I Hope You Pick Yourself

I hope you pick yourself.

Out of the billions spanning the globe,

I hope you select you.

There will be days it feels like you are the last kid left for dodgeball,

That you are stuck with a team eerily aware of your weak arms and quaking knees,

Call yourself anyway.

In anthologies of digitized Venuses,

Do not shrink.

You are not pixels,

Not removable with several strokes of a mouse,

Remember this when you are with yourself.

Remember these truths when your mind is the school cafeteria,

And the last thing you want is to be alone with your thoughts.

Recall this when you inflate into your biggest bully,

Sparing no punches.

Remember this because you’ll also be the only one who can grab you an ice pack.

You’ll be the only one gazing through a black eye from your own blow,

The only one who tastes muffled words through a swollen face.

You beat the real monsters,

So why do they get the prize of your thoughts?

Of making you like them?

I hope you pick you.

I hope you pick yourself in the same way I would–

With love and care and generosity and challenge.

Pick yourself like you are a first round draft pick,

Because in a way,

You are.

Anthem and Atonement

The sticks and stones house the hurt,

But why then, did words form cacophonic scars around my wrists?

Why did they persuade me to flee from the phone—terrified of the acne faced and braced monsters on other end?

Message inside the fleets of spits balls hurled in my direction, my space jeers at my imperfections

I turned the words on myself—allowed their demons to infect me

The toxic syllables, forming wicked symphonies, my tragic melody

The fear that ravaged my insides, “You too fat!”

“You’re vile!”

“Every last bit of you is used and unwanted from your fat ass to liver bile!”

My insides shrieked and raged for years on end, until I was as frail and weak and broken on the outside as much as within.

Drowning in a sea of Lexapro and choked by my barbed-wire scars, there was no terrain or mist—just the indefinite abyss.

It swished me around and swallowed me.

And when I was spit out, I was debris.

But as I learned, ruin is a gift.

The vocabulary adhesive had washed off of me.

My wrecked remains were the titanium that survived their language.

And so they assembled—shards of intelligence and compassion and persistence all fused together.

I became a Venus de Milo of resilience,

A Boadicea of acceptance.

Measuring my life in smiles and joy, instead of purges and cuts

Their sticks became my kindling,

Their stones my jewelry,

But their words are fossils—

Faded echoes,

Evidence that they (and I) were wrong.

My Body:

This Figure,

This form,

Doughy, flawed

Wide Hipped, supple-lipped

How I mutilated your alabaster planes,

Dissected your divine abundance,

I hated you.

Battered your matter to a gaunt shell,

Dyed it with bruises and speckled in scars

Manifestation of my insecurity that you inhaled

The elixirs I imbibed,

How easy they made it for me to abandon you,

Rendering you victim to unwanted hands and darkened plans,

I burned your wild curls,

Tamed the natural ringlets.

That nose edges over slightly to one side–

I wanted a scalpel to erase it.

I wanted a doctor’s straw to sip and suck at my stomach and thighs,

Remove all my softness,

Make my hourglass a line.

With purges and fasts and hours running like the thief of my being,

I tried to shrink.

When you wouldn’t contract,

I tried to vacate you,

Emotionally, physically.

But your intangible strength assuaged my pain.

You held on and thrived.

You are the miracle.

The speed of your stride, the sway of your hips,

The grin of your lips,

The universe at the meeting of your ample thighs,

This is my atonement and a love letter to you.

My darling, marvelous body:

Naked, Spanks-less,

Porous melodic perfection

Seamstress of my reveries

Composer of my emotions

Drummer to my rants, raves and commotions

Host to my ascending soul

You are beautiful, infinite, and whole.

To My 12 Year Old Self: A Love Letter

Dear Marisa, age 12,

I love you.

Dear Marisa,

The chronological canyon, spreading nine years between you and me, will teach you that

Life is not binary black and white.

It is shades of gray.

But even in a muted landscape, this existence is the most spectacular spectrum of silver I have ever seen.

You are the product of tangled genealogies,

Of love in broken tools,

Held hostage to the legacy of hurt that made them.

Of a tribe always looking for welcome mats,

Never planting roots.

Home is a stranger in your vernacular,

Something so foreign to articulate.

You will chase picket fences, postage codes, and people for something that may never be.

Home is yourself.

Home is when you baptize your body as something other than a burial ground.

Honor it as atlas and ecosystem.

Temple cannot convey the wonder that houses you,

The soul inside towers over the chaos around it.

