growth (17)

Blade marks that once caressed

the edges of my skin

no longer hold my sorrow

in its unrelenting grip.

I do not hate myself.

Because my mother learned

that her hips were too wide

because my grandmother

learned that being too

skinny wasn’t good either

because my great-grandmother

had nothing to do but to feed

her children from the scratches

of nothing but yet still

trying to grab all she can with hands

empty except for hard

blisters from the ghost of the past.

She shouldn’t have let him go.

I am a woman but I am no longer

afraid.

Because my roots were

always too kinky and my

nose was too wide, the face

of a five year old girl who couldn’t hold

the little white girl’s hand

because she didn’t want her

hands to get dirty, all pierced into

one then you wonder why somehow

blood is much warmer and fonder

than your empty words.

But that is all the past.

From each crease and smile

and scar and dimple and wrinkle

and pimple, every out-of-place word,

every empty water bottle in the room,

every strand of hair clogging

up the bathtub drain, and every salty

tear and the chewed up finger nails

and every mediocre poem, and the bricks

on top of my shoulders pressing down

to the very pit of my soul that I hold is perfect.

Because I hold it and nobody else can.

Nobody else could.