I don’t admit about things that can
detonate the safe haven I have built
since that long ago afternoon,
I looked up to the Ethiopian sky,
and saw the Sun with a love-at-first-sight muse.
You see, what I never saw,
the limbs of life I always overlooked,
have given me a feral eye that now notices
everything.
My soul has a forensic mission to pierce into things
see their naked truth and love them for who they are.
My mother was my first victim. I entered her when she was looking at my father
with more mercy than passion, a gram of grace than a fountain of love.
I saw she saves love itself for her natural fancies,
her flowers in her little garden, which my brother and I,
battered again, and again, with a soccer ball.
I pierced my father, too.
My eyes plunged into his chest.
I saw he carries love like a river barred by a concrete wall.
I was inside this rippling water,
my loose reflection filming between waves
and developing a photo of his fallen dreams
as a trophy to my soliderhood.
I don’t pierce mom and dad anymore.
I don’t see them anymore.
I have crossed the ocean.
I am elsewhere.
But! The habit travels with me,
and unsettles me like the monsoon wind.
It leaves me uncertain as air.
I am unsure who to penetrate or leave alone.
Honest question,
“If I pierce into things, who pierces into me?”
I do, and my soul is a serpentine within.
It slithers through flesh and bone.
It bites, cuts, and recoils for its fragile self,
never yielding to the scavengers
who wish to pierce in and discover my secrets.
I cut myself for them, and do it mercilessly,
because it is pristine to bleed into one’s heart.
Here lately, I saw the Ethiopian Sun hanging herself on a March sky.
Then the night came with darkness and clothed her piece by piece,
as mother did to me when my armpit hair was as light as yolk,
and my jelly arms stretched to weave through a shirt with a cartoon drawing.
In this hour, I saw the Sun was just as obedient as me.
We hummed in lethal silence and followed our creators’ will.
But then, so gingerly, the Sun began to sink into a phantom mountain,
and pierced me with the color of my mother’s chosen flowers: Purple.
Purple, an infinite space between sea and fire, blue and green.
Could that be what I am now? A green gone purple?
The past wraps itself in my mind like a tape recorder
curling to be evidence of truth someday.
I don’t play soccer anymore.
Mother’s garden has a cement eternally sitting on it.
I am in a faraway place.
The Sun is the only witness around.
I see unpierceable things now. I see mist and dreams.
The death of my mother’s flowers makes me thirsty.
And I close my eyes, the Sun glows in purple behind my eyelids,
and I see small circles darting left to right,
printing the most real thing: a tulip.
People say you can’t see love.
People say you can’t touch love.
I ask them, curious as a newborn;
Have you seen the color purple?
August 2025
Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA
Cover art by Universtock on Unsplash