You waste wishes on life in a smaller body,

In a body without memories,

Any flesh besides this pasty prison,

Pave your pain into your wrists,

Engraving the sagas you have weathered in the only language you know.

And still, this frame breathes.

Refusing to surrender the worth reveling in its atoms.

Knows you are your own best friend, soulmate, and compass.

Refuses to be reduced to a fraction when it is whole.

When we are whole.

Marisa, your heart is a semi’s engine.

You cannot measure the love in your life by someone’s inability to open their arms.

Maybe caring too much is a medical condition

The kind with purpose coursing through your veins and feminism in your marrow.

Marisa, widen your wingspan,

Let others etch their messages on your limbs

And know they don’t define you.

What defines you lies between your lungs.

You will heal from plagues of perfectionism,

Sweat out feverish doubt,

Speak to yourself in a cadence besides cacophonies. Dialects that aren’t self-depricating.

Understand that the cracks are where the light gets in.

Learn to applaud the parts of yourself that don’t receive standing ovations.

At twenty one, you will still be unlearning.

Still be unlearning how your ears fish for beautiful in a sea of compliments,

Like your veneer is all the depth you have,

Like your insides don’t matter.

Marisa, if someone reduces you to one dimension, respond with one finger

Dear Marisa,

Survive and apology share no letters.

This is not a coincidence.

You will wish your words are anything but the color of fire.

In prayers to a star-fashioned God, you will beg for silence,

Sever the enflamed tongue,

Shrink into some fabricated softness that never came.

You are a blazing tapestry.

Something fierce, fragile, vivacious and vulnerable.

A frenzied complexity unmeant to be untangled,

The kind who shuttles from instant to intimate,

Knows no surface, only the deep end.

You spend eternities staring at a blood orange sun

Feeling like you are a skeleton of safety pins.

It is always the eve of something, never the arrival,

How you’ve mapped future sensations like a hopeful cartographer onto your feet and hands and heart.

They are packed into your nerves.

And then, you will blink.

Airtight nerves surge a reflex that closes your eyes for nine years.

And you’ll find yourself there.

Beneath gushing waterfalls, atop Arthur’s seat, inside families you never knew you needed, friends who love you even when you can’t offer it to yourself.

You’ll find yourself in the calculable power of linked arms and laced fingers.

For You,

Girl with safety-pin skeleton, semi’s engine heart,

Stratified on a silverscape with citrus sky,

I wrote this for you.

I wrote this in complete awe of and gratitude for you

Molded this in the language of the love that will fill your life,

Will overtake you like the flood you never prepared for.

Will raise your skin to Goosebumps and render you speechless.

The People in your future make fireworks look like flickering fluorescent lights they are such tangible celebrations.

Dear Marisa age 12,

I owe it to you.

Dear Marisa, age 12,

I love you.

For Girls Like Me

Dedicated to the women who have given me the privilege of sharing their stories and those who shoulder the burden alone.

Girls like me know hide—

Know what parts of ourselves are not made for polite conversation.

Know normal as the spine-tightening at a crash.

Registerthe bellow of a man’s voice like an alarm.

Girls like me don’t know sleep without phones at the bedside.

Girls like me have hearts so big they’re like sponges—

Soaking up everything around us.

Girls like me don’t know self-forgiveness.

We know excuse, quiet, face to cold tile floor,

That bruises are best covered in stage make up.

But have yet to muster the self-love to pry ourselves permanently from things we never deserved.

Girls like me know shame in jokes about our experiences,

Know how to translate the language of misogyny and regurgitate it to assimilate.

Know “no” is a whisper swallowed by the monstrous night.

How are stories are met with silence or tears,
Know how to make you uncomfortable.

Girls like me don’t want your pity.

Don’t need condescending,

Are not a haphazard apology in the wake of shame.

Girls like me don’t know how to differentiate sympathy and pity.

So married to being strong,

To avoiding the caverns that made girls like us

That we aren’t sure who to let in.

Who can carry us?

Who can love us?

Girls like me are not the inventory of our scars,

Even when it feels like it some days.

Girls like me that survival in the light is the scariest thing in a rape culture.

It should be.

Girls like me are not sorry.

Girls like me know survive

Girls like me know thrive.

Girls like me know rise.

Girls like me know this is for the sisters before, with, and after me.

We are the mothers and sisters and families formed like constellations post-trauma.

We are the red worn like a crown,

Wings made in the connection.

Girls like me—be seen.

Girls like me—be heard.

Girls like me—it happened.

Girls like me—it’s not ok.

Girls like me—it’s not your fault.