The Daughter
—Carmen Giménez Smith
We said she was a negative image of me because of her lightness.
She's light and also passage, the glory in my cortex.
Daughter, where did you get all that goddess?
Her eyes are Neruda's two dark pools at twilight.
Sometimes she's a stranger in my home because I hadn't imagined her.
Who will her daughter be?
She and I are the gradual ebb of my mother's darkness.
I unfurl the ribbon of her life, and it's a smooth long hallway, doors flung open.
Her surface is a deflection is why.
Harm on her, harm on us all.
Inside her, my grit and timbre, my reckless.
[What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face?]
—Sherwin Bitsui
What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face?
What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth resembling frost?
What offspring must jump through the eye of birth to be winked at when covered with brick sweat?
What ache piled its planks on the corner pier, now crumbles onto motionless water, sniffed at by forest
smoke?
What makes this song a string of beads seized by cement cracks when the camera climbs through the
basement window—winter clouds coiling through its speckled lens?
What season cannot locate an eye in the dark of the sound of the sun gyrating into red ocher after I
thought you noticed my language was half wren, half pigeon and, together, we spoke a wing pattern on
the wall that was raised to keep “us” out, there where “calling” became “culling,” “distance” distanced,
in a mere scrape of enamel on yellow teeth?
What father woke, turned over his wife, she didn’t want to, but he pushed until the baby leapt through,
now, now, now, strummed into a chorus of burn marks on ceilings where police sirens fruit magpie skulls
on trees of monsoon lightning?
What, what, what—is how that song chimed in wilderness.
Two Moths
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Some girls
on the other side of this planet
will never know
of walking
the loveliness
in a crepe silk sari.
they will spend
their days
for a parade
on their backs
of men
in another life.
who could be
through the stale
exhaust,
of fan blade as it cuts
tea air and auto-rickshaw
thick as egg curry.
shove greasy rupees
for one hour
One hour.
at the door
in a room
with a twelve-year-old.
One hour —
will cover it up.
the waterline
Will rim
of her eyes
until it looks like
have stopped
The X in My Name
signature
of my illiterate
and peasant
self
giving away
all rights
in a deceiving
contract for life
One hour —
And if she cries afterward,
her older sister
the poor
their uncles
These girls memorize
each slight wobble
Men
Instead,
with kohl pencil
two silk moths
to rest
on her exquisite
face.
—Francisco X. Alarcón