Origami Swan

We made paper carvings and folded our hands

When the fat Asian Quaker came over, our assistance teacher,

She said I was folding mine wrong, not the hands but the paper

But I couldn’t tell her I liked to do things wrong, not for the life of me

When I went to Quaker school, I tended to do everything wrong

Contrary to anything they may say, you can be so wrong—

Peaceably so, but still wrong

We carved ridges into our hands in order to hold the ivory paper

It was natural and so were we, but natural didn’t make the swan fly

So I coped rather difficultly with its less-than-there wingspan

And delighted in my odd ways of turning paper

Into something more than paper folded into something,

I made it skin, feathers, bone, beak, claw, and trunk—not swan

And although we could say sex sex sex

And toss around our hair in mixed motions, call out names

(not surnames, just the name)

freely, write about life after death at age nine and not be condemned,

we could not fold the parchment in ways

that did not yield a set of wings and a pointed head and an upturned floaty body and points and folds and bends; we couldn’t do it, we couldn’t make paper into us

but I didn’t bother folding mine,

not if my self-expression had to look like everyone else’s

so when they came around the room to check our swans

and asked what happened to mine

I said nothing, and that my paper didn’t want to be a swan

But I opened my hands

And out of ridges I dug,

Flew dozens of skin-colored swans,

Only as big as the paper doll swans,

Only as big as my thumb’s tip to my wrist’s edge

They flew like the flat paper in front of me,

The one that floated up to my ear to tell me it just wanted to be paper

And that I already had created all I needed inside my skin

Prose Poem...This one's for my mom entitled: Photograph of my Mother, age seven

Photograph of My Mother, age seven

She’s so good at dancing, so good that we drew her into the ivory stained border of the photograph with all girls in it that looked like me.  Me and my sister, we drew her in; and on the little body with the crooked arms holding up first position sat a thirty-nine year old face with thickly pressed-on caramel highlights growing out of the scalp and eyes so big it hurt to look for too long.  We made her look full-chested and strong with little legs, little leathered slippers hanging in point, pushing the photograph down, stabilizing top to bottom like clothes-pins.  But she wasn’t clothes pins; she was a big head with hair that fell in points at shoulders that held up little arms that could do barely anything on their own—only raise upwards into first position.  We put her head on there because moms, well, they were never born.  They were moms, and they didn’t wear leotards and they didn’t dance with the other little girls. 

She’s so good at dancing so we drew her onto the girl that looked like me, the little girl in the photograph that Nana stared at as she told me I was going to grow up to be great.  And somehow we knew it was she, the one with the crooked left arm, the arm that practically blocked one eye.  We knew because

when I was young my mom told me I’d dance.  As much as I hate the way my toes can’t touch the sky, the way my arms won’t do anything unless someone else holds them straight, she wanted me to tip toe and stretch—arms raising a border that wasn’t there before I made my own dancing picture.  When I was young, my mom told me she had been young once too, young and small and a bit uneven—even to the point of loose arms and sideways pointing toes.  And when I danced, they framed me too.  I’ll never remember the things they now say, though I tend feign remembrance when they say I pushed the other girls away from my flailing arms and awkwardly shaped toe points.

 I don’t remember the dance.  I remember readying my toes and my arms in a stretch so tall that when my mom smeared rosy lipstick onto my fat, child’s cheeks, I didn’t need the dance to remember why we took dancing pictures.  But we took them and we wore pink all over our cheeks.