Your skin is kindling
and I am on fire. Burning,
hands outstretched in the white-hot
heat of the flames, palms up.
Beseeching, like my mother when she says
whatever but means I do not understand you.
Palms up. It is not a request but an admittance,
a compromise. She will never really know
me, a confused daughter standing still
in a bi-pass, straight passing bi. Cars passing
in sets of paired tires. I count them, take note
of matching treads and wonder where my other
half rides, if my mother would mind a tire
from the same brand, with all the same parts.
Your skin is a wildfire. I let it rage,
thinking that if this is a death sentence
and your hands exposed wire, electric
on my skin, I’d gladly take the chair. Sit
down; let me touch you, suffocate
in the carbon dioxide you expel. Let this not
be a dream. I have been asphyxiated for so long
in dreams my mother had. I was to be wed
to a nice man, to have the children she lost.
Create new souls to take root in the lifeless
plots of her prime. I think that this moment –
me, throwing myself on you, pyred
like a Salem Witch, would disappoint her.
She would love you if you were a man,
or at least if you could ease me into complacency.
If you had put me in that box that she or society
or guilt has built me, that casket-like thing
moving down the river like a Moses myth,
she might love us both. She would love me,
I hope, if she knew I have wanted men
the way I want you; singed and parched.
Palms up: an appeal to my senses. I’ve come out
of them already, and I am holding your hand,
on fire. Palms up: my counter-appeal. I become
Joan of Arc. She knew herself; she, at least, didn’t beg
to be heard in her final moments. She became
silent ashes and trusted her God. He would love her
even as every back she’d ever loved turned away.
