When I tell my mother I want to be white
she gives me papaya soap & tells me to wash
my face with it twice daily. When I ask for my hair
bleached like the pretty white girls all the boys google after,
she takes me to Party City and their back
shelves of costume wigs. The manager gives her
an odd look because the day was nearer
to Christmas than to Halloween. I told her then
that I changed my mind and wanted
to go home, aware of what a sight we must
have imprinted into the workers of the store:
a weary brown woman shaking a Princess Peach outfit
woven with plastic blond hair at her
brown daughter. I didn't bother asking
my mother for a new tongue either, one washed
and dry-cleaned of the gritty, bitter taste of papaya
soap. Some mornings, I try to forget the mountains
I'd wake up to before moving to America, but their darkness
still haunts me. It has been almost
seventy-five years since the Americans left
the vestiges of post-war trauma in the Philippines, and yet I keep
trying to forget the models lining the supermarket aisles,
stuck to the most inconvenient places like the corner
of a pasta box or a deodorant's lithe curve, how large their eyes,
how thick and clean their hair
with blonde highlights, unlike sooty-looking
black hair under the sun.
A white girl once told me how beautiful
my spray tan was, and I didn't bother
correcting her or myself for being disastrously happy
at our conspiratory ignorance.
When I was a child, my mother always warned me
not to scrape my knees against the tile floor
or else they'd get so dark no man could love me.
I guess that was the first time I understood that my skin color
was a matter of worth, but I still don't know what that meant
and to what end. Some days, the old habits possess me
and force me into the bathroom, papaya soap in hand, in my mouth, a prayer
for it to work a miracle more
in my saliva than it ever did on my skin.