the fire he let me make on the shore

really just twigs of daddy longleg thickness and toilet paper,

very little light and even less warmth but all the danger.

Some days I would wake up and drive moon boots into

blue-white snow blushed with the last dark of night to catch a bus

to a windowless school.

Now everyone on the TV is telling me to run off and have adventures and

move to another country and speak another language really badly

while wearing cute jeans before it’s too late, but it was too late a few

too lates ago.

I didn’t watch football until my daughter was born, and now it’s too late

to stop watching even though I know we’ll always lose.

She has grown from sleeping against my stomach

to playing at my feet and declaring that her favorite team is my team, and

she doesn’t

know football but that she likes what I like anyway

and I want to put her in a time capsule forever—

even when her tantrums shake my teeth

from their sockets.

She is perfect, and the road of life to wherever the fuck

can be wherever the fuck and whatever the fuck

because she is perfect

right now,

even when she won’t let me sleep,

her elbows digging into my back,

my face buried away

from the morning.

When My Daughter Asks Me to Check and Make Sure Racists Can’t Come In and Kill Us

Everybody

argues / confesses

about privilege

until

the echo becomes a kind of din.

Conversation is good,

I suppose, but

that’s not what this is.

Macbook Marxist.

Powerbook Colonialist.

iPhone Antiracist.

Pizza-Franchise Conservative.

Compare oppressions like dick sizes.

We argue on the internet while our kids beg us to lock the windows and doors.

Our Minnesota

Pass the pool hall where Viet men stood

in smoke, dim ghetto kings,

cash a green tide yoked under a gold clip.

Pass the gun shop next to the Chinese chicken wing joint,

the sneaker store that squeaked by for decades.

Pass the thrift store bakery where your father bought you

expired treats, the multiple homicides of crows

like a black snowstorm in bare Powderhorn branches.

Pass the dull concrete where the pay phone

once stood sentry, more tags than quarters, the boy

who always asked if you wanted to join the ’Lords.

Pass the intersection that held Viet and Latinx barbers

and Somali cell phone stores,

the burnt ghost of the Commodore bar.

Pass the chicken coops, the gentrification

that allows you to afford

pretty hardwood floors

if you put up with the stray bullets

passing right through the drywall.

Pass the forgotten paper route, rolled newspapers

thrown in the garbage, the European immigrant

who laughed when you caught her stealing her neighbor’s coupons.

Pass your years at the shitty Tex-Mex restaurant

where the hot hip white people slept with one another

and scorning one another’s music taste was a point of pride.

Pass the Little Earth projects, AIM patrols in red trucks