Elegy for the Winter After Taina Was Cancelled
In the photograph which never existed
I am roughly 7
on a block somewhere
near Michigan Ave
It’s
worth noting that even
in the photographs
we have managed to save
I look exactly like my mother
save only the skin
We’re outside of an FAO Schwarz
which was a place the other kids
at my school went to buy rocking horses
which cost hundreds of dollars
It’s
worth noting that
there is no word for the fear
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