West Side Girl

I wear my skin like some reject from the Tribes of Ham,
Pale and transparent as skim milk.  I can never go home.

My father imparted to me like a curse:
“You’re just like your mother.  You’ll never
Be able to live more than thirty miles from the West Side.”
And I think, Of course.  He’s right.
He’s always right when I don’t want him to be.

And I wonder if it’s this curse, his curse,
Which also gifts him to be able to see into me,
And I to endure the pain of being seen.  After all, my skin is his skin.

Ah, Marìa, Marìa, Marìa—las très,
Great-grandmother, grandmother, mother,
And I am the break in the rosary beads.
I think of the placenta from my grandmother’s birth buried on the hill,
The hill, which I can never go back to.

Instead, I toe the thirty-mile mark.
“¡Bolilla!”  They say.  “¡Gringa!”
At nine, I saw myself as naked as Eve,
And hurried to cover up my whiteness.

Now I go, bearing my flesh like shame,
And the neighbors ask who the white girl is who comes and visits.

Someday, I will take a grater to my skin.
I shall cast it off.  Flayed, I shall anoint myself with cominos and cilantro.
In blood I shall make my pilgrimage. 
On the Boulevard, I shall hail, Marìa. 

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This poem appears in West Side Girl & Other Poems, available at Amazon.com.

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