If I call myself unloveable, I am, practically; if I say it

enough times: unloveable. Then, like practical magic,

 

I’m hollow as old garlic; I’m distance-skinned.

I’m a long, mean package, a terror-dyke, a nag, a squinting,

 

slut-spun hag—it’s easy, really. It’s the simplest thing,

I do it in my sleep. I have invasive dreams,

 

after all, they infect my lover’s skull, they crank our jaws

into four slow hammers. After all, I’m made of distance

 

plus the beautiful things people have tried to put

inside me, they fall out the bottom. No one can kill me

 

with kindness. No one can reach me through the sound

of such ancestral ugly, sound of my grandmothers gagging

 

a half-century ago (did they?). My grandmother beating

her stomach with her fists, drinking medicine, then poison (did she?).

 

I’m distance-skinned. No one can put a story inside me

but me. If not even my memories love me enough to stay,

 

then fine, cut off the hands that keep me married

to any history. See? Like magic, then,

 

I call myself a rotted-out bulb, and soon enough

I’m hauling out the wet stuff, cracking my compost heart

 

under a shovel’s faceless verdict. Sometimes a highway opens

between my hearts, and I run suicides between until I’m lactic.

 

Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run

to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved,

 

and I crumple into carcass. I come from a short line of women

who were handed husbands as salvation from rape.

 

I’m a short lie of a woman whom men have wanted

to tear apart with their good strong hands. I mean, same.

 

If I love anyone enough to know they deserve better than me,

and stay anyway…? If I love myself enough to beat

 

fistfuls of poison into me, into me who hurts me, oh well,

I’m just imitating the rockets’ red glare. I’m just covering

 

the old song. Unloveable is open-source, anyone can make up

new verses to sing it. Here’s the part where I list the times

 

my white ex hurt my feelings, or my white teacher,

my white therapist, the white boy who put his dick inside me,

 

the boy I liked too much, the woman who let me fall

in love with her too fast, of course there’s the boy

 

who died by accident and left me only able to write beautiful poems

about his leaving, pretty only-love things I threw and threw into

 

the endless distances inside me, highways of quiet.

O, I’ve been hard to love in America. I’ve been slow

 

to speak in America. I’ve been, undoubtedly, an American

and done practically nothing to stop it. I’ve been

 

some version of my grandmothers slinking around the floor

of the GI bar, shivering in the bathroom of the GI bar.

 

I’ve been some version of my grandmother making child

after child for a loveless man. I’ve been her, and I’ve been

 

the version of her that lives, that lives in an opportune land,

that chooses who she loves, that sits by a window writing,

 

drinking water with tulsi, breaking chocolate with her clean hands,

that goes to school after school and collects heart and heart

 

and heart sweetly brimming in her well-oiled forearms and still

has the gall to be unloveable. O, my badly-loved grandmothers,

 

I kin you to me, facelessly. I wrap all our deaths around

my shoulders like a foxpelt coat: grandmother across

 

oceans and ages, grandmother across the border, grandmother

carried off by soldiers, grandmother carried into endless highway

 

by disease or dog or dawn’s unrelenting purge. I wrap until

I’m made of grandmother, until the ritual musk of their dreams

 

is sprouting from my skull: sandalwood, ambergris, copper

of blood, coin copper, clay of approaching dusk. I am loved

 

by pheromone if nothing else. By accident at best.

O beasts of fortune, I am loved sweetest by the horrors of blood,

 

by my own, and by ours, O blessed rootrot, by ours.