Global Positioning System

1.
Two points on a map
and the shortest distance between
measures the span and expanse:
the space of us.

Two points on a map
and the shortest distance between
traces the sand at our feet
where we standoff
toe-to-toe and head-to-head.

Two points on a map
and the shortest distance between
marks the fine line and the clock’s time
and the neither-reason-nor-rhyme
that divide us into unequal proportions.


2.
That summer we shaved our heads
people thought we were twins,
identical girls, when we were
bald, colored dykes of different heights
and dissimilar faces, which suggests
how different races appear only in contrasts,
like the photograph of us in cutoffs and boots.

In black and white, we resemble
stereotypes of dykes and colored girls.
And though our worlds are far apart,
we are often mistaken for each other,

as if our mothers led the same life,
gave birth twice to a single daughter.

How different we are depends
upon the perspective of our respective
positions on the globe.

For instance, proximity suggests similarity.

Like, in the photograph
my arm rests on your shoulders,
and your hand touches my hip,
and I’ve slipped the corn dog behind my back,
but there’s no hiding the cans
of cheap beer in our hands

and we stand there together in sunlight,

as if our drifts from different countries—
you from India and me from Guam—
were upon the calm ocean’s tides
and gravitational in nature,

as if the rifts between our landscapes
were neither wide nor deep,

as if being in the same place at the same time
was somehow inevitable, predictable
as physics, and as simple as parting
our lips to smile at one another,

as if in that moment
all the other places we’d been on the globe
were somehow transposed to a single geography.


3.
You like to know where you’re going
when you’re driving in your car
and how far and how long
before you reach your destination.

A global positioning system is satellite-connected,
and what’s reflected on the screen is digital geography.

Even with technology, you sometimes lose direction,
your position off the map, and the lapse
of data in the system suggests parts of the globe
remain unmarked and uncharted, except by the naked eye.

I should know.

On unfamiliar roads, I pause
consider the shortest distance to my destination—
the line that might mark my route to half a world away
from where I’ve been—to the landscape
of your location.

I become a single point on the map—relative and relational
to where you’re at—an unfixed coordinate,
an inordinate mass, a moving body propelled by my past

a global positioning system and map
across the continents that divide us
into two separate points.