“Wow, your English is so good. You sound American. You don’t even have an accent” …

An American accent is an accent. You make up like 322 million of north of a billion English speakers world wide – that’s not even 50%!
You do NOT get to set the standard. 
And if one more person asks me why I speak the way that I do, I will respond with a pinch of salt and a dash of colonial history and say: “Because I was forced to”. 
Decades of white men tying knots in my mother’s tongue and demanding that she annotate Shakespeare’s Hamlet with the blood that drips down her chin.

“I love your turban, your hat, your head thing” …

Oh, you mean my wrap? 
If you must know, there is a plethora of family secrets and spirituals 
That reside within these folds that only the likes of Kente and Chitenge materials can withhold.

“I love Africa. I wish I knew a little more about that place” …

So you want to know what pigment tastes like 
What melanin smells like
What colour feels like
Like soil, I say
Like soil, I am 
Flesh and history 
Flesh and journey
My body – the juxtaposition of slavery and emancipation
My pores seep sweet and sour 
My tears smell like holy water.

I dipped my feet in the River Nile last summer
and I bathed in the waters of Nefertiti
The waves seeped through the cracks in my soles.
and found their way into my veins 
My blood is as thick as Makeda’s 
It flows to the rhythm of that of Ya Aasantewaa.

You seem surprised 
Did you not know that I have generations of queens and centuries of silence gushing through my system? 
That these words that I speak are cloaked in the prayers of my great grandmother’s sister?
I am her dream come true. 
I am her dream come true.

Don’t ask me where I’m at or where I’m going
Ask me where I am from 
What I am from
Who I am from
I am from more than “turban, hat, head things”, “broken English”, and “sun kissed skin”.

I am from the elders who once traveled through my father’s veins
From oily stew and orange squash
From men who plow fields with broken hips 
From women who make a living off of their finger tips.
From a continent of land, light and loss
I am Africa
Born and bred
Cut me up and I bleed black not red
The glitter in my pigment will never grow old
My stretch marks are painted silver and gold.

I am of full lips, thick thighs, and mahogany colored everything

I am soil, I say
I am soil, I am 
Flesh and history 
Flesh and Journey

And I am here.

My therapist thinks my name is Alex
and I’m too embarrassed to correct him at this point.
Like I’ve already been going there for over a month, and he still has no clue that my name is actually Alec.
At this point it feels like I would be inconveniencing him to tell him he is mistaken
Despite the fact that it’s actually his job to be inconvenienced by my problems
Yet I still hold my tongue.
It’s a trait I learned over years of being fine
of ignoring the screaming anger in my brain
of pushing away the thoughts of wanting to kill myself
of avoiding making anyone uncomfortable.
And I think that’s what it is.
I don’t want my pain to make anyone else uncomfortable
because hasn’t it already hurt me enough? 
Why would I want to darken somebody else’s day with my shadows?
And so instead I try to take whatever light I have left inside of me
and put it on display
attempting to hide myself behind it like hiding a tsunami behind a sputtering match
And as the thoughts in my head weigh me down
like bricks in my backpack,
I try my hardest to keep standing up straight
Painting a smile on my face because if anyone else knows about these weights
They will try to take them upon themselves
So I hold out my light and say smiling:
“LOOK! I’M FINE! Look how bright and shining I am!
So I’ll just be here,
Painted-on smile filling with cracks
Bricks pulling me down until
I am under the tsunami of myself
Waiting for someone to pull me up and tell me
You don’t have to keep shining.

All I ever wanted to be in my life is a writer
Actually, that’s not true
What I wanted to be in my life is a dog
In search of truth
That’s not fully accurate either
I really wanted to be a white man 
named after a dog
Digging up people’s backyards
Looking for hidden Mayan treasure
Like that earring your aunt Barb lost
During Thanksgiving dinner 1993
I am a liar
I wanted to be Harrison Ford in a 
Warner Brothers motion picture
Where he, Gimli son of Gloim, and
A bearded Highlander Sean Connery
Ride culturally appropriated camels
And in his Scottish wisdom says
‘We named the dog Indiana’

Forgive me that my Paiute head is too big
For a film star fedora
Or that I am categorically opposed
To using whips as motivation
For plot devices
As it turns out it’s hard to use the
Apparently limitless Tribal college fund
Normally allocated for community college
And the Sunday shirts & skins bball game
To study at Oxford and become a rogue
Archeologist, ready for action at the drop
Of a hat, stealing artifacts from your own
Relatives away from Nazis just to say

It belongs in a museum

Far from the Badlands of South Dakota
When the dinosaur you’re digging for
Turns up a bone 
that looks like yours
And because you’re a professional academic
World renowned published archeologist
You keep digging
To find the skeleton
That belongs in a museum
Is you

Afterwards,
I open all the windows.
I buy three boxes of Franzia Chillable Red because it’s the most amount of wine I can get for the cheapest price and I need to water the flowers.
I turn my stomach into a garden,
rake my fingers across the earth,
trying to tear myself open to tear out his cigarettes.
I delete his texts from my phone, 
rip the his number out by the roots,
I move to a new house, 
one where my rapist has not planted his feet. 
I keep a bottle of water next to my bed to put out the fire.

