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A Child is Like a Clarinet

for Eliza Harris and Henri Akoka

Similes are dangerous.
To equate a person to

an object, an instrument
no less, is a risk.

A child is like a clarinet.
A mother is like a clarinetist.

Personhood posits
promising possibilities.

Poems are willing to die.
Poems dare, just as Eliza

Harris leaped onto pieces
of ice to cross the frozen

Ohio River with her baby
in her hands. Poems flee,

just as Henri Akoka
jumped onto the top of

a moving train with his
clarinet under his arm.

One of these things
is not like the other.

Can’t you tell? Mouthpiece
from lips, flesh from wood.

UPBRINGING

In an alternate version of this story
I grow up in Denver, Colorado, fenced in
by calcareous mountains and thread-thin air. Who might
I have become had we driven eighteen hours overnight to flee
the Red Zone, Chiron lighting the sky, Detroit’s bass chasing behind?
I imagine Denver homes are large. Ivy clings to the wall
like sap. I imagine I could have walked to school unguarded, no knife
pressed to my ankle in fresh Js my mama wouldn’t buy in the City.

Once the factories stripped the grass of its green, she was willing to leave
her mama on Jane Street and my aunties scattered from Cadieux to Van Dyke.

A diamond band convinced her to stay, but she models
what could still become of me: slips and stockings,
subdivisions, propriety. I could have run when I had the chance
but I’m a daughter of the East Side, that old girl set in her ways.

I grew a mouth like the grown men in my hood. Bouquet of tattoos
across my shoulders. Where brown hair was, a field of watercolors.
 

GO MIN
숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
I wasn’t born here, did you know that?
I’ve never told you that before
I was born on an island nearby
Really close, only a few hours away on a boat
A matchmaker bought my brother a drink
So he told her that he had the perfect bride for her client
An exceptional swimmer
A hearty bruise-woman
For a guarantee of lifetime of income
He gave me away
My big brother sold my life for a drink
And that’s my immigration
A little immigration of my own
Just to be beaten up by the sea waves all day
And then beaten up by my loser drunk husband all night

Silence

숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
What do you want to do in your next life?
In my next life
I want to drive a car
A little red one
Drive it everywhere
Go see the mountains
The big buildings
Drive it across the prairies
Take the highway
I don’t have a driver’s license
I can’t take the written test because I can’t read
But when I see someone drive a car on TV
It looks easy
I think I could do it
I think I’d be good at it
Maybe I could drive a cab
Drive people around
What do you think?
You think I’d be good at it?

Beat

숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
In your next life
I hope you get to live the way you want

Silence