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.

                                             sits across from me
and passes a photo of his son, pointing out
our somewhere-around-the-eyes resemblance,
 
and in this tall son with dark curled hair, I see
my own unfathered-form and so Charles Uzor
becomes my newest father and there is so much
 
catching up to do. I tried to fix my marriage
and still it collapsed, I tell him, my whole family
has a new frame. Charles Uzor’s face listens
 
dignified by his spectacles and the sunlit window.
There is a marble table between us. On the back of his seat
rests his walking stick and with all his serious years
 
he cracks a joke, pulls a grin and lets in
some silence, telling me that he too knows divorce,
and yes, people assume it’s always the men who
 
walk away. Some people will leave you
says Charles Uzor, and some people will stay
in a different shape. His voice moves me
 
and my neatly-in-the-ground father
loosening the knot in my neck
and for at least as long as I sit facing
 
Charles Uzor’s magnet-black elegance, I am given
rest from the present pain, still tender
in my chest, and I receive a stretch of light
 
which begins and smoothly runs across
Charles Uzor’s ear and chiselled chin and towards
my own face, somewhere around my eyes.

In a poem I love, the husband slices open 
a pepper to find a church, 

but here at the sink I’ve found a house, and 
inside, the rattling seeds of a chandelier. 

It doesn’t matter. My husband is too by himself 
in the hospital, and in our home at the window I stand 

alone for the first time in almost thirty years. Then, 
he’d rushed out into the dark, summoned to 

his father’s deathbed. But I wasn’t really alone. 
My toddler son slept, his mouth slightly open 

and red and wet inside like a fledgling’s, 
my daughter grew within me, close 

as a locket on a chain. When my husband returned, 
I remember he talked of the rattle. The death rattle. 

The children are now inside their own homes
asleep, curled around their beloveds. But all so young 

yet, they do not think we will ever die. 
In their garden beds, if they are dreaming of seeds 

and light, they are dreaming of little blazes
growing hotter. They are not dreaming of wind

and flickering. And, certainly, they are not
dreaming of smoke.

My mama got a sugarcane smile
Southern sweetened iced tea hint
of lemon in her kiss—my mama
loved me like home cooked meals

Slow roasted conversations left overs
in the corners of my mind like I remember
she gave me Cheese Curls like teething rings
to place between my gums and satisfy crying

She Twizzler twisted my thick hair
with globs of blue magic—make me Sunday-fresh
My skin hot fudge, she caramel at best
My mama—corn bread and cola,

Candied yams and cabbage, banana pudding and cobbler
Food so good on the taste buds—make her feet swell
She wobble sometimes like pendulums
on grandma’s clock that do tell time.

Learned it from all the times great gran
was cooking for church’s second service
Learned to praise God through baked
mac and cheese and pray my daddy come home

from the service, but he dead and gone now
and my mama in combat mode — her body
covered with infections like chocolate coated
candy. Sugar level–501–which is to say
she got stroke caught in between her teeth

A1C, 14, veins constricting then collapsing
like salivating glands when you taste that cheesecake
that’s too rich and saccharine
My mama so sweet its sickening

They had to cut cyst out of her breast
like she had cavities within her chest
and I’m scared that if she don’t water down
the syrup in her spirit they will amputate
her limbs and ligaments leaving her bitter
to the taste—all sour in the face
where salty tears replace the stars that twinkle
and burst in my mama’s iris, my mom is

hot cocoa when my soul grows cold from all the pain
in the world, all gummy bear dimples and a heart
made of pecan swirls. My mama got a crockpot-type-hug
that fills the house with aroma. My mama fills me up

every time I’m around her. My mama is a recipe passed down
through generations and I just pray my children will have full plates
before she is called to grace—Amen. Pray her eyes will not be candy
wrapper shut before she ever has a chance to meet them.

But my mama be stubborn like Jawbreakers sometimes
So I make pools of apologies hoping she will forgive
me enough to take care of herself, but this aint no candyland-
child’s play and though disease is hard for anyone to swallow
this aint no sugar pill placebo cuz we know diabetes won’t just go away

And still my mama be like Baby everything gon’ be ok
My mama with her smile made of sugarcane
as I can’t help but fear the decay.