They knock on cupboards & ribs,
steal mothballs from the wardrobe’s dim corners
& patch them into their wings.
They scream when the kettle boils.
Their feet & fingers are webbed like geese.
Some bake bran muffins in blue children’s aprons.
The kitchen, powdered in bread flour, a cloud they glide through.
Others wrestle the wind through a screen door.
When the doorbell rings, they flap their arms & chirp
their mockingbird throats.
They work in shifts, all night shining shoes.
All morning they brush her hair.
Some are secretive & break the chimes, so she won’t
know their comings & goings.
Others dissect the basement mice & pin
the decorative bodies, splayed like fans, to the walls.
Their laughter rakes like tires screeching through a stop.
She begs them to stop but they only start a game
of tar & feathers.
She opens the door to leave, but more trudge in
ferrying beer bottles & shoehorns, tiny mouse bones dangling
from their teeth.
Some plant violets in the garden then wash their feet
so the dirt won’t track in. Or so the violets won’t grow
inside. Some rock her to bed & call her baby;
others roll their doll eyes & bite her fingernails to shards as she sleeps.
She once woke to a fistful of blood & feathers, believing
it a tiny bird she’d crushed in sleep.
Tomorrow, she will take a pill & they will leave in a mournful parade:
When angels leave us, they look like lost children.
She will spend all day counting their shadows like stitches
& washing that dead bird from her fingers’ webs.

It is tamale Saturday.
The day the colors of the rainbow break
b r e a d.            Today these Brown hands will be coated
In masa and Mama and memory.

A family patterned like
plaid on stripes will go to war with corn
husks and Grandma Lupe's recipe    h a n d w r i t i n g.   
Today I am not artist. Nor social

media handle. I am not
Black Boy Joy. Nor Brown Boy dead. I am
a   b a b y                before its first gulp of tap water. The oldest cousin
still hesitant to clink forks at the adult table.

Today we pick up the place
mats Tia and Big Mama and Papa Sisto left
behind. We’ve never been the same since they    d i e d.       
We grew into something stronger

and weaker at the same time,
most ourselves when colors don’t
m a t c h       but meat is tender, and masa has no clumps,
and air is clean like a mind

that has reconciled with its last meal.

^{After Major Jackson}

Because I could say my friends' exes live in a swamp in my heart
            and no one would ask what it means.
Because my head is level and my wrists are narrow.
Because after block parties and cookouts my mom corralled us
            into the bathtub to wash dirt from our soles.
Because nowadays I go to bed with unwashed feet.
Because everyone who didn't eat breakfast in my house hates grapefruit.
Because instead of letting people in, I rebuild myself around them.
Because it haunts me that my aunt would still be alive
            if she still had health insurance.
Because I still think about characters in books I read at age eleven
            now nameless and faceless.
Because all my poems end up in AP style.
Because I always have a crush on someone taller than me.
Because I can't find anyone in New England who knows what it's like
            to ride the Brown Line over the Chicago River in summertime.
Because my best friend and I have different words for love.
Because I'm still afraid to die.
Because I rode Razor scooters on the blacktop with the boys before school.
Because walking through Boston feels like spitting out cold air.
Because I spend a Valentine's Day at a funeral I couldn't cry at.
Because the winter always makes me like this.
Because I don't know what I mean by like this.

A website stutters numbers
about my town sheepishly
pushing them all the way
to the bottom

The percentage of residents living in poverty—8.5%
Then the parentheses:
(6% for white residents)
(9.6% for Hispanic residents)
(14.3% for Black residents)

I wonder why it is only the poverty statistic
that mentions race
Then I remember everything is about money
That in this cushy suburb racial bias loves to glare
back at you from the inside of a wallet

In this chunk of non-city
the people are proud
of their diversity
Even as the achievement
gap at my high school
glares at them

Back when the Chicago Tribune covered
the 1919 Chicago riots
they were overshadowed
by the streetcar strike which
inconvenienced white
people who had to find
other ways to get to work
I bet no Oak Park wife
looked toward the lake
and saw Black bodies

I wonder how many of their
children have done anything
other than cast problems under bottom lips
letting injustice sit with stale breath
Their “hate has no home here” lawn signs
resting in freshly trimmed grass
I can feel them eyeing me
questioning if I belong here
as I walk past

I think about pulling all the signs out
Telling my neighbors to learn their own statistics
Will they see me in parentheses?

A part of me hopes they don‘t
Is this why I straighten my hair
for every school picture?
So for those few minutes before class,
a teacher may see me as something
other than Latina
Is Oak Park the cut lawn
and the sign planted in it
or white women
standing proud behind their liberal yard signs?

Where does it fit in a world that would rather focus
on anything but the problems across the street?

I just hope that when Oak Park makes its choice
it will say it without muttering

I am nearly positive there are no other
Langston Kermans on this smoking earth.
Certainly not in this neighborhood.

How frightening to think
there might be another
who appropriates the prescription for my abscess,

who claims my lost packages,
who watches anime and sucks
juice between his teeth, the same as me.

I am 32 years old
and I have never known anyone’s
heart attacks in the morning shower.

No monoxide pumped into a closed garage.
No true loss.
Even my first dog lived to 17:

She died quietly on a metal table,
the family encircling her
like a fleshy halo.

Dearest “other” Langston,
how many eggs have you cracked
to find the yolk pecked with blood?

i.
I miss the rev of the minivan.
The time I turned too sharp off Harlem and dug
its battered side into a white van.
The tobacco glued to the man’s teeth as he yelled
and then realized that a minivan could do no harm
to his white van.
I miss pleading to my mother for the keys or slipping them
into my pocket, depending on the furrow of her brow.
And how I would drive the car until the red arrow just graced E
and then vacate for a week until the tank magically filled itself.

ii.
Driving at night is mostly like soaring,
like a pair of ice skates and the whole town,
your whole world, is frozen over. I’m always finding excuses
to run errands in the moon’s embrace, to slip
down the driveway into brake lights and exhaust pipes.
I know neon Jewel Osco like I know my own knuckles.
The checkout lady, a cool breeze as she makes up
a family for me and wonders why they let me go out every night,
for dish soap, tampons, a thank you card,
wonders why shopping has become my good-night kiss.
Sometimes I will take Harlem Ave. so far
that cross streets become strangers and I wonder if I say
hello enough times the world won’t feel so much
like a vengeful tongue.

iii.
I do not drive in Boston,
I take the train, the slow chug of the city’s arteries.
I step onto Comm Ave. after a car passes,
jacket blown open wide.
I remember the thrill of a sterling wheel
and a half an hour in which no one will call your name.
I daydream about Thanksgiving break
when I can shiver in the front seat,
puff clouds of smoke with the car as it awakes,
used to slumbering in its old age.
I will take the car down Harlem Ave.,
past Roosevelt Rd. where all the cross streets
turn to numbers and I will count on my fingers
the hours until I leave.