Graceina Samosir
If I Remain a Boy
I won’t grow into you.
My hands will be too small
to wield your paternal violence.
I don’t want to write
your violence because it re-
traumatizes me.
I need to keep
this part of my story
to cope. My weapon
is obscurity. It’s funny
how I have words
to describe what my body
remembers, but I wish
my body were a future, not
a past. No diagnosis
or therapy can make me
forget. If I remain a boy,
I also have your love, not
the possibility to reconcile
after it happened—
I became me,
a scarlet F- A- G,
& then you died.
If our history is an it,
that means I can store us
within a folder deep inside
my amygdala labeled Old
(Do Not Use). I know
the label is a lie, but at least
I control it.
That I’m your son, here.
That I love you, here.
My story gets to be
an archive. In the outside,
I really became a boi,
i
inserted into myself,
a slant of light you’ll never see.
I don’t need you
when I’m a genderless sun.
I learned to be a liar
because of you. In the end,
you won: Do Not Use
written across my skin,
a narrative in motion.
I’m a fool to think
I can file away your haunting
when what my body wants
is you, kissing my forehead
again— a boy’s— just like before.
Siopao
Braised, not grilled—
how my bones will be cooked
upon death. I’m a combo
covered in tattoos
& chicken skin, the result
of moist volcanic lava
dipped
in Great Basin salt.
Before my birth, there were sea
-ways connecting Cebu
to Guangzhou.
How do you think
my mom was born?
Sometimes I wish I could lick off
the latex of Ma’s memories
to get to the tsismis.
Rumors: the only currency
I share with family.
That & our love
for pork buns
whorled like the whirlpool
of my self-destructing body.
All I can hope for is a good boiling
to infuse my corpse
with spice.
I come prepared for my ancestors,
whose bellies
will show me truth.
—————
Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, & neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, May 2021) is their debut full-length poetry collection. Their poems appear in outlets such as Foglifter, Gulf Stream Magazine, & Hairstreak Butterfly Review, while their personal essays can be found in journals such as Cold Mountain Review & Glassworks Magazine. They received their MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women & are presently an English PhD student at Oklahoma State University. While not always (physically) there, they permanently reside in the middle of the Nevada desert.