I crop out the trailer and the splintered remains of the front door.
I crop out your name all over the news.
I crop out the sawed-off shotgun they found hidden in the yard.
I crop out the blood-vacant faces of every soul who was sold to.
I crop out their family’s hunted hearts.

I rotate the image until you are upside down, hanging
from the monkey bars, hollering my name,  Andrea, look what I can do!
I zoom in until there is no lighter beneath the spoon, just ice cream
dripping from your face, and me trying to teach you
how to blow out the candles the day you turned two years old,
your cheeks—pink balloons giggling away gravity.

I give more detail to the background. I pose you
beside our bloodline, our grandfather throwing his liver
through the kitchen window, our grandmother on her knees
sweeping up the glass. I zoom in to the pieces she didn’t find.
I find them in the sole of your shoes on your worst day of junior high.

There is a thin line between skewing the truth
and giving a panoramic view. I don’t know if I’m widening the lens
or just making an excuse when I say that you were a kid
the first time you used. You wanted blue hair
and a boyfriend, not a conscience

that wouldn’t have a good vein left, not an abscess
in the arm you would one day not hold your family with, not me
falling off the wagon of my unforgiveness,
running to the police station, begging them
to replace your mugshot with the negative,
your dark side in full light,

the filth-hungry scream in your body every time you tried
to get clean, the clinic that told our mother you would die
if she didn’t send you back out to the streets
to find the poison, to kill the bugs,
how I’d count your legs when you walked into the room.

How I still do. But that isn’t the right exposure.
Because you were also the kindest person I ever knew.
And that in itself has been its own dark room
considering  the ugliness is to scale,
considering our family tree

and how there isn’t a person who loves you
who isn’t dead on the branch.
How loving you less might have been the sweetest gift
I could have given my own life, but how that sweetness
would have rotted god’s teeth

when every Christmas morning you woke me at 4AM,
more excited for me to open my stocking
than you were to open yours.
How do I say that to a judge
and not sound insane?

How do I say the truth isn’t the right filter?
The truth knows nothing
of who you almost were, but I do.
I just click a button. I undo one tiny thing:
     and there you are.

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries

And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step

Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,

The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.

If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:

The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.

We simply would not be here
If that were so.

You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.

You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward

Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise.  But think:

When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—

It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.

From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,

The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need
To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going. 

Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.

Be good, then better.  Write books.  Cure disease.
Make us proud.  Make yourself proud.

And those who came before you?  When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.

me and you be sisters.
we be the same.

me and you
coming from the same place.

me and you
be greasing our legs
touching up our edges.

me and you
be scared of rats
be stepping on roaches.

me and you
come running high down purdy street one time
and mama laugh and shake her head at
me and you.

me and you
got babies
got thirty-five
got black
let our hair go back
be loving ourselves
be loving ourselves
be sisters.

only where you sing,
I poet.

When I say But mother, Black or not Black,
Of course we are polyethnic, your look does not change
Though it does harden, a drying clay bust
Abandoned or deliberately incomplete,
All the features carved in
Except the eyes. What I’m trying—
I mean—You are an Arab, yes,
By culture, by language, and in part by blood; by blood
You are also Black African—and when, then, I say
And probably a fair amount of European, too—the lights,
Though we’re standing at the corner of 195th and Jerome,

Turn up somehow

Tracing an outline of you onto the armory’s sharp red brick, the El
Barreling up from the tunnel like a surge of magma reaching
For air and as I wait for it to pass so that you can
Hear me again, so that I can hear myself at last
Say, But here, for me … Don’t you see—?
Your face hangs on the fair of fair amount—heavy drops
Of oil, or old rain, falling onto us from the tracks—almost willing away
The layer of long-dead men flattened onto it, and the desperate
Rest of you, until I say with my looking
Through the unbearable human noise, My sweet selfless mother, it is
Fine, it is fine. For us here now I will be the first of our line.

A second death in as many days and I succeed at being
Strong and contained, until the tweet
Where one young brother says I’m not scared of dying,
I’m scared of breaking my mother’s heart. I am flesh
Two rooms down the hall from my mother’s flesh
Holding in my hands the news which is not new and today, at last, I understand
How primal and intelligent her need
To be done with this—
Our sorrow, our joy, anything at all thought ours—
To be done with the almost unavoidable assertion
Of a self she refused
To let her body take on—and to be done
Permanently, by making
A useful choice, through a man made useful by her choosing,
A man of Irish-Scandinavian stock (the only criteria,
I have wondered, in angrier moments), so that
Her boys, my brothers and I, or at least our bodies
Emerged from hers looking Spanish, maybe Greek or Italian.
Three boys, each passing
Closer to her one True North.
When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying I love you.
She is saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother she wished
He’d just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face
And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance,
Told her I love you and you are crazy. Today
I see: I am flesh, I am free
To inhabit my life: to stand, to sit, to breathe, to play tag
Or with a toy gun, to walk away, or to run, to put my hands up, to ask why.
Today on a walk I took to release
How it felt to be shut out—this time,
By the editor of the African diasporic journal
Who asked not me but someone who didn’t know me
Was I Black—
I cross 112th and Amsterdam and suddenly
Am 20 years-old again,
Drunk, out-of-control in pain without knowing
Why, trying to jump a taxi
Because I’d spent my money on booze, and the cop
Whose car pulled into the crosswalk to block me,
To stop me as I ran, gets out and says to me
If you don’t pay the man, I’ll arrest you.
I was underage. I jumped a taxi. I was incoherent and angry.
I did not have the money to pay the man. I was not arrested.
Turning from the news, I complain now to a friend
I don’t know why we (all of us) should want to live—
It’s all so futile and banal. It’s all so pointless, even when it’s good—
As my mother rests inside her safe and dusty room
Next to the man she crossed an ocean to find.
I have thought her wrong
To think that we would need saving. But what do I know
Of having to choose one violence over another? Asleep now
She rests inside her flesh, my father close beside her
On his back, his forearm across his eyes,
He who chose her, too,
And over his own family, he knew to tell us, having learned early
That you must cross whatever line you have to cross.