once i wrote poems
without counting syllables–
rather, counting moments
that trickled through my mind
throughout the weariness of days,
with little money and lots of hope,
and now it’s little hope and lots of money,
and the twists and turns of reality click in
until i feel i can only control counting syllables,
and one haiku at a time record my days,
the in-between lines lost years later.
once i wrote poems
to put inside stories
that would spill from my pen with
lyrical language and little plot,
so similar to the mundane of everyday life,
when snow spins our tires and meetings suck our days and relationships wither with wear,
and i wasn’t afraid of the words
i so diligently drafted.
but i learned to count.
to be more cautious with words.
seventeen. now. then.
Feminism
The Battle Begins
i want art to win
to remind us of our past
not steal our future
our hope gets swallowed
behind headlines; dictators
costumed by deceit
i want art to win
for every imagined star
hooked by my daughters
for these costumed shells
to bring beauty back to us
before it’s too late
Hike it Out
a mountain escape
from the netherworld life
since the election
Thanksgiving Monday
Thirteen days have passed since Doomsday arrived in our world. And if I thought I was addicted to social media before, it has now become as necessary to me as my daily three cups of tea. I am addicted to seeing what has happened from moment to moment, which underqualified or downright frightening lunatic he has chosen for his cabinet, which tweet has garnered international attention, which lawsuit he has just settled, which of hundreds of hate crimes will be reported between now and tomorrow…
I find myself standing in the kitchen, next to the teapot. Reading. Checking my phone in subtle silences at happy hour. Reading. Looking at my computer while the students are working. Reading. Sitting at the dentist’s office while waiting for my three girls to get their teeth cleaned. Reading.
I’m not on my bike. I’m not doing yoga. I’m not taking long walks.
I’m immobile. Still numb. Still reeling in the incomprehensible truth of what our world has become.
Even Humans of New York can’t save me from this with his latest stint in Michigan. Yes, we are all human. Yes, we all have problems. Yes, job growth has dragged, Obamacare costs too much, and maybe we needed a change. But the cost of that change has numbed me. It has left me in a swill of late-night insomnia, fretful mornings, catatonic looks at my three girls as I find myself so deep in thought, deep in worry, that I cannot answer their questions about schoolwork, chores, or who got the last marshmallow.
Everything, everyone, every part of my life now rests under this shadow of doubt and fear.
And I am still one of the lucky ones. One of the white, non-immigrant ones. And perhaps that is why I feel so trapped. What people do I have to connect with, to understand why this bothers me so much? Those whites in Macomb County, Michigan who turned their backs on the human race? The ones in the Rust Belt who naively think Trump is going to revive coal mining jobs? The veterans whose benefits will be slashed when we end up spending $25 billion to build a wall against Mexico?
The ones on my Facebook feed (most of whom who have probably already unfollowed me) who will never be swayed by my opinion? Who’d rather take this demagogue for a president than have any hope for the future of humanity?
I am trapped in my White World. It is privileged and ignorant and shameful.
It hasn’t been two weeks. Our world is changing right before our eyes, and simple errands now bring me to tears. Taking my girls to the dentist on Thanksgiving Monday. I picked this dentist when we bought our house a year ago, finally a permanent home after three years of being vagabonds. I was so happy to find a dentist within walking distance of our house. When I first visited in January, I was greeted by two Russian receptionists; all of the other customers were also Russian and spoke in their rapid-fire vocalized native tongue with the employees, presumably about their latest X-rays. My dentist is a Vietnamese immigrant who did a more thorough cleaning and analysis of my teeth than any dentist I’ve ever had.
Why am I writing this? Why does it even matter? I keep thinking about the Hamilton line that bleeps across my mind, “Immigrants get the job done.” As I sat in the dentist’s office this morning while my girls’ teeth were X-rayed and cleaned, I wondered if everything would change. Would he kick them out? Would he shut this down? Would he find some hidden bylaw that would allow him to deport every last one of them?
Their Russian-American dentist sat with me in her office and explained in detail the crooked situation with each of their teeth. And just like the other times I visited, no one else who came in today spoke English as their first language. I wondered if I was the only one willing to step out of my white bubble for a decent cleaning, or if this is really what the world has become.
