I used to say I was a miraculous birth,
some poor child divinely snatched
from a couple in the Boroughs and placed
in my mother’s womb instead. I wasn’t meant
for a Southern accent, and avoided most of it,
except the word buggy for shopping cart,
like my ancestors must have ridden on and on
until the Black Warrior’s song became a start.
Alabama, you taught lessons with bees and heartbreak.
A sting on the eyelid at Snow Hinton Park, lust
for love (Freud might say) divorce planted in me.
You didn’t care for the women’s jeans
I wore when the bling era reigned supreme,
the off-brand Air Forces on my feet while country
cowboys fed their families with factory work,
their boots licked with sparks from welding cars
they couldn’t even drive to the lot. You blew
my swish of bangs into my eyes, depression
into my lungs. The Nigerian sisters at church
said I must be hiding someone behind all that hair.
There were the times I collapsed to the floor
at pastor touch and spirit fall, and all the promises
God gave in that broken place within your bones.
Have you taken them and locked them away with
old skin shed? You saw the seasons when friends
would go mute for a day, make me invisible
for a trick laughed-off last minute, and the gay
jokes shot like arrows towards any flesh left lying
still uncalloused in those underfunded hallways
of no electives and Spanish class broadcast on satellite.
It’s odd to miss the place I couldn’t wait to leave,
Stockholmed nostalgia for rows of corn and wheat
and little groceries changing hands, one-lane roads
leading away, away. How did you make fast food
feel like family tradition in my mother’s dog-tired hands?
Or hunting trips playing my Gameboy in silence, my father
staring out into the daybreak forest, returning home empty-handed?
I wish I could return—little piece of childhood, of sugar-coated
French fries, lighter fluid lit on ripped jeans, of fetish
peddled on P.E. bleachers, and first kisses in rumored
ditches, secrets kept until their power’s gone, where
across the tracks was just another neighborhood
and ambition went to settle down—where I would devour
desire you gave for everything not your crimson soil.
