Father-Daughter Dance
I once made a stranger bleed out from his eyes
After transcribing his skeleton, and then reading
His scratched-up bones back to him.
I was thirteen when it happened, English class
When I first realized how a tension can be pulled
From the hoard of another's burden, no need
For subtlety, even by accident people are dying
To tell their secrets.
It's scribbled all over them. I just hadn't realized
To decipher it is a gift, a homemade yoke of one-sided,
Double-bound heroism, wherein the villain is
Eviscerated and simple, usually
It's trying to convince the crowd that gets you.
My father hated me for it—creating context
Drawing attention with an unabashed ask
Based on noticing, saying out loud what was written
On the face of a person; the collective
Noun for questions should be called an Innocence
Since the price of why is too much—too often
It's an unasked-for Experience
Why don't you get your teeth fixed? I was so excited
For my father when I said it, not knowing
Low-income housing, or anything of adolescence
when these kinds of corrections usually happen
I was six, and since Ki-hwan next door
Had just gotten braces, kindergarten logic led—
to my father hitting me hard on the back of my neck,
He called me an ******* for exposing him.
This is not hyperbolic, it's literally what happened; I just
Kept living life, with the embarrassment of a broken toddler
Being my dad, hiding so many sins, not all mentioned,
So many others—
I like to think I've won in the ways he was always too small
To see, that ******* showed me how to keep it moving
No matter the damage—just because
For the sake of his stepfather’s name, that was the template.
But I am a woman of a right-now-enduring existential shame
For the crime of not knowing the age of orthodontia, let alone
A moment of tenderness that might have saved us both,
Or had a shot at expunging this right-here moment
Of being an *******, saturated with a father's impression,
Boggy as the blood-soaked prostate of a long-dead man,
Surely, I will get over him.
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