my blog is turning into a file cabinet…

Toward An Impure Poetry
by Pablo Neruda

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand’s obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding—willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon’s claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy’s abandonment—moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet’s concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the “bad taste” of things will fall flat on the ice.

so at the j-o-b this week, i’m working on a detailed proposal for the brave star collective, the writing group for highschool girls that i dreamed up. and in the middle of choosing what we are going to read i’ve been stumbling upon some lovely writing. first junot diaz, now paule marshall. i am loving it:

From The Poets in the Kitchen
Paule Marshall
in the New York Times January 9, 1983

SOME years ago, when I was teaching a graduate seminar in fiction at Columbia University, a well-known male novelist visited my class to speak on his development as a writer. In discussing his formative years, he didn’t realize it but he seriously endangered his life by remarking that women writers are luckier than those of his sex because they usually spend so much time as children around their mothers and their mothers’ friends in the kitchen.

What did he say that for? The women students immediately forgot about being in awe of him and began readying their attack for the question and answer period later on. Even I bristled. There again was that awful image of women locked away from the world in the kitchen with only each other to talk to, and their daughters locked in with them.

But my guest wasn’t really being sexist or trying to be provocative or even spoiling for a fight. What he meant -when he got around to examining himself more fully – was that, given the way children are (or were) raised in our society, with little girls kept closer to home and their mothers, the woman writer stands a better chance of being exposed, while growing up, to the kind of talk that goes on among women, more often than not in the kitchen; and that this experience gives her an edge over her male counterpart by instilling in her an appreciation for ordinary speech.

It was clear that my guest lecturer attached great importance to this, which is understandable. Common speech and the plain, workaday words that make it up are, after all, the stock in trade of some of the best fiction writers. They are the principal means by which a character in a novel or story reveals himself and gives voice sometimes to profound feelings and complex ideas about himself and the world. Perhaps the proper measure of a writer’s talent is his skill in rendering everyday speech – when it is appropriate to his story – as well as his ability to tap, to exploit, the beauty, poetry and wisdom it often contains.

”If you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends you’ll probably say something beautiful.” Grace Paley tells this, she says, to her students at the beginning of every writing course.

It’s all a matter of exposure and a training of the ear for the would-be writer in those early years of his or her apprenticeship. And, according to my guest lecturer, this training, the best of it, often takes place in as unglamorous a setting as the kitchen.

He didn’t know it, but he was essentially describing my experience as a little girl. I grew up among poets. Now they didn’t look like poets – whatever that breed is supposed to look like. Nothing about them suggested that poetry was their calling. They were just a group of ordinary housewives and mothers, my mother included, who dressed in a way (shapeless housedresses, dowdy felt hats and long, dark, solemn coats) that made it impossible for me to imagine they had ever been young.

Nor did they do what poets were supposed to do -spend their days in an attic room writing verses. They never put pen to paper except to write occasionally to their relatives in Barbados. ”I take my pen in hand hoping these few lines will find you in health as they leave me fair for the time being,” was the way their letters invariably began. Rather, their day was spent ‘’scrubbing floor,” as they described the work they did.

Several mornings a week these unknown bards would put an apron and a pair of old house shoes in a shopping bag and take the train or streetcar from our section of Brooklyn out to Flatbush. There, those who didn’t have steady jobs would wait on certain designated corners for the white housewives in the neighborhood to come along and bargain with them over pay for a day’s work cleaning their houses. This was the ritual even in the winter.

Later, armed with the few dollars they had earned, which in their vocabulary became ”a few raw-mouth pennies,” they made their way back to our neighborhood, where they would sometimes stop off to have a cup of tea or cocoa together before going home to cook dinner for their husbands and children.

The basement kitchen of the brownstone house where my family lived was the usual gathering place. Once inside the warm safety of its walls the women threw off the drab coats and hats, seated themselves at the large center table, drank their cups of tea or cocoa, and talked. While my sister and I sat at a smaller table over in a corner doing our homework, they talked – endlessly, passionately, poetically, and with impressive range. No subject was beyond them.

