Thiahera Nurse- Girl’s  Throat Makes Sense of Everything

1.)  When she was born, I made sure that she did not make one sound

Even when the doctor’s forced girl’s mouth open

I did not make way for air, not once

2.)Boy tells girl

If you don’t swallow, I’ll make you clean up all the mess

And you’ll like it

Oh word?

He says, I’m comin

I go get him

I open as wide as I can

Swallow everything

I don’t come up for air. Not once

3.)They spread girl’s mother apart real wide

Her legs unfold like the heaviest note

God could ever write to Broken water

When they pull girl’s small squealing body out of the wreckage

I sat there

Said nothing

Made the whole room a column of noiselessness

A blue vat of carbon dioxide everything

They beg baby girl to open up and take her first breath

They beg me to ask for air, if only once

4.) You know, something amazing about not needing breath?

 You learn how to swallow a man whole, if he just asks

Boy says, Girl, you so small! What you know about spreading and being so open?

I am wide

I craft open from the black vault of my depth

I am spine when girl is too busy laying on her back t

To remember what one feels like

I am powerful. And everything.

I am too much God for girl’s body

5.) I say nothing

How  can you talk with a man’s weight shifting itself inside of you?

What do you say when a man is finished with you

And you  are still holding parts of him that you can never give back

When everything is all the way swallowed and gone?

6.)When girl was born, I did not move

I did not make one sound

I rocked in silence

Heard everything, said nothing

Her mother prayed so hard

She said, God if you give my daughter her first breath, I will give you back everything.

I laughed at God

Didn’t spread for air not once

Told him He wasn’t gon’ Red Sea me

Never understood how something as powerful as water could be so pussy.

7.)Boy says that this is the best head he ever got

And in this moment I wish for a mind

Wish for shoulders, wish for teeth

Wish for a name other than wet and wide and spread

And , Damn baby, don’t  ever stop.

In this moment, I start to think I am not as God as I thought I was.

8.) I couldn’t hold my breath anymore

I got up for air, made a mess of everything.

9.) Bitch, clean all  this shit up

10.)Then he leaves. Who is gonna prey on me,  pray for me, now?

11.) Her mother says to God

 Give my daughter breath,

And I will  give you back everything.

12.)Damn baby this is the best head I ever got

13.)I thought I was God.

14.)I am too much God for girl’s body

15.)I am spine when girl is too busy on her back to remember what one feels like

I need air. Need to breathe. Need to be something other than a blue vat of nothingness.

16.)When she was born she didn’t make one sound

I did not ask for air. Not once.

The man who will not touch you anymore

Makes you  the deepest well

In the center of a town 
that has  no need for water

All this depth and need to feed

Mean nothing as they feast

On dried pomegranates and sun whipped meat

What now when the village people

Look at you and do not wish

On the bounty of your tide ?

What do you

When he has turned your wet insides into a pothole of nothing?
-

You scream

Drink

Drink

Drink

The villagers tell their gods that you taste of a pickled ocean

That the taste of your well twists their mouths into a sour memory

He washes his hands of you

They celebrate the day

You coil  into dust

there is nothing

more important

than communion

this togetherness

this need to believe

that you are here

because God sees

some sort of light in me

that deserves the simple goodness

of your mouth holding my name.

put it to rest, woman.

having loved him was a blessing

having to leave him was a necessity 

leave him 

pray that he does not look for another woman like you

stop trying to figure everything out  

stop making every column of silence between you two

a drama of pause and rewind

stop this. this man does not want to be a friend

or

keep half of the whole you took away from him

it is thanksgiving now

you two have not spoken 

since you wrote poems that actually mattered to him

eat your stomach full, keep your mouth shut

do not mention his name at the table

do not keep journals about how you will incorporate

him into your new life with a man who you can love better than

you could have ever loved him

do not give your first born son a name

that reminds you of his skin

do not tell your husband that if it this did not come to pass

it would be have been him

move on.

be grateful that you got to love him

be grateful that you left him—-

even when he did not understand why and asked his God

to make this aching chasm of boundary between you all better

leave him alone, woman. stop, please.

leave him . let this all be peace

the day you left

everything i drank went sour

my mouth took everything into itself

as a bad, malted word

i forced water down the shaft,

it came up as a horrible, pale foam

i gave it sweet milk

it turned the sip to vinegar

everything was vinegar -

a bitter brine

an  unmoving sleeping spittle

everything was an open wound

that I understood could not be shut

here i am,

falling

like a pile of rosary beads

unstrung and thrown across

a whole entire cathedral

scattered and hopeful

that a god with washed hands

will rope me back together

and make me a sequence of prayers

for the one who will hold the mysteries

and know that everything about my architecture

is a blessing. 

