tw: racial violence

history taught me white folks don’t care about our blood until they can wear it as nail polish. ma’am what shade would you like? perhaps the macabre of my ancestors, dressed by a haughty whip and slithering rope. you may always alternate colors as well! we have the scarlet cacophonies of our black boys. slurs beating skull, becoming bat and parents are told not to come to the ball game unless they wanna hold their child like a shattered flower bud, beautiful black boy never bloomed before his bruises did. and perhaps a blasphemous red sea? dip your crescent toes in tallahatchie river; claim emmet’s legacy and it’ll be gorgeous until it stains your white picket fence.

history taught me white folks don’t care about our blood until they can wear it as nail polish and i shame them though i know i am the salon. they say i claim my honey brown skin as a gown, fabrics ablaze. and i say soak me in your remorse. soak me, soak me. dilute the blood. this blood, this blood. take it. ma’am i can be your favorite color.

and when did i say this? i can’t remember but it must’ve been when i was drunk on discrimination. so desperate i’d seek another oppressor in the form of an ally? and no these words did not flow from my mouth like a red sea but they must’ve hid in the way i glance at my white friends with desire. or the way my pupils break whenever black history is taught as though it doesn’t reside in my neighborhood. or maybe it’s because i exist. aren’t i asking for your pity? your white pity drowns this land, making us a sunken bone and the vultures can’t find meat but are they even looking? yes, we are only bone and you know the beautiful thing about bone is it’s whiteness. strip us bare, strip me bare. ma’am, for when you want to wear us without brandishing grim. black is the new white and for once we are your favorite color.

somewhere between seattle and athens, you are laughing & i am struck by the fear of living. is this why you let him cut your fingers & skin your cheeks because i know you’ve never liked bones. you say he was a poet in another life, but we weave the language into gods & he’s already written “bitch” with your ashes, scattered the word across the indigo fields as if the devil cares. he told you to not love anyone until you love yourself, but you can love me until the sky sinks into the sea’s embrace.

babe, burning isn’t rebirth. i know your lies like i know your lips.

karunam (pathos)

I was 13 when I first met you, static as boys should be

while I coiled like a fetus in my bathtub,

watching everything I’d ever known  

rally into drains.

I’m stiff except for the cerulean streams of history that flow beneath my skin.

I’ve never been less lonely or more content,

Nestled between ceramic and public water, filling sentences

With words you never said.

Led Zeppelin-

Drown the air,

Drown the notes of my parents contending

Over bone-shaped childhoods,

Erode my breath between boulders of

Rock.

I bled dry into what I perceived you to be. I did not cry but I hoped you’d still hold me,

The way fiction sometimes creeps into your shirt.

In cold, distant wheezes.

_____________________________________________________________________

Footnotes: this is a part of an awfully long poem i’m working on, based on the Navarasangal (or the nine facial emotions) of Kathakali (a form of classical dance and storytelling native to Kerala, India). Esthappen from Arundhati Roy’s ‘God Of Small Things’, to whom the poem is addressed, is a very important character to me for various reasons. i’ll be uploading the other parts soon.

- The weather reports have been frustrating, because they advertise ninety-degree coolness when in reality it feels like a hundred and five, accounting for the cloudless skies and the sticky quality of the air. We have been eating outside on the deck to adjust ourselves. Every night my sister makes hot soup––hot soup––which on one occasion I douse all over my thumb. I text pictures of the large pink bubble beneath the nail to my friends, who have little sympathy. “Why the hell are you eating hot soup in this weather?” And that is a very good question.

- I eat mangoes two a day, which are somehow still being sold for twenty-five cents each at Costco in mid-July. Nobody else is allowed to eat my mangoes unless they ask permission and undergo a routine inspection, in which I stare at them hard in the eyes to gage how much a mango would really mean to them. I’ve gotten used to the itchy, irritating feeling that springs in one’s mouth after they’ve eaten two mangoes a day for weeks on end. I dread my doctor’s appointment next month––learning how even further out of whack the vitamins in my bloodstream have become.

