Mutant: a zuihitsu

Look at myself – small bean.  Sprouting song, pigtail, smile.  She poured her child into such and such a container until

who are you?  Archiving spine when

did I begin to feel a container

a certain tension

Of lady-ness.  A woman not refined, polite, and well-spoken,

a slut, says my mother.  Though she did not say.  Not her city of Grammar, not her country of Syntax.  But the nation of Longing – norming ourselves to the proper binary.

In a poetry craft seminar, Amaranth Borsuk.  An Oulipo strategy of definitional literature, each word replaced with a definition.  So this is the first mutation.

Is my mother a woman of high social position or economic class.  Any woman (sometimes used in combination), (used in direct address; often offensive in singular).  Wife.

Together in solidarity, descended from a now-dead patriarch, this is what in the house we build.  Are you a boy? 

In the house, to live or stay in a specified place while performing official duties, carrying on studies or research, awaiting a divorce, etc.  to be in control of her own body  I met a woman who reminded me of myself.  She told me she was a “strategic lesbian.”

Meaning, her body render the enemy incapable of making war, as by the destruction of materials, factories, etc: a strategic bombing mission.  Meaning, essential to the conduct of a war.  Meaning copper, meaning lesbian.

Let me explain my Chinese family, she said, as if I didn’t woman loving another woman.

As if the house

makes me mutant

to love my own woman

to grow my selves, to tend to my gender(s).  There are six I learned in Intro to Women’s Studies, to my mother’s dismay.  Shall we begin with the correct pronouns?  it became obvious

Her father’s face is revenge,

What held her In the slang dictionary, a total jerk, a social outcast (Also, a term of address), such as: Stop being such a mutant.  If she wants to be a strategic lesbian, why can’t I/she

becomes her weapon.

And when I looked her up in my dictionary: ”Researching the last sentence suggesting the making of a mutant, it can be a sweet dream and nightmare to become one.”  Make an example – a sport – out of that one was the eventual conclusion, the place where she, future tense, would stop.

And then

[Note: Italicized lines from Jai Arun Ravine's and then entwine: lesson plans, poems, knots]