Author: tgifreytag

Questions

If there’s one true thing, it’s that
Google will make money off us no matter what.
If we want to know
what percentage of America is white
(as it seems we do)
what percentage of the population is gay
(as it seems we do)
what percentage of the earth is water:
the engine is ready for our desire.
The urgent snow is everywhere
is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and
many have asked, apparently,
where am I right now. Also
when will I die. Do you love me
may be up there, generating
high cost-per-click, but not
as high as how to make pancakes,
what time is it in California.
So many things I wanted to ask you,
now that you’re gone, and your texts
bounce back to me
undeliverable. Praise to
the goddess of the internet search, who returns
with her basket of grain,
67,000 helpful suggestions
to everything we request:
how to solve a Rubik’s Cube,
what to do when you’re bored,
how old is the earth,
how to clear cache,
what animal am I,
why do we dream,
where are you now, come back.

■

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,
hands oozing
til both palms burned
at the punchclock.

Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open lawbook
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.

■

Summer

You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.

Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel size
     lint roller just in case.

Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.

Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms,
     locker rooms, & quite often, Toyota Camrys: at least 10,000.

You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.

Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”

Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer
     doesn’t have to mean disaster.”

Or dead.

Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream
     sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.

Your powers are great, are growing.

One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the
     breath.

The next day you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change.

To make me promise I would. To make me promise.

& promise.

■

Shape of the Invisible

At dawn
Upon the snow
The delicate imprint
Left by the sleeping body of
The wind.

■

Hymn for the Hurting

Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.

Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

■

En la Casa de Mami Tita

I wake up to the alarm clocks
of cocks & gallinas struggling
for their corner of the callejón.
Step out
on the preheated concrete.
Stray kittens cross my path.
I evade chicken excretions.
Lizards stand still
as I walk the length of three houses.

A pale jade home smiles at me in the sun
a ramp welcoming me onto her balcón.
I remember her skin as guayaba
with steps signaling the start to her porch.
Her front door is blessed
with the smell of fresh habichuelas.
Open windows & curtains flirt
with the morning breeze.

I enter home & hear
songs of small white houses & jíbaros.
Songs of forgotten writers & my mother’s voices.
Clanking pots & a cucharón serve me a meal
only this home knows.
Metal cups keep water cool.
A ceiling fan fights off mosquitos.
Chanclas gently shuffle over
linoleum covered concrete floors
the start to a tale on the tip of her tongue.

Mami Tita once told me
“You know, they operated on me?
That’s why I only had Teddy, Cuco, & Taty.
After that, I couldn’t have any more kids,
but, at least, it was free & I didn’t die.”
She said this with rice sticking to her lips
& caldo dripping from her bowl.

Outside, cars honk past,
neighbors yell from porch to porch,
& chickens cluck along.
Inside, I spend daylight listening
to songs I’ll never hear again,
tasting food I hope I’ll learn to cook,
& waiting for shuffling chanclas to sit
& tell me a story once more.

■

Basket of Figs

Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me

the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.

Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.

That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it

tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.

■

They Don’t Love You Like I Love You

My mother said this to me
long before Beyoncé lifted the lyrics
from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

and what my mother meant by,
Don’t stray, was that she knew
all about it—the way it feels to need

someone to love you, someone
not your kind, someone white,
some one some many who live

because so many of mine
have not, and further, live on top of
those of ours who don’t.

I’ll say, say, say,
I’ll say, say, say,
What is the United States if not a clot

of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?
If not the place we once were
in the millions? America is “Maps”—

Maps are ghosts: white and
layered with people and places I see through.
My mother has always known best,

knew that I’d been begging for them,
to lay my face against their white
laps, to be held in something more

than the loud light of their projectors,
as they flicker themselves—sepia
or blue—all over my body.

All this time,
I thought my mother said, Wait,
as in, Give them a little more time

to know your worth,
when really, she said, Weight,
meaning heft, preparing me

for the yoke of myself,
the beast of my country’s burdens,
which is less worse than

my country’s plow. Yes,
when my mother said,
They don’t love you like I love you,

she meant,
Natalie, that doesn’t mean
you aren’t good.

■