- We keep a list of nicknames for the cats on the fridge on crumpled purple notepad paper. One of our cats is a thin black-and-white princess with rabbit fur, so of course we give the most ungraceful nicknames we can muster to Her Holiness––Cow Kitty, Mint Chip Moo, Squeaker, El Petite, and simply Cat. We also have a less-groomed, nearing-obese gray commoner cat who has a strange hobby for hanging around bathrooms, and we try to make her feel as important as we can––The Grey Lady, Miss Èclair, Daisy Dearest, The Gray Goddess of Middle Tennessee, Baby Belly, and Earth Bender Badger (the last a fitting title we adopted from watching Avatar: The Last Airbender reruns on Netflix).

- My dad and sister are the intellectuals of the family––they engage in such activities as reading The New Yorker for fun and debating about the geography of Zimbabwe. One day my sister laughed obnoxiously loud at “Lexicon for a Pandemic,” which was an article in one of those magazines, and the entire family was left grinning at such plays on words as “Someday, Noneday, Whoseday?, Whensday?, Blursday, Whyday?, Doesn’tmatterday." The other day my sister showed me “The Unexpected Solace in Learning to Play the Piano”––another one of those magazine articles––and I laughed tears and put a page of it up on my wall. After which I thought, “Maybe I should become one of those intellectual people things."

- It’s too bad that classical music is so boring. I would love to use a worldly knowledge of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, and Liszt in quiz bowl and to impress my friends. But it’s all so dull, and my seven-second attention span can’t possibly be expected to stand the tests of little violin ditties. Instead I listen to useless things. I think a need for fun, a need to listen to things I actually like, is my downfall. But sue me––I’m more of a movie soundtrack kind of person. And “Ice Bear Combat” is so much more fun than “Minute Waltz.”

you start dying the second you've finished growing; yes, it's like when you've gone so far right you're on the left side of things. it's the moments you learn about the irony of you funny bone - you dare someone to laugh after you've hit it, through clenched teeth. (if only it started raining destinies again, then our growing would keep 'til the end.)

my ex says she knows tragedy better than the oracles; the bones of pomegranates splattered across her singeing hip and still pale as a waning corpse against an ink palette, she twiddles with rabbit feet.

she is marrow leaking into your pupils. why bother looking at the sunset to find spines littered amongst the stars like a macabre drenched sidewalk? no one likes a melted headache (even though you’ve torn the melody; you’re offly hungry). nail a spare achilles heel to the northern moons and wish for locust blossoms kissing your bruised rib. she is sin.

“can you only offer a child’s skull?”

i bleed my eyes out on this mattress

blinking to the dull hums of male voices 

i split a kon-peki blue over the molt of my fingertips and 

swallow the shards of the shattered bottle

a cyst sits under my skin and 

rolls my flesh between its teeth 

flicks stones at the muted fabric of a dying mind

i bleed my body out on this ceiling and wish the gods would die 

to a writer's pen 

mediocrity smashes my cranium in to eat but 

there is no brilliant mind, only a 

stuffed tragedy, a beheaded fairytale dripping at the edges of bloodshot eyes

there are too many mistakes to die over and

crying in shitty moonlight poetry

i swallow this like a dry pill and choke

and i hope it kills someone talented

i wonder if the gods would look human in their dying moments 

just to frame my seething inferiority, pretty pretty—  

i cut my screams from the throat of a gutted painter

crush it into crimson ink, hang my name as 

the dying writer tearing pretty words from their broken bones

—just to satisfy a burning desire of merely being enough

for just a second, only just a second before 'not anymore'

just to kill a deity once before it breaths again,

buried in the wombs of virginal maidens

unfair unfair, how gods are born instead of made—

but i take it with me and go

i take it with me and go

i’m bored and i lost all the questions for my earlier q&a when i deleted the post on wtw (stupid move ik) so i’m doing this ig.

1. what got you into writing?

alrighty so what really got me into writing was this writing contest my seventh grade teacher introduced me to, but the only thing that was motivating me was money so i won’t count that. what really got me into writing was the fact that it does wonders as a coping mechanism. i feel like shit? i write. and if it turns out to be good... bonus.

