I want all my lines to pack a punch
but all I hear after each line's jolted rush,
is to crawl back from whence I came,
to remain there with a hush.

your gender won't allow it
your race won't allow it
privilege soaked woman
with fair skin, pretty mouth, oval eyes

stay in your corner with your hush
line up like the rest of them,
in between the dazzling city lights
allow your clothes to hug you tight

stay in your corner with your hush
dont speak of your misery into the night
when they have learned to scream louder,
crawl into dank spaces with a lofty smile
and hand out compliments on your grandma's gilded platters

stay in your corner with your hush
allow the woman to side-eye you
allow the man to side-eye you
while the world remains all ablaze
and the women fix their hair on murky bar mirrors

stay in your corner with your hush
don't speak too much, you'll give it away
that you are a breathing living entity of
fire, earth and water.

Don't dare relate them
to me or you
to he or they or them
for they have found more comfort
in separation than in likeness,
remain as unsharpened pencils in a box
dazzling in a row, ineffective for the prose,
stay in your corner with your hush.

I wonder when Ferlinghetti
spoke of ballerinas in Central Park,
how much coffee he chugged
before feeling the electric
buzz of descriptions
coarse through his pen.

I imagine Mary Oliver
sitting seaside in a cabin,
with shells lining her desk
and her chamomile tea
whispering soft haikus
for her to relay to the world.

Rilke traveling through
Swiss mountains on a train
with a leather briefcase
filled with handwritten letters
and wisdoms borrowed from
his heartbreaks.

Did they write with me in mind?
With other poets in tow?
Their great loves on their sleeves,
melting into their prose.
Who did you write your poems for?

Did they know that a young girl
in California would be sleeping
with their names on books at night,
in replace of a lover?

I bet Hemingway would've like that.

I remember fondly
when you asked me
if I knew French before
our first dinner date.

I lied and said yes,
just to hear the
sparkle in your tone.

I lied and said yes,
just to see the smile
from your face
vanish when
I confronted you
with an obvious truth,

to see if you felt
embarrassed by
your misplaced lust,
or at ease with your
perpetual enstatement of it.

as you slowly realized,
it wasn't me you
were chasing,
but maybe a cute
Parisian girl
in a striped turtleneck
eating a croissant,
under some beige canopy
who vaguely resembles me,

And while you were sitting
there wondering of that girl,
I easily slipped into
my Marie Antoinette accent
so I can practice it on you.