The Poet X(6)

When we were little, I would come home with bleeding knuckles and Mami would gasp and shake me: “?Muchacha, siempre peleando!

Why can’t you be a lady? Or like your brother?

He never fights. This is not God’s way.”

And Twin’s eyes would meet mine

across the room. I never told her

he didn’t fight because my hands

became fists for him. My hands learned how to bleed when other kids

tried to make him into a wound.

My brother was birthed a soft whistle: quiet, barely stirring the air, a gentle sound.

But I was born all the hurricane he needed to lift—and drop—those that hurt him to the ground.





Tuesday, September 11





It’s Only the First Week of Tenth Grade


And high school is already a damn mess.

In ninth grade you are in between.

No longer in junior high,

but still treated like a kid.

In ninth grade you are always frozen between trying not to smile or cry, until you learn that no one cares about what your face does, only what your hands’ll do.

I thought tenth grade would be different but I still feel like a lone shrimp in a stream where too many are searching for someone with a soft shell to peel apart and crush.

Today, I already had to curse a guy out for pulling on my bra strap, then shoved a senior into a locker for trying to whisper into my ear.

“Big body joint,” they say, “we know what girls like you want.”

And I’m disgusted at myself for the slight excitement that shivers up my back

at the same time that I wish my body could fold into the tiniest corner for me to hide in.





How I Feel about Attention


If Medusa was Dominican

and had a daughter, I think I’d be her.

I look and feel like a myth.

A story distorted, waiting for others to stop and stare.

Tight curls that spring like fireworks out of my scalp. A full mouth pressed hard like a razor’s edge. Lashes that are too long so they make me almost pretty.

If Medusa was Dominican and had a daughter, she might wonder at this curse. At how her blood is always becoming some fake hero’s mission.

Something to be slayed, conquered.

If I was her kid, Medusa would tell me her secrets: how it is that her looks stop men in their tracks why they still keep on coming.

How she outmaneuvers them when they do.





Saturday, September 15





Games


With one of our last warm-weather Saturdays

Twin, Caridad, and I go to the Goat Park

on the Upper West Side.

Outside of ice-skating when we were little, neither Twin nor I are particularly athletic, but Caridad loves “trying new social activities”

and this week it’s a basketball tournament.

The three of us have always been tight like this.

And although we’re different, since we were little we’ve just clicked.

Sometimes Twin and Caridad are the ones

who act more like twins,

but our whole lives we’ve been friends, we’ve been family.

Already we feel the chill that’s biting at the edge of the air.

It will be hoodie weather soon,

and then North Face weather after that,

but today it’s still warm enough for only T-shirts, and I’m kind of glad for it because the half-naked ball players? They’re FINE.

Running around in ball shorts, and no tees, their muscles sweaty, their skin flushed.

I lean against the fence and watch them

race up and down the court.

Caridad is paying attention to the ball movement, but Twin’s staring as hard as I am at one of the ballers.

When he catches me looking Twin pretends to clean his glasses on his shirt.

When the game is over (the Dyckman team won), we shuffle away with the crowd,

but just as we get to the gate one of the ball players, a young dude about our age, stops in front of me.

“Saw you looking at me kind of hard, Mami.”

Damn it. Recently, I haven’t been able to stop looking.

At the drug dealers, the ball players, random guys on the train.

But although I like to look, I hate to be seen.

All of a sudden I’m aware of how many boys

on the ball court have stopped to stare at me.

I shake my head at the baller and shrug.

Twin grabs my arms and begins pulling me away.

The baller steps to Twin.

“Oh, is this your girl? That’s a lot of body for someone as small as you to handle.

I think she needs a man a little bigger.”

When I see his smirk, and his hand cupping his crotch,

I break from Twin’s grip, ignore Caridad’s intake of breath, and take a step until I’m right in homeboy’s face: “Homie, what makes you think you can ‘handle’ me, when you couldn’t even handle the ball?”

I suck my teeth as the smile drops off his face; the dudes around us start hooting and hollering in laughter.

I keep my chin up high and shoulder my way through the crowd.





After


It happens when I’m at bodegas.

It happens when I’m at school.