I try to quantify what we inherit—
dancers legs that know how to roam
but be church pious by morning,
the ability to fold shirts into a perfect square
or the street walk that says I’m a willing
dove but need no man or pierced jewelry.

Yesterday my legs were propped
in stirrups as the gyno said you
should go on The Biggest Loser.
I heard cities at the skull base
stuttering over each other,
vine and vowels of your rolls
and the garden under your chin.
The implied real estate of—
don’t you want to be beautiful?
Unmade and remade?

In the exile hood,
a ghostwriter jukebox
stretches its vocabulary
muscles and says farewell
to the wide-eyed blade.

What do we sing in our families
that isn’t already playing? Colored buoys
collapse when unlined, it is unclear
how long fireflies take to cool.

Migration, Exile…these are men’s words.
Women have always been torn up
like rice seedlings to be replanted
in marriage (or another name);
my language weeps its wedding melodies
in many dialects, many tunes
In my next life, O God, don’t make me a daughter:

The floor is red cement, cool
in Calcutta heat, the borders black
diamonds under bare feet.
A fierce grandfatherly snore
and the newsprint whirs
to the floor, stirred by a fan.
Up the steps, creeping past
the mezzanine. The women’s room
reveals itself by a hushed giggle.

& there’s no taking it back now.
What comes next? Charcoal underbone,

darkroom for soliloquy & irises wide
at home. Some underside party popping

off & ending with me counting resignations
on a couch made from my last pennies—

copper profiles cushion deep, dull
with emancipation & worth almost me.

It ends because the beginning won’t jumpstart
again: red smudge of a mouth, lipstick everywhere

the afterthought a comet leaves on its way
out. What makes this moment unfold like a fine

woman raising herself up from the bathroom floor?
Honky-tonk in the honeyed brown of an eyeball?

We reappeared through

mountains in the North blackened
with distance, blacker even behind
themselves, and obscured even
further with that tokey giant air.

Meaning had fallen off
the words. I peered into

bathroom mirror
through hesitant
steam, wiped away

to expose

an expected face, different.

There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.

A lot of it lives in the trachea, you know.
But not so much that you won’t need more muscle:
the diaphragm, a fist clenching at the bottom.
Inhale. So many of us are breathless,
you know, like me
kneeling to collect the pottery shards
of a house plant my elbow has nudged
into oblivion.

I bleed daily
for a month,
produce a liver-shaped thing.
He rinses his blood
with a chemical cocktail
every third Thursday.
We make nothing—no child
no pacts—but distance,
until we both lose.

I don’t know what I would do
if a man looked like my daddy hated me,
hated my sex all the more because I did not want him
to have it, or because I have wanted a woman too–