Mira, I am complicit in my beheading. Persephone in the streets. Hecate in the sheets. Lousy, Loud. My navel is lined with the musk of Unwantedness. You murmur that my eyes are an incantation icebound in time—the snake-hooded Adam’s apple of a low prophet. This city inked itself from an alphabet of crows. You quiz me about the cobra gypsies, the bathtub gin, the calligraphy of myrrh in my hair. The first girl who jumps has already chanted her legs into hemp ropes. Blood thickened to eschatology. My homeland is time’s amnesia, a schizophrenic signature—a pessary, atavistic blot . You can italicize this lockjaw of wander, the sieved flashbacks of a wasteland I hooked between my two front teeth. An immigrant’s memory is gurfa—the amount of water that can be scooped in one hand. A body can’t will itself into a fact. Map as I am—a honeyed mongrel, a cold and precise animal. I howl and it is thistle. A river you milk to gnosis. Look at the way my eye blows up—pink pinhole, soft belladonna, the rubied gut of lamb we buried in the bomb shelter. Childhood Eyes. Child Who Dies. Shrapnel still shoving cargo under my skin. Synaptic bullfights. Your first cathedral starving its saints between the white light of my bones.

Note : Rroma refers to a multi-racial nomadic tribe that is often considered to be amongst the most disenfranchised and displaced communities in the world. I am half Rroma Spanish on my father’s side. Garganta Rroma translates loosely to "Rroma-throated."