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, Berkeley Poetry Review, Entropy, Hobart, wildness, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
Poets Resist
Edited by Sandra L. Faulkner
August 10, 2020
Krysta Lee Frost
Mixed Race Daughter Mourns Her Mother(land)
Shores of my childhood, heave.
Watch me weave fronds of memory and crown
myself something deserving
of daughter, patched in shades
from a shared core.
I bait with all my faces: one I wore to please
you, one you parsed and turned away.
Light returns to its point
of origin: dawns we once knew.
Restless and rusting, my perforations
resisting the pull of yearning.
Mother, I give in to apology,
my mouth’s sharpening blade.
The face I don’t have
to be called your own. The farce
of my history contaminating
your body. Who invited me?
I wreck and wreak, each shell
I bring home a tragedy.
I sound of another shore.
I reek of another sky.
There’s sand in my pockets.
Any more rocks and I’d stay under.
When the moon wrestles open
your jaw, what slow rattle
as I wait to be your spittle.
The rumor of me rubble
treading towards refinement.
Tonguing the wound of me,
pearled and reddened, nearly drowned.
Sour me the pattern of your dusk.
Let me follow your sound,
words they marred “guttural”
when they urged me to speak.
The next time I am beached, I will
not burrow. Sing with the words
and I’ll follow, ocean floor
scraping my hands and knees,
finally graceful.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.