I’m new here and all I know about Minnesota is weather reports and weather reports. To say there is snow here is also to note that there is nowhere that the sun is not in the sky; made impossibly weak by distance and little collections of water condensing it down to grey light. They say there is Winter and Construction and if I’m a season, a little tapestry of months made kin by heat, I’m definitely Construction. I’m fifteen after all, what else could I be but scaffold on a building perpetually on the eve of becoming? A loose tooth atop a better bone, blood is at the root of all advancement. All the food tastes like copper. Wisdom teeth itch into being at the back of my soft mouth, the path to normalcy is a well-practiced wound. Something stirs beneath flesh, gags at my touch and this is how I grow older, fingering what will rot in isolation.

Let me make the stakes clear, there are only four Black boys in the photo including my own perpetually blurry face. The little country I put in the mirror always fraying in the steam. Out of all these Black boys I’m always referred to as the smart one, Obama, Mr. President, Gorilla taxonomy of everything but my own damn name. I have what one might call a difficult name if they have the kind of tongue that considers a name by proximity to their own. I hate substitute teachers with a mythic passion, in each roll call pause, a me. I exist in a space between letters, without me the whole thing is illegible. And this is my service, the brief architecture that the class giggles inside of. Somedays I correct them, and somedays the name is a casualty I leave smaller lives to pick clean. It’s not that I don’t care, I just know that I was put here to beat rich white people at a game they made up centuries ago and chess is predicated on acceptable loss.