Sand Castles

They call it Long Island

not because of the outstretched miles

but textbook history

half a century ago we invented the picket fence

Laying out lines of identical sand castles

made from a Levittown mold

My new next door neighbor

walks through our overgrown lawn

and asks Mama if he can meet her husband

When she tells him she doesn’t have one

he says

You’ve come to the wrong neighborhood.

This poem is for you, Mr. Weinstein.

For the current you sent down my shore

crumbling wet pebbles that made our structure belong

You were so concerned with who my father was

when all I knew was who he wasn’t.

He was not a void

not a burrow in my familial tree

Mama taught my branches to pierce the sky

so I was never consumed by my roots

I never felt abandoned until you told me I should

using shattered seashells to carve my bark incomplete

engraving lines like

Maybe I need to be in a relationship to prove not every man’s my father

If he couldn’t love me what gave me the right to love myself

I’m supposed to be broken

I reduced my heart to shards

and handed them out to any man with palms

issuing love poems as adoption papers

But Mr. Weinstein,

I was not always sand

I was a boulder condemned by punches of salt

Chiseled away from a tide of values

that stole its rhythm from the 1950s

No wonder the island where Gatsby drowned

told me

As a woman I was commodity

and as a survivor of domestic violence I was damaged goods

But no for sale sign dangled from my neck

I refused rennovation

begged for attention for the trauma in my atria

stitching up wounds with self victimization

but instead of scars I got stories I couldn’t stop retelling

hoping if I wet my eyes with enough

salt water I could break out of this mold

I moved to a new coast

Grasped fresh sand just to morph it into more poems for my father

For the fact I can’t show my teeth in smiles because he refused to get them fixed

Made me believe I am prettier with my mouth shut

For the time he strangled my sister and as she shrieked my name

Convinced me I had a mouth, but not a voice

For all the times I wished I lost him in a tragic accident

because that kind of fatherlessness is less painful

Mr. Weinstein, who is this the right neighborhood for?

Men like my father?

Kids who know their daddy’s fists better than his face

Women who choke on their own silence?

Picket fences promised protection

But they just caged the violence in

I am more than what I didn’t have

and maybe I am made of sand

But I will be nothing less than a castle

So...welcome Mr. Weinstein.

Welcome to untamed tides

Welcome to goddesses emerging from bloody seas

Welcome to the acceptance you never had the courage to give

Welcome, to my street.