NEARLY 7 YEARS AFTER THE FACT A BOY WHOSE NOSE I NEARLY BROKE HITS ME UP FOR BRUNCH

I wasn’t unprovoked

back on the 8th Grade DC trip

my mother was mentioned

& that is how I was christened

the other amongst others

I look like no one except her

they said Your momma an illegal

Your momma tongue is an elective

Your momma must have pulled you out

of the river       I was both of the shorelines

when I say      river1     I mean I cannot belong

to something I cannot drown in

I mean I resemble something

that also breaks bodies in defense

I mean sometimes being Biracial

is to have two half-filled glasses

& die of thirst anyway

1. This is less about the shame I have been willing to let neighbor my tongue all these years. Do I know who I am? More than I like to admit. I look like my mother, that’s more than many people get. I looked so much like her then and she lived in Omaha, auctioning off my family’s great sin, our desire for nicer things made her radial. Every morning of 8th grade I woke up in the same apartment as my father, beginning to understand our curse, our similarities, our gears with teeth in the same place. This scared us both and she was not there. She was not there and we fought. She was not there and I blamed her and hid my face beneath fitted hats that made me look more like my father’s son, and only ever his son. The hats were cheap, they raised little cartographies of oil where my face becomes her hair. The other Black boys in the grade were afraid of me, the boy with the mother so far it made me foreign by association. They were so afraid I thought we could never be friends again. Everyone else was white, and so I say “I drowned in that year,” though we lived in Chicago amid a bumper crop of wind. I could breathe just fine. But when she called and said the house was not ours anymore and neither was the money, for a moment and only a moment, I drowned in her absence.

IN THE NETFLIX TRAILER OBAMA SAYS “I DON’T FIT IN ANYWHERE” WHILE ANTHONY HAMILTON PULLS A BURNING CITY OUT OF HIS MOUTH

And the song is not about anything

in particular       just melody and wound

pain is true enough for a man to pass

for a whole country     And he is young

and named Barry then    And I think of

how my parents flinch sometimes when

I say my name     How it sits opaque

as a kidney stone    jagged sugars

a slow waltz with what is forbidden

Barry dances with white girls and glances

uncomfortably with all the Black boys

and we all know the white girl is a phase

a counterbalance to the basketball

which is either a very obtuse Atlas reference