In the name of Jesus the Messiah,
I declare that I am born out of God,
Carved and painted with the envisionment of evil.
Black hair runs down my curves and red lips, sweet with sin,
Make me a victim of temptation and vengeful lust.

Father forgive me for the falsehood
Of desecration of holy marriage unions
And Adam's taste for the Apple-
The truth is choked in his throat
and in the blood of the first murder on record.
​
In the name of Jesus the Messiah
I declare that I have never harmed a child-
My spirits find safety under my wings and wisdom in my fall.
I embrace the moon and it's four stages,
worship my dark, inner feminine energies, and Her divine manifests.

A woman whimpers more than her child will even,
beaten by pushes of words piercing her heart to pieces,
and fists quick to teach her the sign language of a beast.
Her tears become the ink of this pen.

Every morning, she shapeshifts from the beauty of the night into a mourner,
For every breaking of the dawn kills the night’s beauty,
and mocks how short the night that swallows her day’s
grieving is.

At noon, she is denied sunlight.
Her skin becomes where fists carrying abuse land,
and her mouth is a gagged voiceless thing.
​
The night is where she tells the day’s experience.
Her body caresses the serenity of darkness,
and pray to stay there forever, for a new dawn is a nightmare.

Seventeen years ago,
my father named me Aijia.
Ai for love, Jia for family.
If you put it together, mhea said,
it means “loving,” or “family loving.”
Eight years later,
Didi—younger brother came.
His name is Qijia and I yelped in joy
when I saw how it matched mine.
But when I asked father about it,
he responded with a Chinese proverb:
Qijia, Zhiguo, Pingtianxia:
Order your family,
Rule your country,
Bring peace to the world.

When I was 8,
society showed me that I could be unstoppable.
That the world could be mine to command
and the moon mine to capture.
That even if I overshot the moon,
fingertips barely brushing past igneous,
the stars would be there to catch me,
engulfing me in starlight and acceptance.
At 8, I called myself limitless.

And at 9,
they called me delicate.
Through eyes instead of tongues,
skimming over my raised hand,
and bypassing the wrist flicking and unconscious bouncing,
Scanning the room for a “strong boy,”
Someone who didn’t crack under the pressure of a broken nail.
At 9 years old, they told me I was weak.

But, when I was 10,
they showed me I could be intelligent.
Gave me the taste of an A+
and the rush of that 100%.
Instilled an insatiable curiosity,
only satisfied by answers and worksheets.
Until I knew knowledge,
I did not know I was starving.
At 10, I called myself savvy.

​And at 11,
they called me scandalous.
Told me that shoulders grabbed eyes
like bait hooked fish,
and math was made difficult
by above-the-knee dresses.
They taught me about spaghetti straps instead of times tables,
lectured me until skirts gave way to sweatpants and camis to cardigans.
At 11 years old, they reduced me down to a distraction.

             —After Ada Limón

Freshman year gym class
I walked with Sophia

along the path
looping around the tennis courts.

I was wearing that blue tie-dyed t-shirt,
and maybe the shoes were blue too.

Suddenly, a group of boys
crossed our path. One of them said

Sophia had some tennis balls,
but I didn’t

realize he was talking
about our breasts
​
for perhaps a day, or a week,
but likely a month.

Doesn’t wish to be commodified, or
have his hair touched (thank you,)

The property has no affiliation with:

terf-lite, classics-upholding, gatekeeping,
one in a million diversity-hire that needs

to be shushed--

(This author is: A fairytale. In a fairytale world.
It is one he created to even have privilege
To breathe--)

​
Welcome everyone, tonight's play will follow
the standard three-act structure:

My body is stiff
                   unmoving
                   tired
as I pull myself out of one mold
and into another.
Who do I need to be today?
Am I
                   aspiring artist
                   funny friend
                   overachieving student
                   closeted daughter
am I
                   emotional
                   invisible
                   boring
                   plain
                   ​too much
Can you see me?
Who looks back when I look in the mirror?