2. outside of wtw/prose, who are your biggest writing influences?

call me cliche but the ancient greeks. i’m a slut for their mythology and the protrayl of gods is just *french kisses*. i also just love mythology in general as well as any religion so they def influence my writing (yes, my way to show i love religion is being a blasphemous lil shit; i regret nothing).

3. what’s the significance behind your profile picture(s)?

it’s literally just a picrew i made. then i put a rainbow over it bc i’m queer af and want to rub it in y’all’s faces. but also imma change it soon dw.

4. top fifteen favorite books - go. (if you don’t know what exactly are your favorite fifteen, just name twenty you like.)

i hope people realize that whenever this type of question is asked i automatically forget every single book i’ve read. but i’ll still try-

in no particular order bc i’m way too lazy for that:

1. a northern light

2. the book thief

3. to kill a mockingbird

4. children of blood and bone (fite me if you want but it holds a special place in my heart even if the writing style is... eh)

5. a midsummer night’s dream

6. milkweed

7. narrative of the life of fredrick douglass, an american slave

8. of mice and men

9. black boy

10. tweleve angry men

11. a snicker of magic (is this book actually good? ... idk but it’s cute)

i’m gonna stop here and come back bc i can’t think of many books rn and if i don’t come back feel free to call me a dumbass.

5. what’s the significance behind your username?

*squints* 13 year old me thought it was quirky. 14 year old me regrets. look out for name change. probably somethin related to my actual name... like jai, i’m a basic bitch.

6. any particularly stupid quote that you nevertheless love?

“to love is to be vulnerable.” no i do not remember who said that.

7. how would you define your current writing style? do you think this is your set style, or are you still evolving?

gritty and skinned. i’m still evolving as i always have; i pray to whatever celestial beings above us that i keep on evolving until i am... imperfect but unapologetically so.

8. favorite song(s)? favorite song(s) to listen to ironically?

i’ve been violently vibing to cavetown for a couple days now. “boys will be bugs” and “16/04/16 (jack’s song)” and “devil town” are my favorite rn. also i’ve recently discovered purity ring and i love the entirety of WOMB but “i like the devil” in particular just... yes. oh and duh anything p!atd... i listen to “northern downpour” at least once a day, perfect song to listen to when i’m feeling like shit.

note that my favorite songs will change tomorrow.

9. a common writing error or trend that annoys you?

i refuse to be really nitpicky about writing errors bc i’m the grand royal of fuckin up when it comes to english. but, just... i don’t like it when people are inconsistent with their captilization. i don’t mean like writing that is lowercase but utilizing capitization to convey something (all my favorite writers on wtw do that) but i mean like...

“hi!! I’m Samantha. my favorite animal is a cat (I have a kitty named midnight) And i love dogs as well!!”

extreme and overly annoying example but you get the point.

10. should pineapple be on pizza?

i’ve had pickles with whipped cream. fries with frosting. ice cream with tortillas. but i wouldn’t dare put pinapple anywhere near my pizza. no.

and if everything was bruised and torn and the sky sank its spoiled teeth into the earth and ripped like a dog, depraved and frothing, and if we were standing there, if we were standing there in the middle of it all, could you doubt for a second that it was beautiful? even when the earth is being crushed between a giant's fingers like blackberries, dark juice running in rivulets down swollen fingers. even when my ribs have been splintered and my lungs are heaving in the clogged gray air. even if we find ourselves at a house party at seven in the evening, rummaging through the medicine cabinets of people we barely know for anything to relieve a headache, and the next room over someone's yelling at their kids, and the stench of beer and someone's perfume steeps in the air, and you can't remember quite how you got there or how many days you've been telling yourself you'll find a way to get out- even then.