True, they would indulge in the usual gossip: whose husband was running with whom, whose daughter looked slightly ”in the way” (pregnant) under her bridal gown as she walked down the aisle. That sort of thing. But they also tackled the great issues of the time. They were always, for example, discussing the state of the economy. It was the mid and late 30’s then, and the aftershock of the Depression, with its soup lines and suicides on Wall Street, was still being felt.

Some people, they declared, didn’t know how to deal with adversity. They didn’t know that you had to ”tie up your belly” (hold in the pain, that is) when things got rough and go on with life. They took their image from the bellyband that is tied around the stomach of a newborn baby to keep the navel pressed in.

They talked politics. Roosevelt was their hero. He had come along and rescued the country with relief and jobs, and in gratitude they christened their sons Franklin and Delano and hoped they would live up to the names.

If F.D.R. was their hero, Marcus Garvey was their God. The name of the fiery, Jamaican-born black nationalist of the 20’s was constantly invoked around the table. For he had been their leader when they first came to the United States from the West Indies shortly after World War I. They had contributed to his organization, the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), out of their meager salaries, bought shares in his ill-fated Black Star Shipping Line, and at the height of the movement they had marched as members of his ”nurses’ brigade” in their white uniforms up Seventh Avenue in Harlem during the great Garvey Day parades. Garvey: He lived on through the power of their memories.

And their talk was of war and rumors of wars. They raged against World War II when it broke out in Europe, blaming it on the politicians. ”It’s these politicians. They’re the ones always starting up all this lot of war. But what they care? It’s the poor people got to suffer and mothers with their sons.” If it was their sons, they swore they would keep them out of the Army by giving them soap to eat each day to make their hearts sound defective. Hitler? He was for them ”the devil incarnate.”

Then there was home. They reminisced often and at length about home. The old country. Barbados – or Bimshire, as they affectionately called it. The little Caribbean island in the sun they loved but had to leave. ”Poor – poor but sweet” was the way they remembered it.

And naturally they discussed their adopted home. America came in for both good and bad marks. They lashed out at it for the racism they encountered. They took to task some of the people they worked for, especially those who gave them only a hard-boiled egg and a few spoonfuls of cottage cheese for lunch. ”As if anybody can scrub floor on an egg and some cheese that don’t have no taste to it!”

Yet although they caught H in ”this man country,” as they called America, it was nonetheless a place where ”you could at least see your way to make a dollar.” That much they acknowledged. They might even one day accumulate enough dollars, with both them and their husbands working, to buy the brownstone houses which, like my family, they were only leasing at that period. This was their consuming ambition: to ”buy house” and to see the children through.

THERE was no way for me to understand it at the time, but the talk that filled the kitchen those afternoons was highly functional. It served as therapy, the cheapest kind available to my mother and her friends. Not only did it help them recover from the long wait on the corner that morning and the bargaining over their labor, it restored them to a sense of themselves and reaffirmed their self-worth. Through language they were able to overcome the humiliations of the work-day.

But more than therapy, that freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk functioned as an outlet for the tremendous creative energy they possessed. They were women in whom the need for self-expression was strong, and since language was the only vehicle readily available to them they made of it an art form that – in keeping with the African tradition in which art and life are one – was an integral part of their lives.

And their talk was a refuge. They never really ceased being baffled and overwhelmed by America – its vastness, complexity and power. Its strange customs and laws. At a level beyond words they remained fearful and in awe. Their uneasiness and fear were even reflected in their attitude toward the children they had given birth to in this country. They referred to those like myself, the little Brooklynborn Bajans (Barbadians), as ”these New York children” and complained that they couldn’t discipline us properly because of the laws here. ”You can’t beat these children as you would like, you know, because the authorities in this place will dash you in jail for them. After all, these is New York children.” Not only were we different, American, we had, as they saw it, escaped their ultimate authority.

Confronted therefore by a world they could not encompass, which even limited their rights as parents, and at the same time finding themselves permanently separated from the world they had known, they took refuge in language. ”Language is the only homeland,” Czeslaw Milosz, the emigre Polish writer and Nobel Laureate, has said. This is what it became for the women at the kitchen table.

