The Halfbreed

    -Chloe Garcia Roberts

Some people say the days the years are whittled of us like skins.

That like the minutes,
the I is combed,
a hive
on whom the shadowbees
will come to feast again.

That to keep the truth
from outgrowing the hide,
we must stay swallowed,
swimming below,
aching only in ways
that cannot be proved.

That there is an infinity of methods we can use,
to dissect
our selves from ourselves
pull the memories from the bone.

And that my kind, have the ability
to divide like universes, into swarms.

*

But personally,
I have to know to continue
the slick inside I use to see
has always been the same
and is and always, me

that gravity
isn’t just for falling down things, together
also holds apart-sailing things

that shouldn’t space that faith has cracked between
be left
to break the fullness into food
cut the hoping down to fuel?

I cannot presume to know what I am between.
Only that there are two worlds

in one: my heart

and in the other: my heart

*

My grandfather told my mother to stay away
from the Mexican boys
didn’t want no halfbreeds running around.
I imagine us like mushrooms,
flowering in wrongness.

Is this the way it always goes?
The gift is wreathed by the tightest pain
the brightest answer, brambled in the slightest truth?

Is there a psychological force
equivalent to cohesion
that keeps the mingled from breaking?
the separate halves from escaping?

Is it me?

*

These are the only answers with which I was sown:

Infection must lie with the contaminated, a fire
must burn within the contours of the flammable.

I am the stain.

And the stain
is a wound of cut air.