There's a couple of devotional figurines in these poems
that my mother kept.
One of them is--
her name is translated as Guanshiyin,
is a feminine deity incarnation in Buddhism.
Many cheap sculptures get made of her.
They are about this large, and the little hand is detachable.
And my mother believed, as many people do,
that if you take away her hand and make a wish,
your wish will be granted and then you
can give back her hand.
There's also-- my mother's Syrian, Peruvian.
Syrian.
Syrian woman.
Two Syrian parents born in Peru, so she's light.
She's fair-skinned and there's a long history of representations
of lighter-skinned folks, lighter-skinned women
put up against ethnic and racial others,
to heighten their own whiteness.
And so trigger warning, there's a lot
of thinking about whiteness in this book,
and about how whiteness might get
replicated in my own daughter, and in my own choices.
"Henry's Fields Give the Lie."
To a tribe somewhere saying fear because it
feeds, the gold by night, wheels round its technology
for falling.
Such a handling stuns the thing.
Is it gentle to its otherness?
Be that gentle to your animal.
Our finest sculptors charged with shaping a woman,
Guanshiyin in her deified name means observing
the sounds of the world.
Glaze her hand and leave it loose, to turn or withhold,
and call it a fight for compassion.
The sun comes up through the planted trees, a thing waste,
not want.
What will you, in your time do, with a white enough woman's
form?
Will its light make a word in the room
so un-American in its humors and hugging near death
that we'll try to say, it's not a real word either.
So our anger, you might inherit.
A civilian in yours.
Trying to outpace likenesses, who sells the shadow?