last night, i realized that
it’s a simple known fact Yellow girls cannot become
poets we are your foreign cardiologist your
human calculator your trash-talking
nail technician your Yellow
doormat to wipe white
soles on. if we try to
be anything else
we are hung by
our collars on
a clothesline
by wide
eyes,
white
eyes. left
to wither in
the sun left to
rot like raisins left to
fester like runny wounds.
we are jaundiced limoncello vomit
stuck on the bathroom floor because
it’s a simple known fact Yellow girls don’t have
feelings. they won’t put up a fight they won’t bite.
so go ahead baby boy, try to stretch your white eyes like
rubber bands, pulling at corners until you’ve torn in half—snap!
when i was a child,
i
drowned my
eyes in tubs of two
percent milk, scrubbed
them clean until all my Yellow
bled out on our bathroom floor. i
cut my mother tongue off with a kitchen
knife, left it to ooze like a bullet wound underneath
my White pillowcase. i stabbed my brain, twisted the blade
until i forgot how Lola folds lumpias blindfolded, how Lolo exhales
White smoke from Yellowing lungs. i shoved two fingers down my throat,
purged the jaundice out of my skin to feel more like Them. i ripped my
fingernails off, picked them raw for barbie baby boys to paint them
a color they approved. please tell me why i murdered my
Yellow self before i turned ten, stabbed her in the back,
mourned her after i saw huang he tears tattooed
onto her cheeks. please tell me why i buried
my native self in our backyard, threw her
screaming corpse over my White
shoulders, made her sleep in a
sea of soil & shame and
was still so
empty.