Contingencies
I keep imagining myself writing a book
from the perspective of a dead woman
in a trench
off the highway
brain bashed in or head cut off
Maybe simply beaten until she’s unrecognizable.
But I shake my own head and remind myself:
That was another life or another dream.
But I have this habit of forgetting.
And I’m not sure if this habit is:
Strategic
Or
Involuntary.
And I have no contingency plan.
Here’s the thing:
I feel broken–
A horse whose spine has been ridden so hard
that the skinny bones pop out,
little knobs under threadbare skin.
My spirit is dead, yes, but moreso:
My body is tired.
Heartbreak is hard and lonely and noisy.
And I’m trying to starve and dream it away.
So I have no contingency plan.
Part of this comes down to race.
(To be blunt and ugly, which is the current shape of my world.)
I have no formal claim to this thing that’s mine:
So my brain is borrowed.
My body is borrowed.
My skin is itching as someone else’s soul ricochets around these borrowed blood and guts.
Which means the little pieces of wholeness,
quiet rituals and nods of camaraderie,
don’t feel like they’re mine.
And to be blunt and ugly again:
this feels like the way mixed women should expect to live their lives.
Wholly unwholesome.
Wanting desperately to be filled with something that counters their own doubt or delusion or commitment to something no one else wants for them.
Especially when these women start coming up against:
things that think they own them.
And so the dead woman in the ditch,
the part of me that loved myself,
starts to speak.
She’s haunting us, this future self.
And from her puffy corpse mouth she whispers a song to the tragic mestizo (who had no contingency except her own sadness and a vacant death).
She says:
My whiteness was mine.
My redness was his.
That is to say:
It was contingent on whether he said I was or not.
My rational self understood this:
I am/was white.
Sort of.
Kind of.
Mixed.
Diluted.
Not whole.
My irrational self understood this:
I am/was imperfect.
Mostly.
Poisoned.
Poisoning.
Hateable.
Half and more again empty.
And both selves so desperately want to be alone while belonging.
And as I searched my face, for a piece of not white, I ran through it like a graverobber:
A hungry scavenger for something to sustain me.
Picking and prodding at myself as the crows and song-dogs will soon do to me.
Then she stops speaking and waits to become:
Invisible peace in the stomach of hungry birds.
And as for me,
Ghosted by my future self,
I think about the last before a hundred more fights.
“Go write another angry poem,”
he chided, mouth and eyes shark black cold.
So I did.
I still don’t think I’m as angry as I should be.
And I don’t think I have a Plan B about when you decide I don’t belong.
miskobagizi 