A White Girl Told Me by Xujia Guan (China)

A white girl told me I don’t know Virginia
With her ivy regrown through my tendons, around my bones
Her Big Ben chimes tuned
to my chink heart beating timid
The London mist a thread of cursive on my palm
Clarissa’s roses in my nails and soliloquies
rubbed into balm
With the lighthouse searing marks
behind my retinal veins
Of Lily painting by the waves.

A white girl told me I don’t know Emily --
Not with my soul throng in feathers, filled with song --
I have my handprint on the cornice in the ground, my carriage
trotting towards eternity, His pallid fingers on my gown
When her Fly melts in my mouth --
While I dance in purple, victor’s nectar dipped in sweet
And I know I, with my thin black eye(s)
spent dry my wild nights, ‘till the silence came
of a thousand funerals
drumming in my brain --

A white girl told me I don’t know Sylvia
and I know she knows
nothing of tulips sizzling by my hospital bed
of resurrection
of nine lives down to three
Esther’s screams singed with electricity
anesthesia-free, to be
freed from the jar unshattered, unseen
Clawing at my hair, my face, my flat nose bridge
Cry as I let me slip and leave me all to white
White like a cut, white
like a corpse reborn in festering flesh
Losing my virginity
to coffin flies when
Lady Lazarus rips my skin
Hell I try
dying with artistic flair,
and the broken arrow, returns
and drives itself into me.

A white girl told me I don’t know poetry.
A white girl told me I don’t know life.
She told it like she knows my life.
But I know they are also mine.