Parthenogenesis
Envy these female hammerheads:
how they swim in purified
fields, pregnant by salt or ocean
without contact with males. Link and lock
that warmth. No tepid waters.
No freeze. Immaculate.
I am fertile as loam and no one braves
me – oh, flesh of flesh of bone
of blood
and someone was inside me but I remain
terrible
I remain empty.
The roots of parthenogenesis are “virgin”
and “creation” – spiders, snails,
scorpions love
themselves, love their bodies,
rapture, rupture—life takes flight.
Progeny in your nests, twigs, and tanks.
Web me the mouth that fields
my questions. Ransom: fatherless children
who will never wonder except
in wonder – the miracle of their mother’s
bright bodies: blue hammers, blue tails.
Magic Whitening Princess
In the Ao Nang 7-11, I buy the cheapest sunscreen: SPF 50 PA+++
Magic Whitening Princess Sunscreen by Cathy Doll. On the box,
a sad tan cartoon girl languishes under an umbrella. In front of her,
her pale counterpart winks, smiling, brazen & sunless. MAGIC,
the label reads. JOY, it promises. WHITER SKIN, it proclaims,
backs that up with ingredients: “titanium dioxide”, “L-Glutathione”;
Fright is the color of my half-experiment, half-joke. I lather it on,
the ersatz glow—blend it into my skin. My arm hairs turn white.
Chalky, pale umbra, slivers of silver. Now my legs are bright fissures
in a skinned desert. White Lady is the name of a skin emulsion,
a serum to correct dry yellow faces. On the subject of a white lady,
Louise Brooks, Hilton Als once wrote: “We are all the product
of someone else’s dream.” That dream, to cast a radiant light,
alchemize a new skin, find a formula that alters the kind of sight
we are. My dream, to court the sun, extend its fingers. To suck
its gold egg & gag. My chalky skin doesn’t hide me from myself,
sallow girl in the sand, her spilled drink & shrunken parasol.
The melanin in her face a testament to what? Broad daylight
makes us crave invisibility. Legend has it, a woman once surfaced
on these sands, half-drowned. A sun god spotted her & cast a spell
so she turned brighter. But she turned so white-hot she scorched
the earth—her own bones, ruined. You can’t seek protection from
this primeval sun. She lives inside a cave, skin milky as moonstone.
Wanting light, she collects fragments of glass to catch the sun’s
reflection, but it never answers. Now a million women want to be
as ashen as she. A million girls spelunk in lightless caves.
O, lovely girls, with your sarongs & sashes, your lashes so black
behind sunglasses, your parasols sheltering you like floating gazebos,
your sun hats woven with your gods & ancestors—O lovely girls,
do not be afraid. The light is not your enemy. Come stand in the sun.
The Guadalupe Slough
In the baylands, near the trails—
is where they found the girl
half-floating, hair fanned,
clothes and glasses
missing.
No foul play, the police say.
It was most likely an unattended
death. But surely someone fouled,
surely.
Surely someone undressed
her. Unattended death, n: a person dies
and is not found in days, weeks,
months. Like the woman in her London
flat, her TV wailing into the night.
This is what we’re all afraid of—
floating in our own dead skin,
all the traces of our vulnerability
still intact.
Today I walk across the bayland grove
in this cold California
winter, where she was found.
On this side of the trail,
there is no water. The wetlands,
parched with pale salt
across the Guadalupe slough.
Across the state, infernos alight,
breathless & golden.
My aunt’s house in the hills
waiting to catch fire. Broken grass whistling
in the fields. Inside their house, my cousins
play video games, surrender this burning world
to the next.
How can I trust this world
will get better? I keep returning
to the woman in the baylands—
her ankles tangled in coyote bush,
draped with a sheet on the coroner’s table.
Picture this: it’s sunset. Sky, leaves, red streaks
across the creek I’ve crossed
many times on the way to school.
A pine tree catches fire, a man holds
a throat and whispers. Leaves red streaks across
a cheek. As a girl, I waited patiently to catch fire,
as if it were something worth wanting.
Halo. Halogen. Then I did, and I wanted to be put
out. But no one knew how, so the whole house
burned to the ground.
Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and The New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.