Flower Tongue (3/30)

Yesterday English was not enough,
so I went to Brooklyn
looking for Creole or Haitian French
dark lips laughing near jerk chicken barrels
and sweet corn
knishes in the pizza joint,
dreadlocks.

It’s hard to tell you how much I like being in the minority.

My toes curl in my red converse,
houndstooth scarf hides my neck,
it’s cold but not too cold -
the men ignore me here,
the women ignore me here or
make nods at my hair they’ve asked me what I do to it
I ask them what they do to theirs
we answer at the same time,
“Nothing”.

It’s hard to tell you what being white feels like,
but it never feels invisible until I’m twenty stops in on the 4 train
crossing Eastern Parkway.
It never feels like English wasn’t my native language
until I’m paragraphs deep in island tongues.

If the eggs of my ancestors had not roamed,
I would be a very different person today.
I can hear the drumbeats of my great-great-grandmothers home
all the time,
hear her poetry and laugh on the seawind
as she wanders in britches on the deck of her husband’s ship,
but my feet don’t move like hers,
my hands can’t clap to find the dancing
the people who are my people
but will never be my family do.
How would you feel if some white girl showed up on your island,
saying, “Hello family,
teach me your ways because I’ve missed you.
One of your daughters was kidnapped and put in an orphanage by one of my fathers -
she had to leave you behind to escape them.
Then she married one.
Here I am, family,
I love you.”

I am the whitest girl you know.
I wear tortoise shell glasses, knee-length skirts,
I write poetry, am an athiest, and pro-choice.
The list of my bloodlines is impressive and inexhaustible:
Henry the Eighth, Charlemagne,  Jerusalem, Brandonburg, Mayflower, Washington Irving -
I can play six degrees to My Family Used to Own That Country all day
and never lose.

I am the whitest girl you know,
who is furious she wasn’t birthed two generations earlier
to carry her grandmothers bones back to her people,
that no one bothered to write down the name of the Cree woman
who married the fur trader as he passed through Saskatchewan -
arguing that generational racism doesn’t make it right in Alabama,
you don’t need hate to be a racist,
why the hell are Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben still on boxes and bottles
in bandana haircloths and string bowties.

I am a fighter because every time her grandmother calls you nothing more than skin tone,
I end up throwing kitchen plates at the wall,
I wear my skin as a badge of privilege,
so I get to say “No, other white people, you are not allowed to talk like that anymore
With your blueblood lines and Tory leanings and English paradise,
Kerouac-worshipping, Komen Cure running, Asians-aren’t-minorities-they’re-just-like-us households
Girl in the mirror, you aren’t allowed to talk about me like that.”

My badge is pressed silver gum wrappers.
It falls to dust and tears so easily.
I’m uncomfortable in it.
I cling to what blood of the earth I can find in me,
because my other blood built houses to find God,
and I found him first in the trees.

Yesterday, English was not enough,
so I went to Crown Heights to feel human,
to allow myself to be so much more than what you see.