That Boys Are Flowers Too


Say, earth has become too busy
tending to sister's scars
 that my cries are only gifted
 to the cicatrix and night skies.
You see, father's father had 
encrypted on our tongues—
the constitutions on how a boy
 could camouflage his agony with
 the mask of a lion's heart that
he had forgotten how petals
 had already been sewn into flesh
 and ichor for our hearts instead.
He says a boy must recycle his grief
 into boxes of peaches and fondle 
them as though he were a deity—
without sin.
But i tell you, if you choose to 
unwrap this flesh you'd see
 the anatomy of pain from a boy's body.
And when you swallow my grief
 you could find its definition in 
a thousand and one languages.
You see, the scars on mother's body 
teaches girls how to love 
but father's burnt limbs whispers to us,
Man shall always be man.
And the night I sang to dad
 how i dreamed of becoming a fire lily,
the old man asked that I exorcise my tongue. 

Boy— you are vine. 
You are a ghost orchid too. 
Your petals have blended into 
the satin of crooked minors,
'home' might  weed off your bloom. 



In this poem, my body lives without a tongue

when i fall into the darkness of reality 
i see,
a girl's portrait on the altar of helplessness.
This portrait is pleading, this portrait is me.
But an old man pulls my tongue
 from my mouth.
he says that girls my age must lock 
their voices inside their father/lover/husband's lips. 
then i try to pull my pale body
out of this vulnerable realm
and write to mother how i lost my voice to a strange man.
she stares at me with so much to say but 
mother's tongue has been taken too.
listen, 
in this polity where every woman 
 is believed to possess a disabled gene,
i do not know the difference between a nightmare and reality 
for as long as i carry this body i remain 
that girl child without red.