Santoki's World

the daughter of a nameless womb
contemplates the choices invisible women make
to walk among those with names and families,
money and dicks.

her reflection mirrors her existence in subway windows,
ghostly and detached, floating amidst images without mass,
crammed together in the belly of steel dragons,
tunneling through the underground darkness
towards random destinations in the forbidden land
of her unscrupulous past.
families surround her, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons,
fathers and daughters, fathers and sons,
threesomes and foursomes of nuclear envoys
on their way to homes and churches, schools and shopping centers.
holding hands, smiling, laughing, whining, scolding, loving, hating,
torturing each other in a way only those bound by nature endure.
oblivious to the breaths shared with the nearby specters of genetic kin.

a proud grandmother transports her progeny
swaddled against her elderly body despite her age,
her hunched back, her bowl-legged legs,
caring only that her son’s name lives on.
that he finds immortality through a myriad of proper descendants
and that their combined posterity be pure of public sins.
her wrinkled face, haggard yet harboring hope,
locks truth behind honor, locks birthright behind social mores,
locks broken families behind saved faces,
locks bastard children behind history revised.
locks progress behind 5000 years of expendable women.

the motherless daughter, the unclaimed seed, the superfluous heir,
roams through a world where she is simply a memory repressed,
hazy and non-descript, searching for scraps of information
to prove her birth transpired. to prove her arms and legs,
her hands and feet, her breasts and womb, her voice and heart,
are all concrete, are all relevant, are all real.

a child of no mother and no father knows her bounds.
life has taught her that love is finite. place is not assured.
there is a brokenness about her that is beyond repair
no matter how well she adjusts to life in the arms of others.
at her core lies a void thirsting
for something more than friends, more than lovers,
more than bonds secured by law, more than shackles by paper,
more than deeds to her nameless body paid for by the vanity of foreign faces.
a longing that pierces, that absorbs, that overwhelms.
a connection severed seconds after her first breath
to preserve the façade of a perfect society,
a perfect family, a perfect line…

in solitude she considers her fate and her future.
she resists the myth that love transcends time and circumstance.
she constructs walls around the little girl inside her who still
screams for her mother – a name she may never know.
she lives the lie that children fear…
the hollow identity of being disposable, of being disposed.

like mother. like daughter.
two women live parallel lives in separate worlds
trapped by the secrets they must keep
and the truth they cannot share.
invisible. anonymous. expendable. chastised. alone.
ironic for all the sacrifices made.

~ nabiya