It served another purpose also, I suspect. My mother and her friends were after all the female counterpart of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. Indeed, you might say they suffered a triple invisibility, being black, female and foreigners. They really didn’t count in American society except as a source of cheap labor. But given the kind of women they were, they couldn’t tolerate the fact of their invisibility, their powerlessness. And they fought back, using the only weapon at their command: the spoken word.

Those late afternoon conversations on a wide range of topics were a way for them to feel they exercised some measure of control over their lives and the events that shaped them. ”Soully-gal, talk yuh talk!” they were always exhorting each other. ”In this man world you got to take yuh mouth and make a gun!” They were in control, if only verbally and if only for the two hours or so that they remained in our house.

For me, sitting over in the corner, being seen but not heard, which was the rule for children in those days, it wasn’t only what the women talked about -the content – but the way they put things – their style. The insight, irony, wit and humor they brought to their stories and discussions and their poet’s inventiveness and daring with language – which of course I could only sense but not define back then.

They had taken the standard English taught them in the primary schools of Barbados and transformed it into an idiom, an instrument that more adequately described them -changing around the syntax and imposing their own rhythm and accent so that the sentences were more pleasing to their ears. They added the few African sounds and words that had survived, such as the derisive suck-teeth sound and the word ”yam,” meaning to eat. And to make it more vivid, more in keeping with their expressive quality, they brought to bear a raft of metaphors, parables, Biblical quotations, sayings and the like:

”The sea ain’ got no back door,” they would say, meaning that it wasn’t like a house where if there was a fire you could run out the back. Meaning that it was not to be trifled with. And meaning perhaps in a larger sense that man should treat all of nature with caution and respect.

”I has read hell by heart and called every generation blessed!” They sometimes went in for hyperbole. A woman expecting a baby was never said to be pregnant. They never used that word. Rather, she was ”in the way” or, better yet, ”tumbling big.” ”Guess who I butt up on in the market the other day tumbling big again!”

And a woman with a reputation of being too free with her sexual favors was known in their book as a ”thoroughfare” – the sense of men like a steady stream of cars moving up and down the road of her life. Or she might be dubbed ”a free-bee,” which was my favorite of the two. I liked the image it conjured up of a woman scandalous perhaps but independent, who flitted from one flower to another in a garden of male beauties, sampling their nectar, taking her pleasure at will, the roles reversed.

And nothing, no matter how beautiful, was ever described as simply beautiful. It was always ”beautiful-ugly”: the beautiful-ugly dress, the beautiful-ugly house, the beautiful-ugly car. Why the word ”ugly,” I used to wonder, when the thing they were referring to was beautiful, and they knew it. Why the antonym, the contradiction, the linking of opposites? It used to puzzle me greatly as a child.

There is the theory in linguistics which states that the idiom of a people, the way they use language, reflects not only the most fundamental views they hold of themselves and the world but their very conception of reality. Perhaps in using the term ”beautifulugly” to describe nearly everything, my mother and her friends were expressing what they believed to be a fundamental dualism in life: the idea that a thing is at the same time its opposite, and that these opposites, these contradictions make up the whole. But theirs was not a Manichaean brand of dualism that sees matter, flesh, the body, as inherently evil, because they constantly addressed each other as ‘’soully-gal” – soul: spirit; gal: the body, flesh, the visible self. And it was clear from their tone that they gave one as much weight and importance as the other. They had never heard of the mind / body split.

As for God, they summed up His essential attitude in a phrase. ”God,” they would say, ”don’ love ugly and He ain’ stuck on pretty.”

Using everyday speech, the simple commonplace words -but always with imagination and skill – they gave voice to the most complex ideas. Flannery O’Connor would have approved of how they made ordinary language work, as she put it, ”double-time,” stretching, shading, deepening its meaning. Like Joseph Conrad they were always trying to infuse new life in the ”old old words worn thin … by … careless usage.” And the goals of their oral art were the same as his: ”to make you hear, to make you feel … to make you see.” This was their guiding esthetic.

