Where is my head? I’m not sure. Why are some people born straight, and some crooked like me? My queer spiritual healer said this, and I can’t stop thinking about it. A winding wood, growing crooked, nothing straight about me. If I had the chance to choose, I wonder what it’s like to be normal. But then, of course, this is the turn of the poem. A crooked growth means it can be a loophole. And a loophole can be a means to freedom. I like being free. I like kisses on the nose. I like the smell of my feet and your armpits. I like the smell of gross. I like tasting blended tangerines. I like the gap in your teeth because my tongue fits like a key. I like the holes in my heart because it makes me see. Had it not been, I would have never noticed.

I have longed to say My people
Not because I was born

Of two peoples, of blue
Tiled walls and strip malls.

Not because I don’t know
Where I belong, or

With whom, or worse
“Who I am”

As onlookers have
In their pity proclaimed,

The lovers, too,
After they’ve exited

My body which they felt
Emboldened to name. I

Have wanted to say My people
And to be clear

To all people, to any you
Imagined by the mind

Of an embodied you
That was also first imagined.

I am interested in repair
Without shame. I am

Interested in restitution
With anger. I am

Interested in anger
As love, in having

Anyone who hears the phrase
See it vanish into the edge

Of what they know, to know
How far I mean it to reach—

My people
As redundancy, as symbol

Of the first truth,
Immutable, almost

Banal in its assertion:

If you are on this earth,
You are of this earth.

three feet behind my grin I speak
so seems my teeth is down for it
but it’s a make-do I do.
I DM P. L. Dunbar on some 
whatchu mean “we?” no—
really, though. the rough metric
opening this a lie to make 
done the otherwise I say I is.
yet, the we I been subtweets 
me—“whatchu mean ‘I?’”—
answer’s off my tongue, so: 
authentic, no? where “fine,” “OK,”
“yes” get forged? I split my difference
between here and gone, 
a distance of hard words 
hissed; presence of the harms’
numb climb: I’m fine, I’m fine.