if you want to know what my lousy childhood was like
and how my best friend was a young girl of minority status
in a highly (corrupt, ignorant, American) prejudice town,
i will mind, but i'm not shy, i'll tell you. first, let me write
about how her dimples lit up like the roadside diner sign
and her eyes like diamonds, killing her sisters.
but one day she snapped and i'm not talking umbilical cord.
i'm not saying money troubles and mama's grocery list.
i'm writing of a much more inherent evil -
talking the fist that broke her jaw
and rose through my heart and climbed through my eyes
to shape the fist to produce the boy's busted lip.
i'm talking the bus driver's hands on my burning shoulders,
the "poor" boy pushing towards the window, blood on his teeth.
i'm talking the violence and violation i give freely back
since they decided to shower it so freely on her -
the satisfying plea of please, please, please -
the lion's reduction to mouse.
*copied from adrian blevin's "the other cold war" - written for poetry class, spring 2010.
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