My America Is Bagels
My America is skin. Hide. The red hair periodically in my mustache. The sun’s inability to burn me past the color of bread, whole wheat. My America is Guatemala. El salvador. My America is Chile. My America is unsure whether to pronounce Chile like the country or the admonishment you give the child misbehaving on the front porch. Chile. The Texas home my great-great-grandfather built to be burned down in my lifetime. The cemetery where he is buried with all the others with Mexican last names in that flea bite of a town. My America is living almost every day of my life with a sea of white & yellow lights called Tijuana, a crack in my bedroom window. My America is the hard stone my grandmother wrapped in a baby blanket & hid in a Phoenix basement. My America is the glowing black waters beside Detroit’s midnight lights: paradoxical beauty, tide, swift current. My America is any place where someone docked their boat in the sand saying, This is mine now. Minha. Mijne. Mine.
Once
We will love each other only once. The word for this is cathecting, but we’re young still & high on our own diction, leaving those words sharp with meaning back in the classrooms we were grateful to escape. Lucky. My arm around you, asleep, I imagine what our stories would be like 100 years ago. 100 years ago two people like us would never be in the same city, same province, separated by oceans. Our parents & parents' parents savor these secrets like hard candy clinking against the backs of their teeth, the silent hiss of their mouths refusing to open for the fear of losing something. Their accents something we must summon for certain stories. Would we still share the same tongues? My hair underneath your fingernails, your hair in between my fingers. Our breaths stink of skin, sunlight in dusty blinds. What would we have done to be with one another, then? Would it have been worth it for one night—the coal-fueled train, relentless desert heat, a sailboat passing Greece to a larger vessel ready to cross the Atlantic? The months it would take. The pain of leaving the rivers where your family story started, the pain of the rivers redirected from a homestead where my ancestors live in the form of blue asters. The horses I would have in the burning dust. The horses I would have buried in the ground. The horses we wouldn’t own, either way, together. Touching each other’s faces would risk a necklace made of rope, the judgment of gravity from a tree. Touching each other’s faces always risks something, even now. Together, hours in bed dissolve like sugar in water. There’s more clean water in the kitchen than we can ask for. How many nights did our parents' parents snuff out the light worrying for such things to stay alive, to stay hydrated while outrunning hate? Even still none of us, as children, could imagine having a palm with a blue glow & so much power we could fit the world into our fist, much less them. For once I wish I could explain this to you, to us, to everyone wondering why we’re like this loving someone we know is gone before the body has left the bed, no matter how much our mouths thirsted for each other, sharing stiff drinks & making loose plans to nowhere. No, this isn’t what they imagined for us. Neither did they imagine our chiseled faces, the glow we’ve made of these skins that would surprise them with their smoothness, their color in the dark. Let every night like this be a toast to the names of those before us whose names we don’t know & didn’t have the chance to be this free, committed to finding a future of our own making, even if it’s only once.
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