Cavity-free, we started walking home in early afternoon, deciding to stop along the way for lunch with no particular place in mind. Then, halfway between the dentist and home, we saw a sign that pointed across the barren parking lot of the abandoned K-Mart: “Fresh Mediterranean food!” We didn’t have to think about it. Fresh olives and lamb were calling us. We meandered across the massive vacancy of vehicles to a small shopping center and an even smaller restaurant that, much to my surprise, had several customers sitting and enjoying their falafels.
The Israeli woman who greeted us and took our order was also the head chef. Her name was everywhere–on the signs, below the photographs of she and her family that lined the walls, on the menus, on the lips of customer after customer who came in and gave her a hug. We ordered our gyros, olives, and paninis and settled ourselves into a table between walls of colorful artwork and kitchen cutlery from the countries that line the Mediterranean Sea–scenes from Italy, Israel, France. Soft tunes of guitar, mandolin, and oud filled the earth-toned room as Yaffa’s conversations flowed with the arrival of more hug-bearing customers: “Yes, if your family will be out of town for Chanukah, of course you can come here and light the candles, have some latkes…”
And I looked across the table at my green-eyed girls gobbling up gyros and pita and pit-filled Mediterranean olives, and I wondered what would happen. I wondered what would happen to the beauty of this place, this quilted humanity that encompasses our nation of immigrants, this cute hole-in-the-wall-of-the-world restaurant.
After lunch, Mythili and I headed to the library. (The dentist had asked me, “Where does the name come from? It’s one of the prettiest I have ever seen. And what does it mean?” “It comes from Sanskrit. It means goddess of mythology.” “However did you find such a name?” “From my Indian friend…” and my multiculturalism was swallowed by anxiety).
Once we arrived at book heaven, tears found themselves poised at the corners of my eyes. A simple trip to the library on Thanksgiving Monday. Books were propped up on every shelf, ready to sell themselves to anxious readers of every age. We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball. Women Daredevils. But What If We’re Wrong? Another Day in the Death of America. Rachel: The Story of Rachel Carson. Hatshepsut: The Princess Who Became King. George Washington: The First U.S. President. A Most Improbable Journey: A Big History of Our Planet and Ourselves. Grandfather’s Turn: A Journey to the Ballot.
I found myself snapping pics. The titles spoke for themselves. I saw the librarian quietly setting out more, and a sign that read, “Free and Equal Access for All… You Are Welcome Here.”
And for the first time in thirteen days, I felt that I could move. I could go on a bike ride. I could do yoga. I could take a long walk.
I can continue to go to my immigrant-led dentist. And eat falafel at the local Mediterranean restaurant. And bring my daughters to the place where the world can change: the public library, where all walks of life are welcome, will enter, will read… Will open their minds and begin to change the world back.
I can pop my white bubble and hope for a better tomorrow. I can clearly pronounce my daughter’s hard-to-say name (MY-thuh-lee) so the world will learn that multiculturalism is about opening our eyes, our minds, our ears to beautiful new sounds and words and images.
I can be hopeful and thankful on Thanksgiving Monday, on each and every day, that we can win this world back.
Bleed Purple
hope comes in colors
pinned up for future voices
who will fix this mess
Let’s Make America Great Again!
It’s been almost a week. A white supremacist will be his chief strategist. He promises to find a judge that will repeal Roe v. Wade. And wants Ben Carson to lead the Department of Education???
Everyone has a theory of why this has happened, from die-hard Bernie supporters to the DNC.
But for me, I just can’t swallow the fact that, no matter what, we’ve elected a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic bully.
And whether you’re a lower-, upper-, or middle-class white person, your white privilege has put this man in office. Your white privilege allows you to ignore his horrific remarks and choose him, because his policies and his cabinet will not have a direct negative or dangerous impact on your life. Your white privilege allows you to be frustrated with wages, student loans, rising housing costs, and Obamacare to the extent that you would vote for a candidate so wholly unqualified that Obama has to spend extra time showing him what it’s like to actually lead the country. Your white privilege, in your rural communities, ginormous urban mansions, or sprawling suburban neighborhoods, protects you from ever experiencing what marginalized groups go through every day, whether it’s a risky bus ride or the line at the supermarket or a police car driving behind them.
I am so ashamed of my race, my endlessly empowered and ignorant race.
Will there ever be a time in history when we can use our white privilege to build each other up instead of tearing our country apart?
I hope to God this is the last election in my lifetime won by white privilege. For the sake of any possibility of a free and loving country whose doorstep reads,
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Let us use this election to open that golden door. To find those among us who, no matter our circumstances, could never vote for such a man. Let us join together and fight the good fight and make America the promised land it was meant to be.
