Is it an imposition if I write poetry about your mother?

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PINK POETRY PRIZE

After Radwan Al-Kashef

                         I decided using your mother’s name would count as an imposition.

                         The name tells us why she suffered.

                         So I changed it.

                         Gave her my own mother’s name.

But the poem wouldn’t have it.

The mother      touches herself.

The mother      drinks date wine, roams the purple desert intoxicated, looking for men.

The mother      drips from lips and thighs.

The mother      was cut.

                         Turns out, a clitoris can cut back.

                         A clitoris can be a bird.

The mother      still has half of it.

The mother      believes it was some kind of spirit.

The mother      early in the morning, finds gold dust on her breath.

The mother      knows intimately the meat, the bread, the rotting flesh of figs.

The mother      finds you stuffing toys into your crotch, declares if I weren’t your mother

                         I’d have set you on fire.

The mother      says cleanliness is half of faith.

The mother      says endurance is a brightness.

The mother      says all men go out early in the morning and sell themselves,

                         thereby setting themselves free, or destroying themselves.

The mother      shares a name with light.

The mother      shares a name with the future.

The mother      is a temporary mosque.

The mother      prays in every dark spot she finds.

The mother      says do you want to be set on fire?

The mother      asks the sea to hold you in its eyes.

The mother      can’t protect you.

                         I want to be the mother’s mother.

                         I want to climb the tallest tree like the only man in the desert,

                                        make date wine with my palms.

                         I want to be water and run down her back, in the light look like a

                                        cataract of scars.

                         I want to be her womb, her voice, the bulk of lungs in her chest.

                         I want to go back and love the woman who worshipped gold.

                         I want to tell her I found her dust on my lifelines.

                         I want to be a complete person.

                         I want to know why I keep eating the skin inside my lips.

                         I want to be dirty.

                         I want to smell my crotch in the middle of the day.

                         I want to fill a temporary mosque with water, have it soak me,

                                         wash me—if necessary, drown me.

                         I want to make it known I prefer water to fire, and sand to water,

                                         and salt to sand, and gold dust to salt, and sugar to gold

                                         dust and I wasn’t doing anything, it just felt good.

                         I want to take

my mother’s name

                                         and bury it

                                                                somewhere even god wouldn’t find it.

Before the Wedding

You want me to be a woman                  I hide in the black rooms of the ocean.

You teach me how long it takes             for moonlight to reach us—

                                                            I would like to leave, read

                                                            every inscription

                                                            on the riverbed.

You, like me, mourn in advance             the luster of my face.

                      They gave me to the Nile because I was a virgin woman.

                      I was waxed and buttered.

                      I was a gift to the god.

                      Girl for flood.

                      He promised a flood.

                      My mother waxed me and wept a river.

                      Every year the mother of a virgin bride swallowed stones red and silver.

                      God made everything to pass and perish except stones.

                      God made stones for memory.

                      Ghosts cannot cross water so here we are.

                      Motherless but we are alive.

                      We mother ourselves.

                      We learn to breathe like this.

                      We wear stones around our waists and necks.

                      We never meet god.

                      We pleasure ourselves.

                      What kind of marriage is this.

                      We didn’t call it revolution but we did it.

                      We swallowed the river dry.

                      We stopped god.

                      We stopped the Nile.

You want me to be a woman                     but have you been

                                                                                    to the museum of our mothers?

You go to the gym, cheat on me in a dream—

                                                                  I just want you to want me more than I want you.

You say do you know why the military prison banned                   astronomy classes?

                                     I look for the constellations

                                                             I do not find them.

                                     I say you know, for 28 years, women searched

                                    for their loved ones              in the Atacama Desert.

             I am almost 30                             (in just over a second)

                                       I will become invisible.