because somehow you are standing here. and somehow you are running through the parking lot at the end of your first concert, trying not to get hit by a car but mostly thinking about the euphoric numbness in your ears and the taste of cotton candy still simmering in your throat, and then you’re on the train and it’s past midnight and you have school tomorrow but there’ll never be this moment again. and somehow you’re sitting on a bench downtown, splitting ice cream with your crush, and she offers her earbud to you, and the sun is spilling through the trees like honey with the smell of almonds and jasmine wafting through the air. it's a fairly mundane way to spend your friday afternoon, but there's something a touch ethereal about it in the moment. 

once you read an article about the failings of modern art. the primary flaw, in the author's words, was that modern art sought to ask the question "what is art?", but of course there can never be a satisfactory answer to a question so broad and somewhat useless. you've been to the MOMA. you've seen the shapes and colors wrestling on prints, the wall-to-wall paintings that look like someone attacked the canvas with a knife, angry gouges of red and blue oozing out of the pale backdrop. there are sculptures of airplane chairs and solid slabs of color, and you don't want to think about what it must've cost the museum to display them.

but the article was wrong. modern art does not seek to ask "what is art?", it seeks to answer it, and the answer is "everything." every color bleeding from a blurry windshield on the rainy city streets, every half-ripe fruit that falls from the trees in your neighbor's yard, every tired face on the shuttle from the airport in a city that you don't recognize at 2:00 AM. every time you wade barefoot through the dewy summer grass; every time you see the morning glories braided through the fence in spring; every time you stand freezing on the pier and watch the sea calmly slapping against the wooden barrier, sending a spray of saltwater up through the air just as the clouds part and the droplets catch in the sun, and you think "oh" like you've had an epiphany, but it's not something that can be put into words. and yes, even the earth turned inside-out, bruised and torn and falling to pieces.  

you are proud of your country, and of her rich heritage. and you shall try,desperately try, to be worthy of her. you open your eyes wide, waiting in line at a school quadrangle, it is yet another morning assembly among your fellow restless comrades eager to escape to lands outside of the tiny home they have grown up in. you yearn together, as you wipe the glistening sweat from your dusky foreheads, stuffy tunics amplifying the effect of the sun's heat emanating from the azure sky as crows erupt in a cacophony of voices. the hymn is disrupted, but the choir undeterred-their scarlet robes a testament to the long-standing heritage of a school that has seen far worse days. the final bars of the national anthem rise and swell as your eyes travel down the corridors of an undefiled heritage of the storied past.

you long to go back, to summers well-spent you'd laugh with your cousins over jokes you cannot remember, your attention arrested and suddenly occupied by their boisterous dog, she'd lick your face and you'd both fall down. you like to reminisce about the stories your Nani would tell you, of your childhood, the sweet, pungent aroma of her signature Aam ka achaar wafting through the dense air. the warm,fresh-out-of-the-tava aloo parathas await, but it is not enough for your ever-eager appetite.

you would greet guests sometimes, they would ask you "what you want to study, beta

? but you didn't have an answer, so your shy smile would do the talking for a while." then, in dadi's open aangan you would sprinkle coloured powder onto the olive floor, hardened by the passage of time. the finished product was a rangoli, you'd smile up at your mother's face, she was proud, you deduced (oh but you hoped, you really prayed she was, pride was a commodity too precious to sacrifice.) on Diwali, you'd hasten through the Puja, tie the red thread on your wrist, only to pull it out a week later, carelessly. gazing admirably at your Dadi, circling incense sticks over elephant gods that you have to believe in, the earthy scent of deep yellow marigolds emanating through the smoke of the puja room. gorging on mithai after every meal with your Dada. you'd help acquaint them with the wonders of the technology you have grown up with, but to them is a reflection of changing times, the roles reversed, the younger generation adopting the role of a teacher, the older, the unsuspecting student. aloo tikki drizzled with dahi, generous amounts of gold-streaked sev and green dollops of chutney, the taste of which lingers in your mind.

and then you'd go back home, awaiting your next visit. they'll tell you to call but you will forget, only birthdays can serve as a reminder of what you leave behind, away from the cosmopolitan society you belong to. they will tease you about your Hindi, and you'd laugh and shrug it off. and maybe, just maybe, you will remember to call.