By the time I was 8 or 9, I graduated from the corner of the kitchen to the neighborhood library, and thus from the spoken to the written word. The Macon Street Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library was an imposing half block long edifice of heavy gray masonry, with glass-paneled doors at the front and two tall metal torches symbolizing the light that comes of learning flanking the wide steps outside.

The inside was just as impressive. More steps – of pale marble with gleaming brass railings at the center and sides – led up to the circulation desk, and a great pendulum clock gazed down from the balcony stacks that faced the entrance. Usually stationed at the top of the steps like the guards outside Buckingham Palace was the custodian, a stern-faced West Indian type who for years, until I was old enough to obtain an adult card, would immediately shoo me with one hand into the Children’s Room and with the other threaten me into silence, a finger to his lips. You would have thought he was the chief librarian and not just someone whose job it was to keep the brass polished and the clock wound. I put him in a story called ”Barbados” years later and had terrible things happen to him at the end.

I was sheltered from the storm of adolescence in the Macon Street library, reading voraciously, indiscriminately, everything from Jane Austen to Zane Grey, but with a special passion for the long, fullblown, richly detailed 18th-and 19th-century picaresque tales: ”Tom Jones.” ”Great Expectations.” ”Vanity Fair.”

BUT although I loved nearly everything I read and would enter fully into the lives of the characters – indeed, would cease being myself and become them – I sensed a lack after a time. Something I couldn’t quite define was missing. And then one day, browsing in the poetry section, I came across a book by someone called Paul Laurence Dunbar, and opening it I found the photograph of a wistful, sad-eyed poet who to my surprise was black. I turned to a poem at random. ”Little brown-baby wif spa’klin’ / eyes / Come to yo’ pappy an’ set on his knee.” Although I had a little difficulty at first with the words in dialect, the poem spoke to me as nothing I had read before of the closeness, the special relationship I had had with my father, who by then had become an ardent believer in Father Divine and gone to live in Father’s ”kingdom” in Harlem. Reading it helped to ease somewhat the tight knot of sorrow and longing I carried around in my chest that refused to go away. I read another poem. ”Lias! ”Lias! Bless de Lawd! / Don’ you know de day’s / erbroad? / Ef you don’ get up, you scamp / Dey’ll be trouble in dis camp.” I laughed. It reminded me of the way my mother sometimes yelled at my sister and me to get out of bed in the mornings.

And another: ”Seen my lady home las’ night / Jump back, honey, jump back./ Hel’ huh han’ an’ sque’z it tight …” About love between a black man and a black woman. I had never seen that written about before and it roused in me all kinds of delicious feelings and hopes.

And I began to search then for books and stories and poems about ”The Race” (as it was put back then), about my people. While not abandoning Thackeray, Fielding, Dickens and the others, I started asking the reference librarian, who was white, for books by Negro writers, although I must admit I did so at first with a feeling of shame – the shame I and many others used to experience in those days whenever the word ”Negro” or ”colored” came up.

No grade school literature teacher of mine had ever mentioned Dunbar or James Weldon Johnson or Langston Hughes. I didn’t know that Zora Neale Hurston existed and was busy writing and being published during those years. Nor was I made aware of people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman – their spirit and example – or the great 19th-century abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth. There wasn’t even Negro History Week when I attended P.S. 35 on Decatur Street!

What I needed, what all the kids – West Indian and native black American alike – with whom I grew up needed, was an equivalent of the Jewish shul, someplace where we could go after school – the schools that were shortchanging us – and read works by those like ourselves and learn about our history.

It was around that time also that I began harboring the dangerous thought of someday trying to write myself. Perhaps a poem about an apple tree, although I had never seen one. Or the story of a girl who could magically transplant herself to wherever she wanted to be in the world – such as Father Divine’s kingdom in Harlem. Dunbar – his dark, eloquent face, his large volume of poems -permitted me to dream that I might someday write, and with something of the power with words my mother and her friends possessed.

