not another word from you
could make me feel
apt for another chance
at redemption, to prove myself worthy
of the paper before me;
how do I position my hands for
a holiday that thanks your privilege—
when you asked me how
I wanted this fat stupid bird,
& I said rainbow
& you said no
five-year-old marisa marveled
at how you missed it
the fabulous menagerie of hues
exploding chromatic clapping prismatic across the sky, fireworks tearing
through white-washed cornfields of sameness,
scribbled hand turkeys morphing into beastly brights—
dear teacher, little did you know that the shy
chinese girl scrunched in shame before you
augured a world
in which her imagination in due time
would conceive of gorgeous lingual melodies
transmogrifying creatures with power
to roar mountains into being,
granite colossi combustive quartz
blooming kaleidoscopes
across the landscape—too bad
they would blind your glaucomic orbs,
squinting spheres which mistook other for wrong
all she was asking of you, dear teacher,
was to permit herself to unfurl
her wings damp with life’s tender newness,
a baby’s scalp of yawning sinews moaning
past bones in ecstatic friction, fanning
into a rainbow the colored headdress
of the bird you love so much—
yet the clipping of feathers
made no sound,
sawed the nucleus of her voice
&—
silence:
the skeleton
from which
all
genocidal
tendencies
hang
in other words:
the reason why I have waited
two decades for my memories to divulge
a reality other than your monopoly
on meaning, your claim on
arrangements of fake avian cartoons,
emblems of apparent interethnic harmony
to this day your impertinence was prophecy
of my ascension, a world
that would gorge itself on the crisped
foothills of northern california, palms nodding
to the pilgrimage that reared a child whose forehead
sleeps smooth from the bowing down
dear teacher: one day you may discover that homage
is a different beast than what you’ve always fed
because on this thanksgiving day twenty-two years ago
my mother nursed an infant at her breast gave grace
to another god for a daughter whose fullest feathered self
would sail treacherous into the maw of your white beginnings
now sick of saving face,
dear teacher, all I mean, is that
today I live
& that turkey
is me.