While I'm In The Body That I Am by Krysta Lee Frost

                     Khánh Hmoong CC



While I’m In The Body That I Am


let me stay. Let the skin I spoil
pool color, recover its vacancies.

Let me peel at my want petal by petal
and never get ahead. Deny the stray

glance that lands on my desperation.
Deny the birds. Even the ones

whose hunt for warmth harmonizes with mine.
Shun the shy plants at the side of the road.

In another country, forget a foreign
tongue. Replace what’s mine with what

meanders for purer blood. What motley 
I posses, clot. Cells in denial against spilling.

Let the hands rest. In the mirror, haunt
another hour. Hollow out the harrowing

gaze until the eye is all that remains.
Do not attribute it to mother or father,

drown it in garish hues. Dress for the woman
I want to be, get to know her 

momentous in red. Reduce limb to limb.
How I move across wretchedness or learn

to carry my weight. Accept the cost
it takes to stay upright, mouth above water.

Name what loneliness carves
its own cave. Call it red. Wear the dress.

Sometimes, believe I can be saved.
Take my hand to the cavity and convince

it is someone else’s collapse. Learn to laugh
at a joke about longing, the houses

I can no longer visit, all my mother’s 
work misplaced. Even the photographs

muffled in a box. The trees gone. The girl
I left in each of them a murdered murmur

of continuity. Forget how long it takes
to renew all my cells. The seven years

I’ve lost to being someone who shakes
the shock out of morning. The shapes 

I’ve failed to suture, those nameless things,
waiting to be claimed.

​

Krysta Lee Frost is a mixed race Filipino American poet who halves her life between the Philippines and the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Margins, Entropy, Berkeley Poetry Review, wildness, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

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