for joy

(i marginal
 i omitted
 i incongruent and

 off center square)

 

joy
those people who bark at you
who make gutteral noises
and imitate your heaviness
who find their hipness
standing square on your's
don't know that
your mother may wish you were different
and that when you come home on christmas break
she takes exception to your short hair

and your dark skin

and never asks if you have romance

never the pretty conversations of

how to coo no’s in a suitor’s ear

just the oblivion of your sexless body

the large plaid nothingness of you

and your father explains to company

during his genteel moments

when he conjures his big words
that you are ugly but sweet

and calls you from the den to say hello

invites the guests to touch the ugliness
and your mother challenges you for wearing red
and that maybe you hanging your head
is a hundred yrs old

why should you show your eyes

who would respond to the longing

or catch the first flash of winter in your silent tear?
they will not know

that your mother was made at the
expense of a fair skinned world

and beaten away from her beauty

and they said mutilate yourself to be pretty

and she did

and they said corrupt your children to be pretty

and she did

and when she saw herself eligible to be american woman

you arrived in her life

like a curse growing ever blacker at her tit