presidential race once again, this time within a diverse and vibrant candidate pool.

from my perspective, the 2016 election was a very depressing reminder that sexism continues to pervade all levels of our public life. obviously donald trump and his supporters (male and female) did more than their fair share to perpetuate that sexism, and even participated in misogyny (and, in trump’s case, sexual assault).

but bernie sanders’ supporters, “bernie bros” and beyond–including, apparently, bernie sanders’ own staff structure–actively engaged in sexism, too. in many cases, his supporters utilized outright misogynistic language to attack HRC. bernie himself was slow to address women’s issues or put forth real policy on them, and people seemed uninterested in holding him to account for his own bad votes as senator, such as those on (not) reforming gun laws. i’m uninterested in seeing this election’s many female candidates being attacked the same way, from either the right or the left.

beyond the issue of gender, however, i was disappointed by some of my friends’ and acquaintances’ decision post-bernie to sit out the 2016 election or write in a third candidate because of the beliefs that either a) both parties were the same, which to me was an uncritical response to the media’s inability to cover donald trump, or b) that not participating would be a revolutionary act and precipitate the downfall of the two-party system.

i believe that this decision was one of privilege, and in many cases, ignorance–one has to be pretty comfortable and have no immediate policy concerns to either draw an equivalence between trump and HRC/republicans and democrats or to decide that we can sacrifice certain policy areas (voting rights, abortion rights, immigrant rights) in pursuit of a “revolution” that would burn down national institutions.

96 percent of Black women voted for HRC in 2016. that should tell White progressives something very, very important, if we are listening. communities of color, queer communities, and immigrant communities have been measurably and tragically impacted by this presidency, and i personally think a fair share of the blame does go to majority-White, majority-young liberals who struggled to listen two years ago.

i myself will not be voting for bernie in the primaries, as i already see other candidates that align more closely with my own policy beliefs. regardless of primary votes, however, i hope that at the moment of party nominations, we can build a real coalition behind the forthcoming candidate that does not abandon vulnerable communities by fracturing the electorate and handing a second term to the current president, the illest-fitted for his office in history.

i’ve been thinking a lot about death,

mainly because my grandmother is ill and is transitioning to hospice care.

My grandma rocked a brunette bob in the fifties and a blonde beehive in the sixties and never learned how to cook. She lived in Southeast Asia with her first husband for several years, did social work in underprivileged communities after her divorce, and opened her own business with her second husband. She was born during the Great Depression, and her mother raised her and her sister alone after leaving an abusive partner. Maybe this is why my grandma has always been resilient, self-sufficient, sarcastic, and disarmingly, impossibly, heartbreakingly generous. You know the type—not enough money to pay the bills, but still slips you a $10 bill for your birthday. That kind of lady. When my monolingual-Spanish-speaking sister-in-law came to visit a few years ago, my grandma escorted her from group to group at every event, introducing her by name to every single attendee, the language barrier as meaningless to her as Antarctic ice cores. She has listened to my doctorate and career plans extensively, and she gets unreasonably excited about these things, which often generate as much excitement in me as tax code or baseball statistics or running into someone from high school in a grocery store.

I have these vivid memories of her smoking on the back porch and talking for hours, always about things that happened decades ago. The JFK assassination. Martin Luther King. Commercial airplanes. World War II.

Is there anything more fragile than a human being as we enter this life or exit it? Now she looks like a butterfly whose wings have been wet in the rain, smaller than her own self, with so many thoughts and words and pieces that won’t fit in her head or her mouth, everything held together with the thinnest of spiderweb strings.

And her life has been difficult. Bitter in some ways. We are never given clear passage, never allowed to pass through without waves of pain, pain, pain. The death of a child. The loss of another. Regret, regret, regret. Wrong decisions, dead-end paths, our feet tired from wearing circles in the carpet. Days bleed into days, weeks into weeks, years into years. The clock is more relentless than even our most relentless thoughts—it outlasts us all.

I have gone to see her a couple of times just to hold her hand. It takes her a moment to recognize me because she still thinks I’m ten or eleven years old, but when she does, her entire face lights up, and sometimes she slips into a moment of such icy lucidity that it makes me think of everything I have gained from her and everything I am losing now.

Sometimes I think we never get to know each other, not really. Then again, sometimes I think that knowing each other, that loving each other has to be the only thing. What else is there? A beautiful earth that does not need us, a galaxy that will never know our name, and these delicate cords that tie us together, person to person, finger to finger, heart to heart.

 

 

On a shooting in a synagogue

After this weekend, I am thinking of ripples.

I started thinking of ripples yesterday morning. It was a Saturday, and I was in no particular hurry to do much of anything. It was rainy, and it was dreary, and it was cold. I was brushing my hair in my upstairs bathroom when I heard the pop-pop-pop.

