Koylan Massiell Gomez,

Rich For a Day

my father always had that lawyer fire in his blood.
quick with his tongue. there’s a story
from when he was a kid on the farm,
selling chickens by the road. they said
he would stuff them with rocks,
so they would feel full,
so that he could feed himself on the art of persuasion.
folks paying more for the weight of illusion.
I still carry that story. His guts, his cojones.

when I think of those summers,
the broke, up-and-coming lawyer
determined to make his daughter's days memorable,
I can’t help but smile. he would drive to these
bougie hotels, park by the back entrance,
slip on his shades, and waltz right in.

he would tell us: speak English. Loudly.
that was the first time I learned
that a word pronounced right,
could open a gate.

our small bodies floating
in water silky with chlorine.
not realizing how everyone around us
looked so different. our father in a pool chair,
his dress shoes kicked up,
but if you looked closer,
you could see the dust from the barrio
still clinging to the faux leather.

and if you looked closer still,
you might notice the way
his jaw tightened, his foot tapping,
a man holding his act together.
a father of equal parts lie and love.

and if you listened harder,
you would hear the laughter
of two little girls
who believed every pool
was theirs to belong to.

Girl vs. Body vs. Mami vs. God

“But where does it say that it's a sin? Show me.”
I shoved the Bible at Yasmine and, for a split second
I thought I saw my mother's face reflected back.
Yasmine had the same look of shock and disappointment.
Just like mami when she caught me. Hand over my gutted starfish.

            And I hate the word “caught”
            as if I were doing something wrong. Mami's eyes
            taught me that my yearning was full of disgrace.
            And in return, it made me feel full of disgust.

“The Bible speaks in coded language.” 

Yasmine replied as she bashfully gathered her church books.
I want her to be honest with me. I want her to stop
quoting the Bible and speaking from her heart. I want
her to look me in the eyes and tell me that when she
is lying in her bed, she isn't overcome with the yearning.
The unexplainable wanting.

I want her to show me how our shifting bodies,
like tectonic plates, internal heat rising,
can be tamed with Bible verses.

“Eso es un espíritu del demonio”, but if that were true
then wouldn't we be hijas del demonio? “So are you saying
that we are offspring of the devil?” Yasmine's ears turn red.
“I think you need to be more devoted to your prayers.
If you pray hard enough, God will refocus your mind
away from your body.” 

            Why would He create us
            in His holy image
            and then punish us
            for exploring the very image
            He created?

“You remind me so much of myself when I was your age.”    
She said as she got up to leave and let out a sigh of exhaustion
mixed with defeat. Her long skirts and turtlenecks
kept her modest. My low-rise bell-bottoms and French tips
kept me hood. I stopped her at the door, “You and I
got nothing in common; you’re a church girl
that can barely answer my questions.
What if Eve was just horny?”       

It was her silence that made me realize I had hit a nerve.
Maybe my words took Yasmine back to when she
received her first kiss, and the same night, a slap to the face
by her mother for having caught her looking at her
starfish. Maybe she wanted to understand its layers,
and read between the pages, the same way she
reads her Bible. 

            Looking for the right words to help her come
            to a conclusion of what is right from wrong.

My persistence, my fear, my wanting to know if
God would still love me because I discovered how to love myself,
was relentless. I felt like a dying fish, afloat, waiting for Him
to save me. Every day was an internal struggle of wanting to
wash away the feeling of filth that overcame me.

So I prayed, I got on my knees, and I asked God
to help me stop looking at Joel with greedy eyes. I prayed
that he would make me pretty by taming my fuzzy curls
and ashy skin. I prayed that he would fill my body like
my cousin Alexandra, who had hills in all the right places.
I asked God to give me carpal tunnel so that my fingers
wouldn't roam. So that my journals wouldn’t disappoint
the church, Yasmine, mami.

I remember how I would sneak in line to touch
the holy water. I would secretly rub it against
my neck. I would hope that it would help me grow gills.

            And every night, I felt like a cichlid
            hitting the bottom of my tank, a fraud
            pretending that I was dying, luring my prey.
            Luring mami so that she can acknowledge
            my hurt so that she can talk to me in the soft voice
            that she only uses with strangers.

“Are you sure that we came from a rib?” I asked mami
over a plate of locrio. The shredded chicken and bones
mixed in with the rice. “Mira muchacha del diablo,
para de hablar tanto disparate y ponte a comer”.
There it was again, daughter of the devil. I looked at
my plate and grabbed one of the chicken bones. How
could He have created us, so complicated and so fragile?
I held the bone tightly, closing my hands around it,
pushing with my thumb until it snapped.

I wanted to tell mami that she associates pleasure
with shame. That every time my fingers danced
the motion of our ancestors guided them.
That we shared the same temperament, nose
and hands. That prayer was in itself a way of
succumbing to a different wanting. And that God
islove, and love is life. So, is it truly a sin to feel alive
especially when everything surrounding you
makes you feel so dead?

I placed my hand underneath my shirt,
my fingers strummed my ribs like a guitar,
wondering which rib belonged to Adam. Slowly
pushing against them and hoping for a crack.