I spent three hours trying to write this poem about you

I give up

I remember nothing

You look so different

I cannot find your old voice in your new face.

Trying to write this poem

Is like being dragged by my hair

Through a museum of your mouth

Where I can not recall my name

There are no artifacts

Or fossils of  our hands

I am angry

A bloody selfish mess

Who ended us because being far and in love

Was just too much for an 18 year old girl

Who was so afraid of being alone

And did not know how to pray

I should mention that when we broke up

I fucked a man who I did not know how to love

We fucked every day for three months and I felt dead every single  time

I felt like I was dying on a death bed I furnished myself

And you were too busy trying to forget me

That you never even asked

Where it hurt

It hurt every where, every single time

And every time he tried to make home

Inside of this sloppy raw cave, that is my sex

I closed my eyes and whispered

Fuck you

 I was so angry

With your understandable need for space

I understand that when someone breaks the

Very thing that holds your spirit together

You must take everything back

And leave

I understand

It all makes perfect, rational sense

I am not a rational woman

I am selfish and needy

I understand that when you are in love

You can not be friends with the breaker

How could you excuse the murderer when you are trying to breathe your lover’s face

Into your last breath?

But I am still so amazed

At this gaping silence

This still shot of time

Where we are nothing to each other

There are times where I hate you,

Like now, where I am writing this poem

Finding it so very hard to wish you the best

Or

Remember that we were ever in love

When you never asked where it hurt

Perhaps because I never asked you where it hurt

Maybe because I am afraid that you will look me

Dead

-in my face and say

I do not remember when you broke me

I don’t even remember me wanting you, at all. 

A  gay man is burnt alive

In a country that I can not pronounce

He has no name

No face

No mouth or throat to hum the words:

Help me here.

He does not matter

There is no news footage

No 11pm

He does not get to eulogize

The cremation he is alive-awake for

If my body  were to be bludgeoned by flame

In the middle of State Street

By a crowd of  yellow haired women who

Avoid sitting next to me in lecture halls

And

White frat boys who hang

My kind of corps

To the most visible type of house on Langdon street

I would stay quiet the whole  time

I would not make one sound

Not one whisper of 911

I would stuff my jaw into my hands

And make sure no one mistook this fading out for

Martyrdom

The stillness would lull the whole campus into a cramped stop

As I simmered into an unbelievable silent film

Who am I, even in death, to request a stage? A photo-op on the school’s website?

An apology from my murderers mothers’?

How could I be so self-important  with my bones piled up like cigarette ash

And

unimportant things?

In this cremation, where I would keep my eyes

 Open

And mouth

Closed-

 until my skin waned like candle wax-

I would think of this nameless man

Whose  country I had once thought to be

So foreign and insignificant and  far away

 And so much

Unlike

My own

I would say,

Look at how our neighbors have finished us. Look at how over we are in a place that wanted to make us an exit wound  ever since we got here.

Footnote: I have heard conflicting stories on why the man was beaten/burnt. I’ve heard that he was an armed robber, I’ve also been told that he was gay. Whatever the case may be, I am well aware that somewhere in the world this is happening to members of the gay community-being persecuted for who they are-thus this poem.

You are the most genius decision

I have made since I have been here

You help me remember that two bodies

Are not meant to be at war

You have shown me that we are just landscapes

Waiting to grow out of the universe

I think I need to write about you because not once have you

Come to drink this water and claimed that you discovered the spring

Never have you stolen soil from my earth

And called it conquered

You look me in the eyes and ask if it is ok

To touch here

Open there

Press and split and pray on which ever

You always ask

I never feel like I am being stolen

All my parts are still my own

You make me feel like it is a privilege to share with you.

One time I loved a boy so hard

I forgot the way my mother says my name

In the gambol of our love making

He left me, of course-

For which I can not blame him for

 I was a dirty, phonetically ambiguous mess

I never sound right on the ears.