Afterwards,
I go on a date to Apple Valley with Will
to the Minnesota State Zoo during their Adult Hours
We get to drink and visit the exhibits, 
and he says it will be so much fun.
He wants me to go to his house after this.
I pull a bouquet of yellow roses out of my throat, stems catching on the walls, put them inside a wine bottle and give them to him.
I try to say, “I’m Sorry,” but cough blood and thorns onto his lap instead. 
In his eyes, my body transforms into a pitcher plant,
carnivorous flower attracting flies with a basin of sap,
like I drew him in with laughter and honey sweetness
only to find, now, if he gets too close, 
he will stick to the walls of my trauma
until he too becomes consumed. 
He empties the bottle of flowers on the floor and hands it back to me, silent.

Afterwards,
I uproot relationships before they grow.
I have a dozen first dates and wrap them with barbed wire. 
I tell my friends this is the most I’ve dated in my life,
which is to say, I tell none of these boys I love them or myself,
or I give all of these boys bouquets of flowers with the heads ripped off,
a handful of stems.

I pray
to a damp cloth.

Afterwards,
I don’t call 911.
I don’t take medication, don’t go to therapy, don’t tell my doctor what happened.
I don’t call it depression or anxiety or PTSD.

I call my shaking tired, call it closing the library, a full schedule, an opened text message at 2 AM from a phone number I deleted months ago.
I pretend it doesn’t exist until it does.
I do not give him a name, because then it never happened.
I do not give my mental illness a name,
I do not give myself a name, 
because no one names a salted earth.

I never told anyone about the after before,
how I didn’t know if it was rape until months later,
if I should say I was raped once or twice
because is the morning after he sleeps over a continuation or a second chance?

Later I text my rapist to ask when he was last tested
because he didn’t wear a condom.
Even when I’m trying to be safe
I am not safe.

Afterwards,
I leave all the windows,
I try to put out a brush fire that is always hungry.

She pops the hood and gestures
to a twist of grey vines
and tells me the problem
and the solution.
I can’t even tell
what she’s pointing to.
All of it is grey
and looks like it could reach out
and break my hands.

I had a car phase in high school.
I wanted to know more than the boys did.
I wanted to be more of a boy than the boys were.
Or, no, I’m projecting. 
I just wanted to save myself if I were stuck
on the side of the road in an unfamiliar area.
Either way, I didn’t get far–
I could name the make and model
of the expensive cars that picked
the other kids up from school,
until the day I got a flat tire
after jazz band and shut down,
everything I’d learned flying out
of a puncture in my brain,
and I ran crying toward the school.
Mr. Ives, fresh out of track coaching,
changed it for me, with the help of
my grade’s track star, a man
who harassed women in the hallways
and dominated any classroom conversation
his wide wingspan could grasp.
I think he just wanted to prove that he could,
the same way I wanted to prove that I could.
But what is masculinity but giving up
on anything you can’t fit one hand around easily?

Rachel has one hand in the thicket of grey
and another on her phone,
double-checking the amount of oil to put in.
I think about trying to talk
my way into this mass of pipes.
I think about all of the times I have talked
over Rachel on things we are both good at.
I think about all of the femmes
I have talked over like a hand
trying to pop its wrist socket
and take flight.

I turn around to realize
the New England chill has finally subsided
enough to let the dandelions grow,
her front yard a field I understand,
and I remember when I was a girl
and learned to make flower crowns
to bide my time waiting for my dad
to pick me up from school. So,
I park myself in the greenery
and give up being a man for the moment.

In a world without gender, this scene
would not be a poem.
This would not be a story
about masculinity.
This would just be two friends
doing what they are good at.

Which is, creating things with our hands.
Hands have no gender.
Nothing that can be created
by a pair of hands has a gender.

