After Oprah

As a kid the only black woman in my life was my fourth-grade teacher— I remember her not because she was black but mostly because of her copper-colored bob that never changed, as if a piece of bronze had been chiseled onto her head and neither I nor my classmates could prove it was a wig, but we knew it was too perfect to be real. Then you came in- to my home—but not the way someone came in one afternoon while we were away grocery shopping, leaving the side door wide open releasing my white-winged parakeet, my mother’s jewelry and our television, gone. And for years I watched you go from analog into digital; you were the modicum of motherhood I encountered daily while my mother stood on a production line mouthing prayers for prosperity and health in a room of air compressors. You’re a super galactic hologram—scattered light reconstructed through the dark matter, ever-shrinking pixels—shifting the cosmology of the world with gigs of Gayle, and revolutionary road trips. And now will you quietly fade out into the space- time continuum where not even my imagination will find you? Your last broadcast like the final song of our beloved parakeet as it flew past the leafless trees toward the vast dome of heaven.