the drug kept riding my / head until I slid past sane/
into the room out back with the shivery-silver hue/
we blackdanced there until I felt the heartbeat thrash onto my tongue…
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Who Turned Fifty—WTF—during the Coronavirus Lockdown? Me. I was none the wiser. I blamed the Global Pandemic for my uppity uptick in heart palpy all-nighters, binging Tiger King and matching my paranoia with How To Get Away With Murder. This was my “come down” after faking we’ll-be-okay-ness each day in our John Stamos-less full house. Our elementary, middle and high school kids Zoom-schooled, snark-walked miles of hills and dales in lieu of team sports, saaang every word of Hamilton while gobbling mountains of strawberry cheesecake pancakes…
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When I was young I wanted a statue of myself. I was humble, I wanted a mere statue for saving a lake or a patch of forest or something, not to revolutionize the study of truth, like my dad, who wanted to “beat Einstein,” a dream he abandoned four months before graduating with a PhD in Physics to help my mother start an accounting firm in Arizona…
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In March this year, the Oxford English Dictionary added forty-two untranslatable words to its over half a million word collection. One of them is from the Philippines, the word gigil. Pronounced “ghee-gill,” it’s the word for “cuteness aggression.” It can be an adjective or a noun, used as shorthand for OMG I wanna pinch squeeze and take a bite of this totes adorbs…
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You wish not to leave the hospital. Alone in a new country, you have nowhere else to go. When you smile at your child, it is your first betrayal. Secretly, you withhold your love from her to devote it to another—the dream that you blindly followed across the ocean because you believed its promises.
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At Sabbath School, we sing Jesus loves me this I know and I fantasize that I’m there, a stick-figure brown girl, a hyphen in the spectrum of red and yellow, black and white kids on Jesus’ lap as per that idyllic painting on our bedroom wall. Creamy robe and skin, butterscotch hair, sad sky-blue eyes.
The Bible that Mama quotes mostly admonishes us to serve, purify, labor, eke our way to heaven. Gawwd, God. You’re Mean Joe Green. Meek, depraved, unworthy us, pining for your son Jesus’ ivory lap. For the Bible tells me so. My timid heart does not tell me so. Little ones to him belong. My itchy, rashy body does not belong. They are weak but he is strong. I’m curled on the ground, a question mark at Jesus’ legs…
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