The Flood
When death comes, I want to look back and say
I’ve touched the dirt on the ground.
That I snubbed my heels into the soil.
and felt my skin on grass,
the emerald blades breathing minerals
cloaking the Earth.
I want to have been where its down and deep
where my bones will go,
for my footsteps will go further.
I want to be able to tell people,
I was once a girl, hollering and belting Whitney and Lauryn
from the back of a roofless lowrider, or in some vintage car, beat car,
that sputters and croaks like old love in the snaking cities,
wind caressing the strands fleeing my ponytail
and whipping themselves in surrender
to my sticky, mauve lipstick that I never outgrew.
I want to be the one that shoveled the grime,
the scent of sweat mixing with shampoo
and sage,
working with my hands in a way that is art that is soul.
I would have built a place,
a library or community center or something of the sort
and then be in it.
Sat on a sofa that sagged in a benevolent wink.
An old woman, wrinkles like a face that is the converging of maps.
Wool coat and gold buttons
I want to say that I have forged castles,
dilapidated walls of oppression with liberating laughter
reverberating in classrooms and in youth.
I want to see my people heal
in some version of a world
or exactly a world,
where people overpower profit-tinted eyes,
glaring back with precision—
Where I come home, with communities
of immigrants and children brave
with education, as resilience floods the streets
as it drowns incarceration with care
as it drowns it in potlucks and ball games
as it drowns violence in voice.
I want to permeate my words with permanence
to have been in articles and archive halls
and see my name, two words once afraid,
sassy in the rolling credits of documentaries,
not from bloated bravados or fortunes of filth or
fashionable, sexy scandals of half-truths
but because I hacked off chains,
watched them fall off in little couplets and jabs of questioning.
I want to ask—
Did I stomp arguments in court rooms,
challenge persecution with lapel pins glinting from my collar, starched,
and with my motherland’s honor?
And have I stared down world leaders like a crouching beast
behind my notebook that shook the man behind the podium,
so behind the gun?
Will I have an office that is more like piles upon piles of books?
Would I be able to prove
I did a good job at trying?
For when I clock out, I want to say that
I shouldered my purse and kicked off my heels for sneakers on the A,
and met my people in the night,
down and dirty in the speakeasies
for slam, for poetry in protest
and jazz renditions reclaimed,
hymns snatched back from greed and conquest.
As I danced in the music swelling,
danced between the verbiage,
I would have felt the patio buzzing with
gumbo and kebab and laab in smiling mouths,
and above everyone the urban fireflies called windows
and street lamps decorated our time.
I want to be able to say, I saw everyone dancing,
blazing horizons with harvest flames that filled plates with parties and power.
I want my arms wrapped with ink,
lilies blooming as tattoos,
yellow and black tigers ready to leap from my shoulders,
my jade and gold bangles clanking and cluttering and chiming
as you hear me
enter rooms and storm off in haughty mannerisms.
The people dancing would have gathered again.
I want to say I gathered with them
among signs, marches, and drums.
I would have seeds.
I want to say I have planted them beyond myself,
as I hummed in Little Saigon and Oakland and New York, Queens
and watched the golden leaves glide from Sacramento trees.
I want to say that I swiped my jewel-toned scarf over my neck
from a little ferry in the Ocean from the Bay to the great Washington lake,
that I stood on that ferry as I peered
at the old Seattle trees revealing themselves in the fog,
and can say I’ve been that granular spirit looking up from its
titan roots, into the canopies of green in heavenly awe.
I want to say that I have been the mother of worlds.