[there should be another way to go where i haven’t been before]
Route I
This word can’t fishnet my falling.
This word. Rroma.
It has never been asked to hold me.
I have been cradled safe, away from it.
The laddered anxiety of genes, a pulse-choking flight—
the kind of litany that tucks sandstorms inside an hourglass.
Some parts of me know, of course. I can’t blueprint the thoroughness of this migratory coiling.
My auroch-horned eyebrows. My balanceo y vaivén.
My spine, a cocky minaret of bone too numb to the burning wax of synonyms—
Anagrams
Babystealer.
(Atlas Ebbs. Yes.)
Swindler.
(Rinds Drew Ends)
Thief.
(I fit the If)
Route II
Samudaripen: Ph*rrajimos: “Cutting Up”
You can say that this day is not ours. That others died too. Others who are not us. That not enough of us died. Or that we didn’t die enough. All dying isn’t equal in Your world where life begins at deception. To exist is to confront.
Amen.
The beak dropping into my lap, still warm from the blade.
The bird cooling its rigor mortis in the virgin porcelain.
In Nocturne, Rosario Castellanos writes - Para vivir es demasiado el tiempo (time is too long for life/life is too short for Time) & I have in my hand some kind of drunk, timeless lightning, a lullaby cut from obsidian, the skywide language of echolocation.
Amen.
Route III
You can snatch a child for the crime of being born with the hair of dirt-kissed goldenrods or lips of crushed pink cassia.
(To a father who has eyes of wild almonds & a loud contradiction for limbs; dirty cordovan hardened by razor-carved blisters, softened by incense oil—)
& say – this child is not g*psy enough.
say: your blood isn’t proof
Enough.
This child is not yours.
Enough.
You don’t understand that love is as small or as large as the shadow of its faith: a mustard seed, every mountain & its miracle, the paranoia sleeping in the palm of the same rust-veined hands. On most nights, it just means that I pray my mother’s sleep isn’t scorched by the bitter heat of her arthritis. The way in which a body learns to worship everything that is at war behind its closed doors. The way a father will surrender the leashed animal of his own heart to close the gap between that what beats and what can be beaten, unwilling to let his daughter shoulder a mourning the size of two songful seas.
You can say if I want a home, I should consider building another bridge from my name to my throat.
I can say: padre, gitano, romani
& watch the waves at my feet suture a calligraphy of a newly articulated light.
The crushed blue glass of windchimes we buried along the breath of our brief homes.
Then watched the whole sky flying down to fit into the song of this shattering.
Scherezade Siobhan
is an Indo-Roma psychologist, writer, community catalyst and a late-blooming scarab.
Twitter: @zaharaesque
Note: Rroma Genocide: *the word “gypsy” is a slur for Rroma/Romany/Romani folx