Esperanza and The Tree Snails

They laugh at you,

             The stereotype—

                       Just another Filipina nurse—

                                    Because they can’t see how you, Esperanza, cool

                                                            Wet wipe blood clots slipping down my thighs

                                                                                   Or shoulder me over the toilet at an angle

That won’t rip my

                                     incision

                                                              to pour

                                                                        and pour

                                                                                               and pour.

Instead of “you’re welcome,” you tell me, “It’s my job, Mama,”

So you don’t have to learn another name.

Until you,

            No one told me

                       How much and long

                                    I would leak after birth,

                                                                                 That that’s what’s supposed to happen.

My mother promised, You born in America. Be so easy.

           Two months of waking life

                       Wetness, dimpled thigh

                                    Skin learning viscosities

                                                Of blood and other,

                                                           My big, mocked nose smelling the tastes

Of iron and salt.

Snails,

My growing baby exclaims,

With the mouth that once suckled and chewed me until I curled over and around the pain,

Now, muscular from mimicking tones of jokes and the songs of our phonetics, says,

In the trees.

On this, our morning pandemic walk, she lifts her chin skyward and follows it with a gallop in

shoes on the wrong feet.

Her run unnerves me. The way her knees and elbows and teeth cut the wind with the strength of

a body surviving, the forward movement away from me—that ebullient shrinking—

I grow certain that what I’ve created will inevitably be erased, that the pattern violenced on my

people will persist, but this time not guns or napalm or seeds scattering across seas, but a car

shuttling down a blind alley, an errant dog, a cough from one of the many unmasked neighbors

I’d never seen before quarantine anchored all my inertia.

She reverberates excitement and wonder

At the coiled shells estivating on

The emerald arborvitae

All the way up to where the conical tips sway.

They want—

To escape death,

I want to say—

The bigger animals with teeth,

The unglancing crush and shuffle of shoe soles,

The conducted heat rising from the sidewalk

That sèches and shrivels their viscous bodies,

The moving world that crushes just another snail.

To get a better view,

I promise her instead.

Wave.

Soaked, our sheets recoil me from a dream—A nightmare, she corrected me the other day—of

overflowing piss and shit and blood with no Esperanza to assure me that I am as I’m supposed to

be. One hand reaches for my pantiliner, the other for her breathing sleep rhythm in bed next to

me, her pillow damp too. I fan her hair into dried sweat—crisp coils at her temple—a pressure

point, a soft spot. I check the windows and the door locks, return to our room and reposition the

bat and knives in easy reach for me, but not her.

They were are

Tragedies,

Not in themselves,

But in the violent thrust of history

Into the bones of their faces—

The women in Atlanta,

The elders from the Bay,

The watched woman on a New York sidewalk,

The three thousand who spoke,

And the thousands who don’t.

And then there was

The story I had to dig for, late at night, scrolling, scrolling:

What happened to that mother and daughter,

And why—

Their wide noses, their coveted skin refracting projections.

And how—

The hands of a white man

in their bodies,

Blood pooling on their own sheets.

The nightmares loop. The men take the shape of He-Man and Bachelor contestants who grab and

stomp and drown and slice me in crowds who don’t hear the ripping, the pouring—the echo.

When I wake, groggy and muted and hot, I stop changing out of my pajamas for the day and then

two—You wore that yesterday, Mama, she says—and then more, my body stewing like a broth—

the ones that my mother used to boil to heal me—and my fuzzy unbrushed mouth humid inside

my mask as I float our ancestral language on the wind to her, and she turns and smiles into me,

understanding the crevices and crests and coils of the language that every woman before us

whispered into their babies’ ears. What if quarantine could last forever? Because if I could, I

would keep hiding my face and body, and my hope that she can pass. But then I worry that who

could take her from me or me from her is—remember—they who don’t have to see your blood to

spill it.

I won’t be the next tragedy, I won’t be next, she won’t be next, she won’t be, she won’t—

But all I can do to get back to sleep

Is hold her hand

And imagine the snails,

Descended to the sidewalk,

And my saliva, urine, juices, and blood

Pouring pouring pouring

Slick under their gelatinous muscular bodies,

Soaking them to the mantle,

Just floating coils,

Without Esperanza to dam,

To assure you,

That’s what’s supposed to happen.