The pops were loud.

I have heard gunfire exactly once before in my life–about a month ago, actually, when there was a (non-fatal) shooting at a nearby park one crisp Friday evening, during youth football practice.

This gunfire was different. Faster. But I knew what it was.

What I didn’t know was where it was coming from. Where does your mind go in a moment like that? I’m not sure–for me, my mind went many, many places.

Soon, though, the texts and calls poured in, and I learned that the shooting was occurring at a synagogue about a block and a half away from my house.

Then there was a new and different emotion. Exactly what was I listening to?

The noises lasted for what seemed a very long time–it was an hour and a half after they began that the police announced they had the gunman in custody. Some time after that, his details came out: name, address, background, social media posts. Earlier today, the names of the dead were released.

But ripples.

I’m not Jewish. I think of the work I’ve done with the Jewish Family and Children’s Community Service here in the city, and I think of how closely knit that community is, and all the good, strong things that its members do. Refugee resettlement. Immigration law. Translation services. Elder care. Free clinics.

I’m not Jewish. I think of the loss and the confusion and the terror following a hate crime against you, your family, your friends.

No, I’m not Jewish. I think of watching the Tree of Life’s congregation walk to service every Saturday morning, and how the congregation swells on certain high holidays, like recently during Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and Sukkot, or for funerals.

I’m not Jewish.

Ripples.

Our neighborhood, these streets and these houses, the bakery and the coffeeshop and of course the places of worship, they have fingermarks on them now. Trauma is not something, I believe, that washes out. How long will every trip to work or school or the grocery store or anywhere, really, be stained by a momentary thought of those noises? The sirens? And the people huddled dazed along the sidewalk?

For how long, when I mention living in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, will that flicker some brief memory of yesterday, an uncomfortably intimate familiarity?

For how long will that man’s name be inextricably tied to this place and that synagogue, in an unfair and unholy matrimony?

Trauma stays. I know other things come, resilience and new ways of remembering, and eventually, maybe, a bit of joy in the birth of new things. And I have no doubt that those better fruits will arrive, and some may already be here.

But they will co-exist with this numb gnawing, the gut-emptiness of eleven of your neighbors gunned down in a building that is their community base and your designated poll station, of the families this shooting ripped a hole into, and of the sound.

I couldn’t watch the videos on the news last night because of the sound.

These moments after this terrible thing–so bitter and sour, so sweet and sick, like curdled milk.

Ripples.

i have some thoughts about that anonymous letter published in the new york times that everyone

is calling like the bravest act since that nameless guy who stood in tiananmen square against a tank. if you haven’t read it, you can find it here.

basically, the letter was published in the times’ editorial section three days ago. its author alleges that (s)he is part of some sort of “resistance,” which she or he is quick to clarify does NOT mean elizabeth-warren-hit-the-streets-communist-socialist-facist(?) resistance but instead basically implies that there is an adult in the white house who keeps donald trump from doing the most vilest, stupidest things in his vile, stupid heart. as the tagline for the article says, “i work for the president but like-minded colleagues and i have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

yay. cue confetti raining down during some sort of digital parade for the bravest anonymous (wo)man in the world who has the guts to (not) stand up to the president by working in the shadowy background. (s)he’s being lauded by liberals and (some) conservatives alike for, you know, “keeping it real.”

of course, donald has already tried to sic the justice department on his own administration to smoke out the traitorous little weasel who penned the op-ed. he’s still obviously watching too many martin scorsese movies, but that’s another point for another post.

my point for this post is this: there is nothing brave about keeping a finger on the scales of sanity and general functionality in the darkness. if there is a man at the helm of a ship who wants to drive it into an iceberg, i don’t think powdering his nose and trying to tilt the rudder an inch to the left is a valiant response.

as commander-in-chief and a democratically (if sketchily, as robert mueller is continuously unearthing) elected leader, our president is required to be held to certain standards, and not being crazy and working for what he understands to be the wellbeing of the nation are pretty low-level entry barriers. it’s like: must be a real person, and then must be not crazy, and then must not want to sabotage his country.

if his behavior and his impulses are so incredibly base that they threaten the actual order and operation of the government, then penning some kind of mysterious letter in the nation’s biggest paper assuring everyone that there is someone with a working brain who is pulling the strings behind the man pulling the strings is cowardly.

go to robert mueller. assist in the investigation. and YES, talk about the twenty-fifth amendment. do something, literally just one little thing.

but no, everyone in this administration seems to have no creed and no beliefs in absolutely anything beyond their own weak little grasp on whatever measly portion of power has been doled out to them at this one particular moment. so in order to keep that power but also assuage some of the guilt that probably comes from propping up a man who thinks nazis are kind of all right, this person pens an op-ed.

yeah, thanks but no thanks. we aren’t your therapist. we’re your boss.

do your job.