Yeh-Shen’s golden slipper kept shrinking one inch
Smaller until it found its rightful owner

When footbinding was in vogue in China, the most
Desired shape was the three-inch golden lotus

It took two years to achieve this revered shape, girls
Had their feet bound from the age of five or six

Sometimes binders opted for a slightly softer
Shape – the butterfly or cucumber foot

​It was a cold, clear day in the second week of April.
I remember that it was a Saturday and that I was in the kitchen
making coffee for the two of us.
I remember taking the cup from me and holding it up to the light
to see if it was clean. There was a smear of coffee on the rim,
but the coffee inside was still clear.
I remember how the light shone through the coffee
and made the liquid glow.
I remember how he stood over me then, and how my heart
fluttered like a bird. I froze.
He took the cup from my hand and threw it against the wall.
It shattered into a thousand pieces and I remember watching
as they fell to the floor like rain.

This poem is about my sisters,
Sa’adatu, Chiamanda, & Damilola.
Meaning, every girl is a pendulous rose, waiting
To spill her fragrance on the face of the earth.

Tell me, what is more cruel than
Stripping a flower off its fragrance?

​I see my sister’s voice echoing into exile
Because father labels her with nubility.

I was the river god’s daughter,
And a daughter is nothing more than
a blank page after all,
waiting to be written.
When Apollo was my pursuer
my father,
transformed me to
a laurel tree.
It did make great poetry
of course;
and there was justice too
in the sense of order
or what they call balance,
a cleverness;

Haste is not a virtue. What I would have sworn were memories, I now realize might have
been dreams, tucked into the nautilus of a fevered brain cowering in a corner..  I have
been so rash my entire life. Slow living is extolled among the aged, but what else are they
supposed to do? The dry mouths, gaping, and the rheumy eyes searching have seen better
days.  If I stretch the skin, like cellophane, across the cheekbones of my father’s face, he
becomes a blur, a thing out of focus, but the clock is still ticking and we count every one.
My mother will crochet her own variegated shroud to save anyone else the trouble. Her
grimace masquerades as a smile, and much pain is to be given up for the sanctity of the
world. The humoral issues at play have fangs, and they are planted firmly in our necks.
Our moon faces are waxy and tinged with yellow. They lack the grace we believe might
save us. The breviary with its colorful ribbons collects dust on the nightstand, its pages
warped, but still, it moans in the dark. Everything is beyond the urgent grasp.
The shivering in the night, the drenching of sweat in the day is not an omen. But it might
as well be.

dear mom,

Lately I’ve been moved by how
I recognize the bags under your eyes
from every night I splash
water on my face and look up.

I hate having my photo taken
because I have a hard time recognizing
myself (sometimes) and it
scares me (all of the time) and–

I have this compulsion to write
every poem in the first person
and I want to ask if you think
that makes me selfish.

We like pistachio ice-cream and clouds.
I can’t snap because you taught me
to do it with my ring finger instead
of the middle one. I like to tell people
I am chronically late because I get it
from you. I feel happy when you
hug me. I know myself mom
but I’m not sure I’ll ever recognize myself
the way I think I’m supposed to.
And I think it’s good you’ll never
read this because I hate to make you sad​–

The Jury is Out
I sit in the courtroom,
not sure if I’m the prosecution,
or the defense,
or the judge, or the jury.
I may be all of them.

You sit at the stand,
tap the mic, and ask if this thing is on,
and it is, but it’s popping and cracking
and making that awful, high-pitched sound.
We all cover our ears.
There’s a slight murmur among the crowd.

My mother bred me
In the womb of an abyss
My nourishment,
A healthy diet
Of bits and pieces
She tore off of herself
And when I was birthed –
Another scar on her skin –
She raised me in the mandate
Of the ever-evolving People.
A girl, they called me,
The word rising
From their cold lips
Like a blight, a taint, -
Something to be ashamed –
A child, I never was
Always a girl, a girl
Left on the hospital bed
To unfurl
And to learn the ways
Of the world.

​‘Mother’ – the word, to me,
Has always been my other
An entity quite apart from me
Until I saw her
In that childhood picture
Gaze gleaming, smile beaming –
A reflection of what I’d been –
A burning light among her siblings
But to reconcile that image
With the present
I had been looking at the wrong place –
Her eyes, in my eternity, have always been dead –
I just had to look into her words
Splayed across my skin –