LXSSYS

Daughter

One day I’ll give birth to a tiny baby girl and when she’s born she’ll scream and I’ll make sure she never stops.
I will kiss her before I lay her down and will tell her a story so she knows how it is and how it must be for her to survive.
I’ll tell her about the power of water, the seduction of paper, the promise of gasoline, and the hope of blood.
I’ll teach her to shave her eyebrows and mark her skin.
I’ll teach her that her body is her greatest work of art.
I’ll tell her to light things on fire and keep them burning.
I’ll teach her that the fire will not consume her, that she must take it and use it.
I’ll tell her to be tri-sexual, to try anything to sleep with, fight with, pray with anyone, just as long as she feels something.
I’ll help her do her best work when it rains.
I’ll tell her to reinvent herself every 28 days.
I’ll teach her to develop all her selves, the courageous ones, the smart ones, the dreaming ones the fast ones.
I’ll teach her that she has an army inside her that can save her life.
I’ll tell her to say Fuck like other people say The and when people are shocked to ask them why they so fear a small quartet of letters.
I’ll make sure she always carries a pen so she can take down the evidence.
If she has no paper, I’ll teach her to write everything down on her tongue, write it on her thighs.
I’ll help her to see that she will not find God or salvation in a dark brick building built by dead men.
I’ll explain to her that it’s better to regret the things she has done than the things she hasn’t.
I’ll teach her to write her manifestos on cocktail napkins.
I’ll say she should make men lick her enterprise.
I’ll teach her to talk hard.
I’ll tell her that her skin is the most beautiful dress she will ever wear.
I’ll tell her that people must earn the right to use her nickname, that forced intimacy is an ugly thing.
I’ll make her understand that she is worth more with her clothes on.
I’ll tell her that when the words finally flow too fast and she has no use for a pen, that she must quit her job, run out of the house in her bathrobe, leaving the door open.
I’ll teach her to follow the words.
I’ll tell her to stand up and head for the door after she makes love.
When he asks her to stay she’ll say she’s got to go.
I’ll tell her that when she first bleeds when she is a woman, to go up to the roof at midnight, reach her hands up to the sky and scream.
I’ll teach her to be whole, to be holy, to be so much that she doesn’t even need me anymore. I’ll tell her to go quickly and never come back.
I will make her stronger than me.
I’ll say to her never forget what they did to you and never let them know you remember.

Nicole Blackman, “Daughter”

Steve Gehrke, “Prologue, Epilogue”

for my daughter

when you were vaulted, embargoed, tapping out 
messages on the walls, when you were translucent, 
opalescent, a hieroglyph coming to life in its cave, 
when your body was a glowing aquarium of cells, 
when you were reptilian, mammalian, quick-changing 
behind the curtain’s folds, when you were a kite 
unfolding in the wind, an expanding mesh, an origamist 
of the flesh, when you were a repetition, an exhalation, 
a star’s migration, when you hopscotched the chalked side-
walks of our chromosomes, when you were docked 
and moored, when you were the building storm, a collection 
of notes being scored, the sampler, the copyist, the knot 
of streams, the welcome plagiarist of genes, 
when you were something written a thousand times, 
a thousand times erased, when you were a text slowly 
being traced, when the eternal grammars sifted into you 
like the sediment of stars, when you were a syntax, 
a structure, the perfect rhyme, the one that worked, 
the eureka in our laboratory of sighs, when you 
were unjointed, unmade, unbecome, bodiless, 
vagabond, a clapper in need of a bell, when you 
were a fixation, a flirtation, our compendium, 
our chapter and verse, when we groped for you 
like a light switch, when you were a target, a zeroing-
in, the one lucky toss in our carnival games, a glint, 
a guess, the alchemist’s dream, when you were whistling 
on the stoop of our thoughts, the ventriloquist, 
the eavesdropper, the message in the ear, the sky-
written note the wind had just erased, when you 
were a divided city, axed but magnetized, you longing 
for you, the pheromones in the air, when we carried you 
like synchronized keys, our balkanized deity, 
when you were anybody’s guess, the card dealt 
from the middle of the deck, the fortune-teller’s lies, 
when you were fractured, rationed, metabolized backward 
through the generations, when you were a splinter 
in a million different boards, a single grain in a silo of cells, 
when you were the whole flock, the herd, the fire- 
flies rising in the fields, when you were the fields 
themselves, when you spread out across the plains, 
a hundred thousand streams with the currents 
reversed, when you were a universe of bees 
promised to a hive, when an entire civilization 
began its pilgrimage to you, when you were atoms, 
electrons, the ancient seeds, morphic, mineral, 
cascading down evolution’s alleyways, embroidered 
in the mysteries, weren’t we already just out ahead 
of you, two ghosts being erased by the fog, weren’t we 
already being burned away, weren’t we a contraction, 
a resolving contradiction, the final stops on your migration, 
weren’t we already knotted in a braid, isn’t this a back-
ward elegy, my forward etymology, isn’t it the billions 
of years before your birth that we should mourn, 
aren’t you the root, the source, the pyramid’s tip, 
won’t you be our mother when the causal chain flips?

(Source: weissewiese, via sharingpoetry)

Because any man who burns you a mixed CD with amazing remixes of the guiltiest pleasure love songs in the world is worth missing 5 minutes after he leaves.

Wherever I lay my head, be it far, near, between continents or home, I love you. It transcends distances and knows no timezones. Its how I feel, and I just wanted you to know.

- My good night text message from my stellar boyfriend, Mykee ♥