Insomniac Morning Routine // The Comments Section is Full of Immigrant Children Asking “Am I the Only One Who Goes to the Bathroom First?”

Morning enters this house

the same way each time    blew

in through a backdoor to settle plainly

like a television’s misty glare

or a velvet curtain

             falling open

as if to         split

the hours in a day by     living     &      not

Just as a mother knows she can be mother

     & not     by the shade of her body splitting

                         baby blue         

I am saying     time is demarcated

by the color pooling in an iris

It’s Thursday       translation  :  

I haven’t slept in days     I only know morning

by the floor        how each milky tile turns azure

under my unsure gaze       & what I know of inheritance

begins here   not in the spigot of blue-black veins

but in the gap behind 

a locked bathroom door (just large enough 

for the shape of my unwashed ass to fit)         I sit 

somewhere between porcelain & piss pour

-ing pills from shaking fist         & back again

            to floor

I trace a finger around the circumference

of a single capsule   hazy blue

& admire its circular nature

   not unlike a buoy

   clutched by the drowning

I am the drowning

      the Negro speaks of rivers

         but cannot swim in

                    her own thoughts

My finger orbits again & maybe this time I see

the curving skin that wraps itself around

a mother’s gently bobbing throat

Or    the contour of sinew stretching across

a firmly clenched knuckle    stretching

across a mother’s gently bobbing throat

How many histories can fit into a single exhale?

my father left his people     crossed the Atlantic   survived his wounds long enough to raise a scar

my mother left her people     crossed the Pacific      survived her blues long enough to make them an heirloom

What is legacy if not self-inflicted?

No one considers how easily a thousand generations can be lost with one

   hard swallow

Last night my mother warned me       Don’t—

& I laughed until an ocean filled to the edge 

of my maw          in order for me to breathe

someone is turning blue & calling it progress 

I mean         every woman is not a body of water

but in stories like these

               something is always spilling

Suppose the good daughter knows

to check the prescription      over again—

Today I check     just to kill

time        because every survival

is a translation for restlessness

My birth   the flicker of a bloodshot eye

that circles back a thousand times 

Circles words into their inky 

unspooling     letters softly blurring blue

& in this light     nothing disappears

it only rearranges

every symptom spells     sacrifice     sacrifice     sacrifice