Let us win. Every man, woman, and child. Every race, religion, and sexual orientation. Let us tear down the wall of white privilege and build bridges for a better tomorrow.
Let us make America great again. It begins with taking a long, hard look at ourselves, admitting our inadequacies, and promising to never, ever, let this happen again.
Are you with me?
American Doomsday
when i took this pic
i didn’t know the sunset
would be our sundown
The Terror of Being Female
i can’t believe our world this week–
surrounded by the same chauvinistic bullshit
my liberal baby-boomer parents raised me up against.
and it’s 2016 and i have three daughters and a man, a husband,
a born-and-bred Southern Baptist-raised Tennesseean, whose thoughts couldn’t enter the realm of filth so flippantly tossed
into the national spectrum
and we have a First Lady
who should be our Queen
whose words get twisted on my newsfeed within twenty-four hours
by. A. White. Man.
and i want to grab the world by its ears and shake some sense into it and put him in a swimming pool at age thirteen and have a hand slide up into his swimsuit.
and put him on a bicycle at age fourteen and on the middle of a spring day have a creeper follow him home and chase him into an alley and expose himself to him.
and i want to put him in the college library at age sixteen and have a stalker creep up behind him trying to reach up his shorts when he’s just searching for a poem by William Blake.
And I want him to go fuck himself and his white male privilege that I have never seen in my home–the home of my birth or my marriage–even in all its whiteness
And I want him to feel that terror of being female. Because every woman I know has had icy blood running through her veins in those moments of harassment and assault that have plagued us for all of time.
But he won’t. Trump won’t apologize and he would argue till the day runs dark, and all i can do is pray to a god i don’t believe in that my three daughters don’t face the same fate. That they will find a home as safe as mine with a man as good as my father or husband and a world better than the one we have set before them now.
Because it’s all i can do. Because i moved away in the pool and told my father about the flasher and left that library.
Because i’m writing this now and somewhere in the world eyes are reading it and taking one moment to hear that terror slip out of my veins and transform into the truth that makes me Silent. No. More.
Because I Am a Woman
I am so angry today because I am a woman and a mother of three daughters. I am so angry today because my mother, one of seven, six of them girls, was the only one in her family to finish college and then earn a master’s degree, and she did so by defying her mother who wrote an anti-education letter to the university to deter her from making that choice (for which my mother won a feminism scholarship). In 1972.
I am so angry today because I work so hard to be tolerant. The world is filled with every walk of humanity, and they all have rights to carry out their beliefs, whether they be nationalistic, religious, or cultural. But. When those beliefs expect and demand oppression, I am no longer a bleeding heart feminist liberal.
I am just angry.
More than thirty years ago, Audre Lorde wrote the most perfect essay I’ve ever read, “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression”, in which she eloquently describes my angst: “…among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression. I believe that sexism … and heterosexism … both arise from the same source as racism–a belief in the inherent superiority of one ______ over all others and thereby its right to dominance” (1).
I am angry because the police were called. Because Child Protective Services were called. Because they spent less than one afternoon questioning her and her family and brought her back home. She spent today not at school but cooking the meal for her engagement party, henna ceremony, and impending wedding. At age fourteen.
I am angry because it is 2016. Because she lost her mother two months ago. Because her family came here for a future that her father is now denying her. Because we have come too far in this trek for feminism to be taking giant leaps back and putting our girls in a situation of entrapment.
I am angry because my government does nothing to protect children. To protect women. Because an online threat of suicide isn’t enough to PULL. THE. CHILD. AWAY. FROM. HOME.
I am angry because she is me. She is you. She is all of us. She is the caged bird Maya Angelou describes, stalking back and forth in rage. She is the religious martyr who couldn’t stay in Burma because she wasn’t Buddhist. She is the daughter and sister and friend and STUDENT who you wish you had in your life.
I am angry because I am a woman. Because I am a human. Because I am free, and she is not. She is oppressed by sexism, religious zeal, and cultural tradition. And whether you believe in God or support your culture or want to fight for traditional gender roles, none of these things give you the right to oppress another human being.
I am angry because there is no hierarchy of oppression. And when one of us is oppressed, we are all oppressed.
I am so angry today. And I will still be angry tomorrow. And the next day. And every day forever after, as long as I am a witness to oppression.
Because I am a woman. Because I am a human. Because this needs to stop.
Help me. Help me make it stop.
Step Write Up 