We get our power in odd places.
In A House on Mango Street
she said she felt all her past selves
jangling around inside of her
layers like an onion or one of those
Russian dolls, what do they call them?
I feel them here, too, unwanted presences
myself at nineteen, too tense with nerves
to eat on a date
Eighteen, prostrated on the dirty carpet
of my dorm room, begging God
please, don’t let me feel this way forever
seventeen, dread like lightning
when I saw the school rise before me
the years of suicides like sacrifices
to my father’s corpse
the fat years, where men and children
screamed at me in passing
moved away from me in the halls,
and the time before that
when I was truly a child
Will Itself,
legendary in my stubbornness.
The years bring good things, of course
nineteen, giggling on my friend’s floor,
a microwaved dinner sitting between us
writing awards, one in college,
one in middle school,
eighteen, meeting my best friend,
vodka, Gatoraide, and video games
seventeen, seventeen, must have…
sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, sushi with friends
and lunch in the halls
and middle school friends who ate with me
in the park, who were as strange as I was
or better, stranger
and poems taped onto my teacher’s walls
that I had written, even in elementary school
and love like the sky, taken for granted
in the time when I was Will Itself,
Hanuman in the cradle.
I can hear them still, a thousand ancient shames,
prides, and pent-up, pressed-down desires
curl inside me, not Russian dolls but
the monstrous unfed fetuses of being
I have never had regrets; I never do. For when have I
acted unkindly? For when have I
done wrong? A word, here and there, but never–
but perhaps regret is the miscarriage of these shames, and I, immune
will bear them forever? Wondering always
if the hidden
must be the real
and if so
which of these motley dolls
am I?
Lydia, you get closer to the core of yourself than I have ever seen anyone else do. In doing so, you lead me closer to the / a core of myself than I can imagine without you. Thank you…I think. Martha
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