When I first faced a blank bio for my literary profile, I wrote that I was a “cross-genre human”. In other words, I discover myself at the crossroads of different places and forms and communities, though I’m always squinting through the distance at those who are steeped in clear identity; who grew where they were planted and live there full-time. I grew up moving every year, meeting new classrooms and neighbors, new smells in the fall. New configurations of furniture in the rooms my sister and I shared. Old faces that knew us in my mother’s hometown, and millions of new ones in cities that forgot us instantly.
In such newness, I always found something familiar. Children and adolescents coalescing into cliques representing who they were, or could be. Faith split into religions and neighborhoods and denominations, like spiritual mitosis. My mother running, rarely resting, staying up past midnight so I could meet the day with my school project polished as she spilled into work ragged and late.
I am all of these years, and each of these places. Picking one in which to settle is an illusion. I still slip away, flipping the radio station as I leap the state line and lapse into un idioma menos conocido. Outside California, I taste fields where my mother’s parents prayed for rain. I thumb petals first glimpsed on the daily uniform of my father’s mother: an aloha shirt. My grandparents were born 4,000 miles apart, but they knew the same God. He wove their stories into one bloodline, and two granddaughters.
A poem that becomes fiction:
If she had fallen, she would be a flower
but she leapt, so she is a seed.
Fiction that becomes my story:
Perennial blooms can still die before spring.
My story that becomes a poem:
Winter brings the gift
of long nights. A slow heartbeat
can stretch an annual bloom
into eternal life.Related Posts