When the car is ready to run again,
she joins me on the grass
with my soft crown,
brushes some pollen off my forehead
with her thumb. And we stand together,
admiring all that we have made.

free college counseling!
it’s the way of the future!
what could possibly go wrong?
(side effects may include:
flunking out of college due to depression;
not having a purpose in life anymore
because you flunked out of college due to depression;
being constantly reminded by your shadow
that you are a failure
because you flunked out of college due to depression.
if you suffer from a depression lasting longer than four hours,
go die in a hole, you pathetic failure.)

so here we go again: one hour per week
with her telling me
that i suck at relationships
or that relationships suck at me
(i’m not sure which one).
nothing got better
and nothing got worse,
but at least it was free
for me to sit there and be told
that i shouldn’t smoke pot
with guys who want to have sex with me.

there was this one day
where she kept asking me about my grandmother,
whose death had sent me to bed with a razor
and was quickly causing me to fail all my classes.
i tried to avoid it like the perpetual freshman i was,
but she kept asking, and asking, and asking,
and when i’d started crying,
she told me that she’d done it
because she noticed i avoided talking about my grandmother.
i nodded
and then went back to my room
and cried some more.
it would be several more years before i was diagnosed
with realizing that the world has no safe places,
but i think back then
it was already true.

I have to whisper, because she’s a light sleeper
she told me this pretty early on into dating
but what she doesn’t know is how beautiful it is 
that she smiles while she’s sleeping in the passenger seat.
I’ve got the radio faded to my side, real low,
and the only other noise comes from a
gentle grumble of rolling down a salt washed road
in the belly of New Hampshire.

My sight lines are short in the fan of yellowed headlights
etching in the soft shimmer of new snow,
and all around us are mountains of charcoal,
cardboard cutouts, navy shadows of pine or stone.
There’s a thin veil of light from the dash  
that highlights the side of her smile
and for a moment I consider pausing the GPS and turning blindly
to hang on to this sight of her a little while more.

I’d love to kiss her right now.
Love to pull off into a ditch 
just to wrap my arms around her
and join in quiet slumber through the morrow.
We could listen to the wind whistling 
against the wood as she drifts against my side.
I’d keep an eye open for any wildlife we’d awoken
but mostly just to memorize the image
of her unbeknownst smile at complete peace 
right here with me
tonight.

It’s below freezing outside though, so I can’t stop,
I can’t pause to adjust anything without risking disturbing her
so I just watch.
I watch the road fold up behind us in my mirror into the night,
watch deer along the shoulder munch berries as we pass by,
I watch my odometer tick with every wind in the barren highway
but my favorite view, is in the car,
the privilege of her comfort and trust
to feel safe and warm and to sleep,
there has never been a piece of New England,
no mountain view nor lake or flower
more beautiful to me.

My son, look at how our blood runs
down the Strait of my cracked & hardened
palms. You be the chaser—
for I am done being chased. My
pores evacuate drops of
Nai nai, Ye ye, Tai pwuh, Tai gung 
for you. For you I
raise the spoon, 
trembling between my fingers,
to draw in sips.

Dripping from my chin.

All of this. Everything.
You. Splinters
find my veins while I spend my final
hairs sowing cabbages
whose heads will not emerge until after 
I can’t see them
with a splitting hoe.
But

if human flesh could feed a man

I would slice off
all of my best parts for you to eat
& before there’s nothing left
I would teach you how to build a house
from bones. A father with nothing
to give can only
sacrifice.
My son,

my bao bei.

Let my limbs be your pedals
but let it be your legs
that show you places
mine could never. For there are bullets—
bombs, tanks, machine guns
chasing us down the Strait
in black boots— 
however my chest will shield you
so that you, my son, can run.

how long away I was when what happened 
did. compare county paperwork to memory:

maybe I woke up just as hands crushed 
essence, cinched esophagus. did I know

and not, some psychic sense of rigor 
mortis catching me cross country as it set in

in her bedroom? rates of expanse: ten years 
from fifteen. how to calculate the lack,

solve for the exact date that I forgot 
the black of her hair. one month between

the day of and the day I hear. weeks 
I was busy breathing and the fact

of her was far off, but assumed to be 
breathing back. she spoke so low I barely

understood except her laugh. not sure—
did I leave voicemails while snail watching?

vacation’s skinny-dip baptisms: the beach, 
the creek, leeches risen out of river-

rocks to anesthetize and drink my legs. 
was she ash already or unidentified,

starting to decompose? before I found 
out, I felt her homegoing. telling tarot

on the backseat drive through graveyards split 
by highway. back east, all was water:

gravity racing ground toward coast. distance 
and time’s dials glowed blue in the nightlight’s

shallow. paper moon and fool—two cups 
reversed to mean parting—tipped out the deck

into a pile on the floor. through the door 
and the dark, I heard ocean swallowing its sting.