When I tell my mother I am in love with a woman. She looks up
from the frying pan and I look down as she asks me what it is
that we do. She means sexually. She wants details. I think it's
time to invest in coconuts. Never learned to stomach the smell
of my mother's palm oil inside her American kitchen.
Announcing itself in hot splatters across the clean lines of the
cold porcelain. I still lay my temple across a cool surface, splay
my troubles atop a tiled floor. Limbs like I'm seven again,
naked from the waist, beneath my mother's steady hand and
long silver scissors. Which always feel like surprise ice against
my chubby pubis. Eyes pinned east beneath her impatient voice.
I said don't move. My girlhood, open as the morning blinds, the
light I wish was brighter. When Mama's finished cutting, she
dusts the loose hairs like a janitor, underpaid. Sighs. Now I'm
allowed to be a girl again. Pull up my shorts to play. Outside the
air tastes like honeysuckle and I am on the cusp of forgetting.
Until she calls me home. I pretend not to hear her questions.
She wants to know where I am going.