Roxane Beth Johnson

Eat cereal. Read the back of the box over and over. Put on my red velvet jumper with white heart shaped buttons. Walk to the bus, pick up discarded cigarette butts and pretend to smoke. Get on the bus. Girls yell,Wire head, ugly black skin. Take a window seat, under the radio speaker. Look for cats hunting in the fields. Go to class. Stay in at recess. Steal chewing gum, plastic green monkeys and cookies from desks. Eat in bathroom stalls. Pure white light pours in. Try to get a bloody nose by punching myself in the same bathroom after lunch. The teacher passes around pictures of herself pregnant.You werefat! I yell.  Everyone laughs. I lap it like licking honey from a spoon.I was pregnant, what’s your excuse? Everyone laughs. I swallow stones. Grow tired in the afternoons, droop like a sunflower in the lengthening light. Get on the bus. Girls yell,Brillo-head! Zebra! Sit in an aisle seat.Your father’s a nigger! I say,No, he’s a fireman. Laughter all around. Pinch myself shut like squeezing soap from a sponge. Walk home. Sometimes find an unsmoked cigarette in the gravel along the curb—long, white, new. Put it to my lips, pull it away and hold it aloft, movie-star-like, all the way home.

A boarded-up house. Ransacked inside — broken glass and toppled tables, chairs overturned, books shaken for hidden money. There are mouths in dreams full of gold teeth, chewing bread and meat. The body is hollow as flame and will burn down anything if pointed straight. A bird flies in through the door, then flutters at the window. Although he is tiny, I am too afraid to help him escape. I’ve made myself another house. I hum to fill its empty rooms. I fold in like saloon doors closing, then swinging out, keeping out thieves.

Grandma is washing me white. I am the color of hot sand in the bleached sea light. I am a stain on the porcelain, persistent as tea. Stay in the shade. Don’t say she was the only one. Cousins opposite say: you too white. I am a night-blooming flower being pried open in the morning. My skin a curtain for a cage of bones, a blackbird coop. My heart is crusty bread, hardening. Hardening. This way, I feed my own fluttering. Under shade, the day looks like evening and I cannot bear the darkness. Don’t say, I can’t stand to be touched. Say, I stare into the sun to burn off the soiled hands that print my body with bloody ink. Don’t say,Mulatto. Say, I am the horse in Oz turning different colors, each prance brightening flesh. A curiosity. Don’t say, Bathwater spiraled down into the pipes. Say, I never did fade. Say, Skin holds the perseverance of my days. Folding, folding, the water continuously gathers, making wrinkles in a map.