Would Be Sam

Stella would be Sam,
trade “star” for “the name of god,”
as far as meaning goes;
exchange her great-grandmother’s name
for something more gender-ambiguous,
and I get the Adam/Madam, name game,
sexist bullshit labeling is and the gender-
bending, gender-neutral emergency
of her current state of being.
I am all about fluidity.
But it was Stella’s placenta we buried
and planted a cherry tree.
Stella posed annually beneath the blossoms,
both growing out of reach.
And now she who spent the past fourteen years
defining who Stella is tells me Stella is Sam,
and I survived the rainbow-stained pixie cut
and the buzz, black pants tight as spray paint
and slashed to shreds, but I can’t keep up
with The LGBTQIAK+ acronym anymore.
It’s like trying to juggle the alphabet.
I believe a rose by any other name…
like Shakespeare said.
But once I spotted a Marsh Hawk
landing on a tree branch,
and a park ranger with binoculars
informed me that bird
goes by Northern Harrier now,
it took me years of forgetting
not to think marsh hawk first.
How long, then, for my daughter’s birth name
to submerge in a cloud of unknowing?
I am already well on my way to being nobody,
in name only. Malleable as memory.
So what then if Stella steps out from behind a curtain
not in the role of her parents’ creation
or a socially-constructed character,
but playing herself, Sam,
with a non-binary handshake for a stranger,
and still the same hug and kiss for me,
who swaddled her in his arms
and twirled around the room in a hospital gown
like a swooning Sufi singing, I could have danced
all night the first morning of her life.
Still the nervous person I sit with three times a year
while she stares down the needle at her wrist
when the nurse breaks skin, draws blood. Blood
of my blood. But her own being. A star
in a galaxy of stars, orbiting by this rotation as Sam,
and to be followed, no doubt, by pronouns
streaking past like meteorites, and with them,
more confounding agreements,
more blossoms dangling from branches
well beyond my reach.

 

 

Helicopter Ride

for Stella

When your head feels like a nest
swarming with bees
that can’t find the opening
to their release
and you’re trapped inside
the dark rotor of your mind
spinning out of control
but pinned to a wall
by the g-force of life,
the floor dropping away
from under your feet,
think about the helicopter ride
Uncle Ron took you on
and how the big city-scape
racing by beneath you
looked like a tiny grid
of gridlocked blocks
laid out side by side
like match boxes.
Remember how you whirred
out of reach and hovered
above the steel skyscrapers’
bed of nails like a hummingbird
perched on a branch of air,
harbored safely beyond
the hurried worried scurrying
aimlessly through an asphalt
and cement maze at your feet,
not trapped in between
the river’s dirty rapids
and stagnating at bay
on frantic Manhattan Island
stretched out before you
like a keyboard
with your fingertips at the keys
playing something soothing
that you wrote. Listen
how the music floats
slower than a cloud
practicing Tai Chi
and peacefully as a bird
dreaming of a bird
whistling Satie.