I want to tell you what I don’t know

I don’t know what would have happened
if I if I hadn’t been told I was
responsible for the immodesty of
spaghetti straps at the age of nine.
If I hadn’t grown up feeling solely responsible
for the way teenage boys saw me,
or even worse, didn’t see me at all.

I don’t know what would have happened
if when I was caught kissing on the porch
at 14, my mom had chosen to ask me about my
heart, instead of enforcing the dictated
shame of old men who set our family rules.

I don’t know what would have happened
if electric blue nail polish and
Nine Inch Nails weren’t banned,
but discussed with the curiosity
of who I was becoming.
Or if my parents had tried to see inside
the walls of my innate girlhood;
constantly on the hunt for the beauty
that made me overflow the way
listening to music did.
That words and naming conventions
and color dictated my entire feeling body,
and all they had to do was learn
their language to know me.

I don’t know what would have happened
if my poetry professor in college hadn’t
seen me as a pot ready to boil over, finally.
If she hadn’t read my poem out loud
in class and cried at a line about
the “pully moon” — because from
one small poem she knew I’d write
about the moon the rest of my life.

I don’t know what would have happened
if I hadn’t befriended other people who
had mouths spilling of song lyrics and sonnets.
Kids with off-colored hair and
studded belts and homemade zines
in their backpacks — a motley crew
in a religious institution trying to make
something real among a sea of people
trying to iron flat all of the waves in the sea.

How they saw me.
How they made me.
How I found my words, finally,
in late night lit magazine meetings.
I don’t know what would have happened
if they hadn’t changed my mind.

And now, I don’t want to know what would happen
If I never saw words and wonder colliding
inside the walls of my own daughter’s breath.
I hope she will never have to wonder
if I can hear her screaming.
If I can see the real girl expanding
like a baby blue balloon inside
her chest, asking to be popped
so we all can stand under her
reign of glittered self knowing.