Ms. Noll's Where I'm From Poem

The following is a poem that I wrote, which was inspired by George Ella Lyon's poem. It was published last year in the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal.

On Being Half
by Lori Noll

My Lola told my mom, when you’re pregnant eating octopus dyes the womb, turns your baby black. You want that?

But the cravings gripped her in an inky fist. Cross-legged black teeth sucking tentacles after dark.

By day she ate white things invoking white skin. Jasmine rice, angel food cake, wonder bread.

And so I’m half. Toasted almond skin and half-way slanted eyes.

I am the image of the colonizer and the colonized, crying silently because my mom burned candles every day she carried me.

I am from these folktales, a magic history.

And from Marcos and Magellen, from adobo and itlog, a free market and homeland security.

From the leather loin cloth of Lapu Lapu, the Filipino American War, a million dead. My body is the battleground. Flesh and blood born of bloodshed.

I am the colonizer. I am the colonized. I am the lustful look in the soldier’s eyes.

Both the liberation and the enslavement of the mail order bride.

I am half. Toasted almond skin and half-way slanted eyes.

I am the colonizer. I am the colonized.

Love struggling muffling the pain and truth of history.

I am the victory.