Amber Atiya

to mama who on the eve of my birth beat a bitch with a kool-aid spoon for taking her eldest child’s red balloon (if i wasn’t wet-fisted, all hemmed up inside cecelia, i’da jumped in) to the bazaar of milk & afterbirth that once was her body, piping hot almond dark with laughter & memories of fenced-in two-stepping late night in a brownsville park to mama’s hands, mad stallions pummeling dough for biscuits, cherry-scented butter-smeared fists or floured moons to ms cloritha, professional crier for dilroy’s funeral parlor (stuffed the dead fulla who knows, once saw some geezer’s toupee slid back like a yarmulke, a woman’s wig bangs in her ear, mourners too busy kiki-ing in the back to tell the woman’s kin her fall fell forward & dipped to the side cloritha wailing all the while, earning her fifty bucks off the books) to ms sheronda who daily bugged mama for dried black-eyed peas, swore her son looked like a jackson (the eldest sissy, what’s her face, bee bee, cee cee you know, “centipede”) to the hungry black power thief who snatched nefertiti off our wall, public enemy off the turntable, platter of mustard glazed tongue picked clean in the kitchen sink to cuban ruben cross the hall who loved tongue & chuck D, father figure by george michael (also gone from the crates), who OD’d at the tunnel (stuntin’) in mama’s leopard print dress