I used to be beautiful,
Glossy,
And warm with the glow of untouched purity.
Propped up on my stand, for all to see,
To admire,
To desire,
But not to play.
I can’t remember feeling before feeling the touch
Of your hands,
Rough and warm.
Beauty be ******,
I relished the newness of your grasp on my curves,
That first rush
As your fingertips glided down my polished body.
It wasn’t long before you found my strings,
And joy turned to fear-
Furiously yet gently,
You loosened my taut wires,
And a motion of sound filled my once blissfully hollow form,
And what came from me but an alien, lyrical cry,
Flying from my strings as your fingers danced across them,
And to my horror,
You smiled,
As you watched my misery unfold.
This sound,
Unheard before now,
Rang out my fears and my naked desires for all to hear,
I couldn’t stop you,
And my soul could not be stifled,
As you forced out of me a bitter song,
A tearful melody,
Of hopes unfulfilled
And a vital *****,
Stolen and unreturned.
One hand round my neck,
The other pulling most painfully at my delicate strings,
You played me.
You monster,
You kidnapper,
You mad musician-
Take me home,
Put me on a stand,
In my case,
Hide me away,
Let me go.
Release me from my tiring song,
In any way you must.
Master,
End it,
Before there’s nothing left,
Before I’m dust.
I already lament the death of my beauty,
My once unblemished wood,
Now splintered,
Dull,
Warped by your unforgiving grasp.
And still my strings you play,
Relentlessly,
And with cruel dispassion.
Ravageur,
Finish my song,
And don’t play me again.
If you must,
Destroy me,
So I can’t sing anymore,
Feel anymore,
Destroy me,
Obliterate me,
Shatter me,
Break me,
Against your counter,
Your headboard,
The wall,
Until I’m scattered across your floor,
Oh, **** me,
Player,
Anything to be silent again.

Mon dieu, il est fait du mon amour,
Mes larmes,
Et mes mots.
Mon dieu, il est généreuse,
Mais non
Je ne suis généreuse pas tout de la temps.
En réalité,
Je suis égoïste,
Enfermé dans ma tête,
Avec ne concerne pas pour il.
J'aime le diable lui-même.
Je ne parle pas du le diable dans l’enfer,
Non,
Je parle du le diable assis au bar.
Le diable porte un manteau
Et peigne ses cheveux avec ses doigts.
Ce diable tient une tasse de liqueur en un main
Et mon coeur en l’autre main.
Le diable a des yeux de noir
Et lèvres qu'on ne peut pas résister.
Je pleure mes mots,
Larmes de whisky
Dans le votre tasse.
Diable,
Il est ma destruction.

I’m relieved that you’re not here.
Though I’ve never seen you here before,
I sort of expect you to be,
Because the memory of you follows me wherever I go.
Slipping noiselessly through the door
Into the din of the bar,
With a perpetual cloud of smoke clinging to you,
Highlighting your phantom affect.
I don’t think I could handle it,
Seeing you here.
Visions of you already plague me
Without seeing you
In person,
Sitting before me
Balancing on the back two legs of your chair,
Heavy leather boots crossed at the ankles,
Rocking on your long, lean, jean-clad legs.
I don’t think I could handle it,
Hearing you order your Jameson,
Double,
Neat.
One hand in the pocket of your long black coat that grazes the floor when you sit,
The other wrapped around your glass,
Jameson,
Double,
Neat.
And although the smell suffocates me,
Sometimes I sit out on the smoker’s deck and breathe in the smell of burning tobacco,
And if I’m particularly desperate to feel your presence without succumbing to the need to call,
I order it.
Jameson.
Double.
Neat.
But see,
I can’t actually call you and ask you to come,
Because you will.
And if you ghost through the threshold with your paint-stained hands casually shoved in your pockets,
And give me that gut-wrenching,
Heart-stopping grin,
I’ll die.
Because death is the only way to avoid my incessant need to be near you.
Even now,
Knowing that your insides are just as coal-black as your eyes,
I yearn for the feel of your broad shoulders flexing and rolling beneath my fingertips, my hands running over the expanse of your chest,
Seeking entrance beneath your shirt
As if I can feel the tattoos that lie beneath.
The neck,
The jaw,
The parted lips,
Everything I’ve kissed and caressed a thousand times,
I know I would do the same a thousand more,
If I got the chance.
So thank God that you’re not here.
Because if I caught one glimpse of your irresistible, impossibly soft, dark locks
Falling over your severe, furrowed brow,
Mussed by the wind
And from your fingers running through it over and over,
To the envy of my own,
I would burst at the seams,
God,
It’s a good thing you’re not here.

