1. By the same white car
where my grandparents stood
sternly facing the camera,
was that me in my mother's arms
or someone else, milk eyes squinting
as she drools, her fat starfish hands
clutching a red and green tropical sea.
My mother's skirt, an island in paradise
and later, the jungle print will become
a pillow for my grandmother's couch
where I will wait years for my mother
to reclaim that skirt, and me.
All this fuss for a photograph.
who'd have thought those faded photos
marked the end of an era?
At the age of two,
that isn't me looking in.
I'm looking out of the photo
at a woman, older than my mother
who is still holding me in the picture.
She says she knows me but I know better.
I am cross without my nap
so I squint and sing and coo
to the sun in a blue sky.
Now she makes some other writing marks
but I swing my arm across the paper
and the table and the wall
filling the world with rainbow color
putting an end to all this writing.
2. That can't be me at 13
about to start high school.
That's someone else who looks like me,
who feels very grown up and eager to begin.
I'm looking out at myself, looking in.
She looks different, she isn't smiling, like me.
Are we related?
Her eyes glow red from the flash of the camera
making her look like an albino rabbit
while my eyes are brown.
My mother's skirt, a pillow on the couch
is now threadbare.
My red dress is embroidered with small mirrors
reflects a cloudy sky, like a pond,
a mirror full of algae.
I awake at night full of fear
I can't hear what she's saying.
a namelessness in the dark, like a sudden flash
that bleached the color form her hair, from her eyes
turning them from brown to red
like the rabbit who said yes.
All the times she turned them down,
every single one of my children.
10/7/1988 rev.4
4th revision from notes on Jorge Lujan's poetry workshop, Mark West School? first draft: CPITS writing workshop with Jorge Lujan 4/12/88
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