of waking up white

though there are perhaps thousands

for the fear of waking up with your mother’s curses

Inside       white children are running      as wild as

white children     Bestial with joy

some of them looked like my best friend

some of their mothers looked like a woman

who got mad when I asked her to stop touching me

Lots of people assume my mother is white

that my father       like all Black men

lusts for white women as February lusts

for anything exposed        My mother

is actually Dominican   an immigrant’s

daughter with vitiligo   The only way I know

what she used to look like   a small island

on the back of her calf

I had toys at home       but I wanted their toys

I don’t want to be them     but I want what they have

This knowledge that there is always more of something

I aspired most to be a casual violence

and am still disappointed

I am lucky     to grieve most often what could never bleed

that the blood in my memories is almost always mine

I grieved Taina while I watched That’s So Raven

If I knew anything before it was my time to know it

it is how the static pricked my face to pull me closer

how there were so many white folk on the screen

how easy that sort of famine arrives

how scarcity runs the length of me

how a choice can cost me half my blood

how my mother gave up teaching me Spanish that winter

how scarcity runs the length of me

how scarcity runs the length of me

how scarcity runs the length of me

how there can only be one

In the photograph

which never existed

I massaged the frost

into a mirror

pressed my head too close

to the cold of FAO Schwarz

My face briefly superimposed

on the chaos and smile

think It must be nice

Before my mother dragged me away

and later that night

my father told me I need to stop

talking like a little white boy

And I stared at my hands

and sucked the ash off them

before I headed to my room

which was a good room

And thought of that other city

within my city that window

so pristine it could be a TV

never burdened with static

wondered if the space I rubbed

to look through was still there

My own small brown face

a bruise in the glass

CHICAGO*

I am from Logan Square

in Illinois    there are tornadoes

In Chicago    the city breathes too hard

we make our own disasters

If anything though

I am from the backseat of a Megabus

natural born asterisk

every claim is hesitant

if the bricks cannot remember your face

I am from somewhere

that is not my somewhere anymore

If I know anything it is this

any good survival

tries not to be anywhere twice

I can only sleep on buses