Part 1:

Even my own tongue has, 

Quite on its own

And of its own accord,

launched a tiny insurrection

and has refused to say the word.

Hence I still stumble

I collapse

I cannot manage the word.

Metasta… Metasta… Metastat…

ick?

Metasta… size?

The final test for medical students

Certainly must be to pronounce the word

Flawlessly

Metasta… size

I held your hand in that beige office.

And the doctor spoke his secret doctor poetry

Metasta… size.

You held tightly until that word slipped out.

Flawlessly.

Metasta… size.

And your grip loosened.

Your arm went limp.

Because a nurse will know the doctor’s secret language.

And the deepest meaning of the word.

Metasta… size?

Part 2:

You are a good boy, you told me

Pretending to be a bad boy.

I am a bad girl, you told me.

Pretending to be a good girl.

So we fit, you said.

Yin and Yang, two pieces together.

But pretending might kill both of us.

You become what you pretend to be.

And the original will surely wither and die,

Like the plant in your back window that

That you forget to water.

So listen to the old men, when they say.

Be careful what you wish for, you said. 

I suspect though that you are a good girl

Pretending to be a bad girl

Pretending to be a good girl

In a tricky plot twist

Designed to help shoulder shame.

That was never the shame of a young girl

But what do I know of truth?

What did I ever know about the girl

Sent away from the Island in the Sun?

Sent away from no-shoes country poverty

To another kind of poverty in America

Gon a foreign, as they say back in your home.

To a grandmother with endless schemes to pay the rent.

Cleaning middle class houses

Laundry for neighbors or data entry.

And finally nursing school

Paid by the uncle with other schemes

To feed deeper hungers than the hunger of the landlord

What else did I ever know

Except that we fit together

Not so much because we were pieces of a puzzle

But because shared secrets bond

Like the most tenacious kind of glue.

Part 3:

There are doctors who will now attest

That the strain of carrying grief and trauma

Manifests in spiritual and physical/actual toxins

Measurable poisons.

That eventually lead to physicians

Who learned that secret doctor language

And have learned to pronounce metastasize

Flawlessly.

To patients who have shouldered endless grief

Who were once embryos growing

In traumatized wombs of mothers.

Who were born to this world from traumatized wombs.

When I carried you back

to the Island in the Sun

To the village on the sharp turn

In the steep road through the mountains

There was little left of my very good bad girl

A jarful of dust

And I wondered if there were still secrets

Remaining in the ash.

There wasn’t much to the village

On the sharp turn on the steep road through the mountains

A few houses, a church made of blocks and a shop.

But you asked me to bring you here.

This is where you wanted to be.

The Island in the Sun

There was a little girl in the shop.

Hair in neat braids, a freshly pressed khaki school uniform

And red flip-flops, the kind you buy in the dollar store.

Of course no shoes

She looked up at me curious, almost questioning.

And I wanted to say to her,

Stay here.

Never leave.

Never ever leave.

You will always belong here.

You will always return here.

Never leave.