This is a love letter
To the African-American community.
Black, if you wish,
Or simply “neighbor”.
To the African-American community-
My people would not be here if it were not for you.
Here as in alive,
Not as in the states,
Because we came to the states to be alive,
Something that would not have been possible back home,
But you helped us stay that way,
When our trades were not accepted
By soft-palmed,
American-accented
People of the US.
When we came here to escape death and oppression,
We were welcomed not by the blonde-haired, blue-eyed people we saw in the advertisements from the war,
We did not step off of the boat and into the arms of the benevolent angels we had heard of,
No,
We came to America and found you.
African-American community,
At the time,
You hardly had a home to give,
And yet you offered it to us when we had none.
Your culture was ravaged by war and slavery,
And yet you encouraged us to preserve our’s.
African-American community,
My people came here with no English and no education,
And to the residents here,
The two are synonymous.
My family,
Though skilled in trades handed down by generations of people in our tribe,
Father to son,
And mother to daughter,
Our traditions were passed down,
But when we arrived in the new world,
We were like babes in arm,
Hardly knowing how to walk.
African-American community,
This is a thank you,
For taking my people by the hand and pressing their fingers into the soil,
Teaching us how to coax life out of it.
Teaching us how to translate our language of terracing in the mountains
To sowing in the fields,
When none would take us for work,
Season after season
Of my family hushing the mother language off the tongues of our children
So that they would sound less foreign,
More American,
Black community,
You taught my family how to prepare for a blistering Texas heat,
When they were built to withstand an Eastern chill.
Black community,
You showed my people what it was like
To build a life from the ground,
The strange,
Alien,
American ground,
Up.
You took my people and led them out of the darkness of oppression and corruption
And into the light of the real American dream,
The one where people who have been beaten into the earth can rise up like a Phoenix.
Black community,
You showed us what to do with the dirt and the sandy loam
Until we built upon it churches,
Homes,
Harvested from it sustenance,
And within it,
Buried our dead.
Black community,
This is a love letter,
Because love is the only reason I can think of
As to why you had mercy on my battered, broken people,
Accepting our calloused hands in thanks,
As we had nothing else to offer.
Neighbors,
This is a thank you,
From the small, inconsequential non-natives,
Round and sturdy,
And the savage language with unfamiliar roots,
From my people,
With un-American eyes,
Coal-black and slanted,
Thank you,
On behalf of my ancestors for the actions of your’s,
Neighbors,
Thank you.
Your people were not the ones that struck the beads and herbs from our hair,
Snatched the language from our lips,
And took the ribbons tied to our shoulders and wrapped them ‘round our throats,
Choking the accent out of our mouths,
Neighbors,
That was not you.
Within God’s walls,
Moj Boze,
Ti Bok,
The ones built on the ground you brought us to,
We are told not to condemn the descendants of those who hurt us,
But to praise that of those who did not.
So here I am,
Neighbors,
Writing you a love letter
Because all I have to offer
Is my thanks.
My people,
Though Americanized
And void of the language and traditions that they were told to abandon,
Stand strong today,
And I,
A woman,
Just as stout and ungraceful as the tribe that bore me,
I am educated.
I not only learn English,
But I master it.
I earn my money and I keep it,
No man takes it from me,
Or refuses to sell me land because I am unmarried,
No government can remove me
And ****** me into a camp
Or a foreign country where I will not be a bother,
And although my people have been stripped of their name and placed under the color-coded category of person
On the spectrum that everyone seems to abide by,
You,
Neighbors,
Stood by us.
Thank you.

