Christina Brown

I ASK THE MOON WHAT SHE REMEMBERS ABOUT THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE.


I am asking her a personal question, 
not what happened, 
but how do you remember it? 
but she is not a person, so really 
I am asking for the truth. 
Was it someone’s god? 

Do you think yourself a god when girls 
get moon phase tattoos along our spines? 

Do you listen when we read our poems to each other? 
Because our poems are always about you.

How big was the bang? 
What was it like before everything was? 
Why did you choose this earth to follow? 
How did you feel the first time we called 
half of you a face, tried to call you ours or us. 

What do I call that feeling when my period syncs 
with your fullest figure? Do you notice?
Can you see our faces? 
If you can, do you call us little moons? 

   

MY FATHER’S EX BEST FRIEND IS DYING OF PANCREATIC CANCER AND DOESN’T WANT TO SEE HIM BEFORE THE END.


Theirs was a friendship decades long, that first cracked 
after one man’s stroke, and the loss of some filter 
that used to dull his roughest edges.
 
The last time I saw this man, who’d known me 
since before I knew anyone, he told me you know 
you have to grow up sometime
and I do not know what he was talking about.
My father, angry, said she already grew up too much 
and I do know what my father was talking about.

And then, a series of unspoken misunderstandings.
One did not pick the other up for a party, 
the other did not invite him to the next one
and they didn’t fish together for 5 years
and I never saw him again. 

My mother told me they are at peace. A mutual friend 
has carried hesitant love between them 
like lukewarm water in a child’s shaking palm 
for the last 9 months.
 
My father has found so many reasons to drive past his house,
stop by to repay him for something, or bring him a photo 
of their child selves he found in his father’s garage.
But the door stays locked.

He tells another friend to tell my father 
remember me like I was.
and I think he means 
bigger, sharper, 
palm full of a cold bottle,
mouth full of tobacco, 
and with so much left unsaid. 

       

Christina Brown is a poet and educator living in Long Beach, CA. She is the managing editor at Pear Shaped Press and cohost of The Bi Pod: A Queer Podcast. Her first poetry collection, Girl Teeth, published by innateDIVINITYpress, is available now.

   

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