EQUILIBRIUM
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Took me
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thirty years to say
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I’m glad
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I don’t pass for white.
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Pressed
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those words into the dark
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creases
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in my palm like a fortune:
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a life line
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of futures I wanted to begin.
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Like the way
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the haze of summer heat
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makes
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a drive home different.
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Right now
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even the streetlights
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have a misty
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orb to them. Even
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the cigarette butt
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flicked out
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of the window
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on the highway
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plumes with embers
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skidding
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toward me
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like the tail
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of a backyard
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bottle rocket.
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I wanted my
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hair straighter,
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nose thinner,
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skin lighter.
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I thought this
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is what my white
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boyfriends
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wanted as their hands
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became
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each European request,
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a Russian
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nesting doll I kept
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un-stacking
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until there was only illusion
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of beauty
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split open. Like the Great
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Gatsby cover
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with the disembodied head
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of a crying
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flapper over the neon-scape
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of city. All
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the green beacons we chase
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as thoughts
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of people who don’t love us
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are left back
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drifting on the roads as we
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drive. But
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every muscle knows how
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to get home.
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How the smallest part
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of ourselves
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cannot be divided.
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The last doll
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is still whole in my hands.
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Even the car
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can still purr from energy
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after it’s been
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turned off. What is left
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whispering
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in us, once we have
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stopped trying
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to become the other?
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—from Rattle #50, Winter 2015
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner
__________
Tiana Clark: “I was driving home one night in a trance, under a spell of highway hypnosis. NPR was playing in the background, discussing Maureen Corrigan’s book, So We Read On, about the story behind The Great Gatsby. Something about Terry Gross’s intoning voice and the interstate’s passing white lines drummed up the genesis for this poem about identity. Growing up biracial in the South, other kids would often ask, ‘What are you?’ In many ways, I’m still searching in my work to answer that question. Race, spirituality, family, gender—my obsessions converge in my poems, sometimes to subsist, sometimes to subvert. I look for my place between the classic and modern traditions by breaking and creating new forms. I like poems that take risks. I find it infectious, as I start to become more reckless in my work. I write to access that blood-jet pulse—to rake my flaws across the page, sift through my past hoping to find grace, connection, empathy, power, and—most of all—honesty.” (web)
