There Is Only Grief

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By Kim Sousa

shaped into another. The bath I draw
just to leave there, full. Surface unbroken.
The chickens outside screaming.
Nest-bound and raging
for the eggs that won’t hatch.
My love on a bus.
Six men lynched.
My love says, It’s the pigs.
You can’t tell me it’s not the pigs.
And I won’t. When I say, I cannot
tell a lie, I mean, I’m rejecting
white supremacy. I mean it
the way Arlo Guthrie said it—
even after his grandfather lynched
a mother and son. I cannot tell a lie.
There has never been an unsolved murder.
Maybe there was the impulse
but it isn’t mine to tell. Instead,
I kiss the flag he flies and burn the others.
Rub his body with a single egg
I crack into salted water and flush quickly.
Burning bay leaf love.
Boiled onion skin and white petal love.
I thought the egg would be black.
Too afraid to turn a smooth shell
against my own skin, I mop myself out
of the room. Floors Fabuloso slick
and shining my imposter face back at me.
My love says the sun can’t burn us,
says our curls grow towards God.
I cannot tell a lie: passing
is a useless distinction. Here I am.
Even my father calls me branca—
though we do not speak.
His father broke the bottle against my father’s back
for the miscegenation. My mother’s family violence
didn’t shine with blood and lamplight.
No, the whites disown quiet
as a checkbook balancing, an inheritance reaching
back into the pale. What is beyond this?
Not whiteness. But whiteness still.
I cannot tell a lie.
Look into my terrible face and know.
If you are what your father is,
my father said I couldn’t be his.

Kim Sousa is a Brazilian American poet and open border radical. She was born in Goiânia, Goiás and immigrated to Austin, Texas with her family at age five. Her poems can be found in Poet Lore, EcoTheo Review, Palabritas and elsewhere. Kim is currently seeking poetry submissions for an anthology of Latinx Futurisms she’s editing with Alan Chazaro and Malcolm Friend. For more of her work and for the submission call, you can find Kim at kimsousawrites.com and on Twitter @kimsoandso and @LatinxFuturisms.