Four years old.
Four years old is the perfect age
To know enough about yourself
And not enough about the world.
To know everything you absolutely need to know
Before the world strips it away
And replaces it with a fake sort of knowing.
Four years old,
Old enough to recognize something that will drive you
For the rest of your life.
Four years old was I,
And four years old was he,
Mattie,
My Mattie,
When we met in the sticker-burr ridden play yard
Of a daycare,
And at four years old,
We became peaceful companions,
Slower,
Quieter,
And just a bit more odd,
Than the rest.
At four years old,
Mattie had a silliness about him,
And a funny way of talking through his missing teeth.
At four years old,
We avoided the violent, flying swings and sprinting, shrieking children,
And we scoured the outskirts of the yard
For four leaf clovers.
Mattie was a four leaf clover.
Incredible,
Unique,
And found by chance.
Because Mattie’s silliness and funny voice and missing teeth
Were not simply because we were four years old,
But because
Mattie came from a mom
Who couldn’t stop.
Mattie’s mom couldn’t stop doing drugs,
Not for a single day.
Not when her belly swelled with Mattie inside,
Not when he came into the world,
Breathing the air she did,
Drinking the milk she made,
Mattie’s mom couldn’t stop.
He was buried beneath clusters of clovers,
And his four, perfect leaves were nearly withered away,
When his parents found him.
His parents,
Two incredible women,
Who had so much love in their hearts,
They couldn’t help but let it overflow
Into the cup of a small child with bright eyes and dwindling breath.
Mattie,
My four leaf clover,
Is happy today.
Today,
Mattie,
No longer four years old,
But a man,
Is about to be a doctor.
My four leaf clover,
Who looked to his mothers like the most beautiful child that was ever born,
With the sharpest wit
And the most brilliant smile,
At the end of the day,
Is simply another clover.
His beauty and his value,
Are what we give him.
His rarity, his singularity,
Is something we create,
Something we fashion for him
Out of love and acceptance.
To this day,
I lean down and examine patches of clover,
The image of Mattie,
Gently counting leaves with chubby, toddler fingers,
Burnt into my memory.
And to this day,
I hold in my heart the hope,
That I will meet a child,
My own Mattie,
My own rarity,
My own treasure,
My own little four leaf clover.

Pour tout l’amour que je t'ai donné,
Pour tout moi patience,
Pour tout l’honnêteté,
T’ai m’a rien donné.
Rien.

My father walked me down the aisle,
But my mother held my arm.
He went with me,
But we went not towards the altar,
But towards the door.

My father walked me down the aisle,
And the ***** rang through the church,
Humming through the elaborate crown molding,
Carved by my ancestors.

He went,
Not beside me,
But before me,
And I watched,
As he was illuminated by the bright,
Overbearing,
Texas sun.

My father walked me down the aisle,
But I did not wear white.
My father walked me in silence,
And I shed tears not for a man standing at the altar,
But for the one I would never see again.

My father walked me down the aisle,
And no veil obscured my face.
All eyes were upon me, but not for my pristine beauty,
Instead for my clenched jaw and furrowed brow,
Severe and fierce to distract from my glassy eyes.

My father did not leave me at the end of our walk to sit beside my mother.
She clung to me for support and sobbed breathlessly,
Loudly,
Unavoidably,
And I carried her with one hand,
My sister the other,
And walked towards my future.
A future family,
Not one person more,
But one person less.
I walked,
One final time,
With him.

My father walked me down the aisle,
And I will never forget it.
Hundreds of eyes isolating my family from the crowd,
Slow and muffled sounds drowning in the deafening beat of my heart,
Blurred faces staring,
Black heels clacking against the cobbled path from the church,
The anguished wails of my mother,
The whimpering of my sister,
And the wooden box that glided before us,
Pulling,
A string tied to our patriarch,
The pin key of our family,
Pulled taut and then snipped with the slam of the hearse doors.

My father walked me down the aisle,
Before I had a chance to grow up.
He walked me,
Out of the church,
Away from the altar,
Never to be walked again.