When people at readings and writers’ conferences ask me who my major influences were, they are sometimes a little disappointed when I don’t immediately name the usual literary giants. True, I am indebted to those writers, white and black, whom I read during my formative years and still read for instruction and pleasure. But they were preceded in my life by another set of giants whom I always acknowledge before all others: the group of women around the table long ago. They taught me my first lessons in the narrative art. They trained my ear. They set a standard of excellence. This is why the best of my work must be attributed to them; it stands as testimony to the rich legacy of language and culture they so freely passed on to me in the wordshop of the kitchen.

Well, this is what I do at work sometimes.
Good read:

How To Date A Brown Girl (black girl, white girl, or halfie)
by Junot Díaz
in the New Yorker December 25, 1995

Wait until your brother, your sisters, and your mother leave the apartment. You’ve already told them that you were feeling too sick to go to Union City to visit that tía who likes to squeeze your nuts. (He’s gotten big, she’ll say.) And even though your moms knew you weren’t sick you stuck to your story until finally she said, Go ahead and stay, Malcriado.

Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. If the girl’s from the Terrace, stack the boxes in the crisper. If she’s from the Park or Society Hill, then hide the cheese in the cabinet above the oven, where she’ll never see it. Leave a reminder under your pillow to get out the cheese before morning or your moms will kick your ass. Take down any embarrassing photos of your family in the campo, especially, that one with the half-naked kids dragging a goat on a rope. Hide the picture of yourself with an Afro. Make sure the bathroom is presentable. Since your toilet can’t flush toilet paper, put the bucket with all the crapped-on toilet paper under the sink. Spray the bucket with Lysol, then close the lid.

Shower, comb, dress. Sit on the couch and watch TV. If she’s an outsider her father will bring her, maybe her mother. Her parents won’t want her seeing a boy from the Terrace—people get stabbed in the Terrace—but she’s strong-headed and this time will get her way. If she’s a white girl, you’re sure you’ll at least get a hand job.

The directions you gave her were in your best handwriting, so her parents won’t think you’re an idiot. Get up from the couch and check the parking lot. Nothing. If the girl’s local, don’t sweat. She’ll flow over when she’s good and ready. Sometimes she’ll run into her friends and a whole crowd will show up, and even though that means you ain’t getting shit it will be fun anyway and you’ll wish these people would come over more often. Sometimes the girl won’t flow over at all and the next day in school she’ll say, Sorry, and smile, and you’ll believe her and be stupid enough to ask her out again.

You wait, and after an hour you go out to your corner. The neighborhood is full of traffic—commuters now cut through the neighborhood—making it hard on the kids and the viejas, who are used to empty streets. Give one of your friends a shout and when he says, Still waiting on that bitch? say, Hell, yeah.

Get back inside. Call her house and when her father picks up ask if she’s there. If he sounds like a principal or a police chief, a dude with a big neck, someone who never has to watch his back, then hang up. Sit and wait. And wait. Until finally, just as your stomach is about to give out on you, a Honda, or maybe a Cherokee, will pull in and out she’ll come.

Hey, she’ll say.

Come on in, you’ll say.

Look, she’ll say. My mom wants to meet you. She’s got herself all worried about nothing.

Don’t panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa. She will look good. White girls are the ones you want most, aren’t they? But the out-of-towners are usually black—black girls who grew up with ballet and Girl Scouts, and have three cars in their driveway. If she’s a halfie don’t be surprised that her mother is the white one. Say, Hi. She’ll say, Hi, and you’ll see that you don’t scare her, not really. She will say that she needs easier directions to get out, and even though she already has the best directions on her lap, give her new ones. Make her happy.

If the girl’s from the Terrace, none of this will happen.

You have choices. If the girl’s from around the way, take her to El Cibao for dinner. Order everything in your busted-up Spanish. Amaze her if she’s black, let her correct you if she’s Latina. If she’s not from around the way, Wendy’s will do. As you walk to the restaurant, talk about school. A local girl won’t need stories about the neighborhood, but the others might. Tell her about the pendejo who stored cannisters of Army tear gas in his basement for years until one day they all cracked and the neighborhood got a dose of military-strength stuff. Don’t tell her that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized the smell from the year the United States invaded your island.

Hope that you don’t run into your nemesis, Howie, the Puerto Rican kid with the two killer mutts. He walks them all over the neighborhood, and every now and then the mutts corner a cat and tear it to shreds, as Howie laughs and the cat flips up in the air, its neck twisted around like an owl’s, red meat showing through the soft fur. And if his dogs haven’t cornered a cat, then he’ll be behind you, asking, Is that your new fuckbuddy?

Let him talk. Howie weighs two hundred pounds and could eat you if he wanted. But at the field he’ll turn away. He has new sneakers and doesn’t want them muddy. If the girl’s an outsider, that’s when she’ll hiss, What a fucking asshole. A homegirl would have been yelling back at him the whole time, unless she was shy. Either way, don’t feel bad that you didn’t do anything. Never lose a fight on a first date.

Dinner will be tense. You are not good at talking to people you don’t know.

A halfie will tell you that her parents met in the Movement. Back then, she’ll say, people thought it was a radical thing to do. It will sound like something her parents made her memorize. Your brother heard that one, too, and said, Sounds like a whole lot of Uncle Tomming to me. Don’t repeat this.

Put down your hamburger and say, It must have been hard.

It was, she will say.

She’ll appreciate your interest. She’ll tell you more. Black people, she will say, treat me real bad. That’s why I don’t like them. You’ll wonder how she feels about Dominicans. Don’t ask. Let her speak on it and when you’ve finished eating, walk back through the neighborhood. The skies will be magnificent. Pollutants have made Jersey sunsets one of the wonders of the world. Point it out. Touch her shoulder and say, Isn’t that nice?

Get serious. Watch TV, but stay alert. Sip some of the Bermudez your father left in the cabinet, which nobody touches. She’ll drink enough to make her brave. A local girl will have hips and a nice ass but won’t be quick about letting you touch her. She has to live in the same neighborhood as you do. She might just chill with you and then go home. She might kiss you and then leave. Or she might, if she’s reckless, give it up, but that’s rare. Kissing will suffice. A white girl might give it up right then. Don’t stop her. She’ll take her gum out of her mouth, stick it to the plastic sofa covers, and then move close to you. You have nice eyes, she might say.

Tell her that you love her hair, her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.

She’ll say, I like Spanish guys, and even though you’ve never been to Spain, say, I like you. You’ll sound smooth.

You’ll be with her until about eight-thirty, and then she’ll want to wash up. In the bathroom, she’ll hum a song from the radio and her waist will keep the beat against the lip of the sink. Think of her old lady coming to get her, and imagine what she would say if she knew that her daughter had just lain under you and blown your name into your ear. While she’s in the bathroom, you might call one of your boys and say, Ya lo hice, cabrón. Or sit back on the couch and smile.

But usually it won’t work this way. Be prepared. She will not want to kiss you. Just cool it, she’ll say. The halfie might lean back and push you away. She will cross her arms and say, I hate my tits. Pretend to watch the TV, and then turn to her to stroke her hair, even though you know she’ll pull away again. I don’t like anybody to touch my hair, she will say. She will act like somebody you don’t know. In school, she is known for her attention-grabbing laugh, high and far-ranging like a gull’s, but here she will worry you. You will not know what to say.

You’re the only kind of guy who asks me out, she will say. Your neighbors will start their hyena calls, now that the alcohol is in them. She will say, You and the black boys.

You want to say, Who do you want to ask you out? But you already know. Let her button her shirt and comb her hair, the sound of it like a crackling fire between you. When her father pulls in and beeps, let her go without too much of a goodbye. She won’t want it. During the next hour, the phone will ring. You will be tempted to pick it up. Don’t. Watch the shows you want to watch, without a family around to argue with you. Don’t go downstairs. Don’t fall asleep. It won’t help. Put the government cheese back in its place before your moms kills you.

–

a good wish,
aichlee