golden brown summer skin wraps my body

              tight, dark knees lotioned in youth

blackness is implied by my curl,

our color contrasts

    my thick against her thin

I wanted braids,

she brushed a bushy ponytail

tied it to the back of my head

her eyes, big round, green and gray,

full of love and lonely,

mine were the mahogany iris discs that

followed the way she swayed

I am her babe, beautiful

gorgrous smorgeous, she calls into the air

dancing to brown sugar, Rolling Stones

    boombox blaring

out the kitchen window

I chase a rogue firefly, in the day,

*

Sometimes I am a desert

thirsting for drought end

bound to this earth

aging with it’s people.

My breath tasting the air’s water

For a drink of something true

I grew

Until the top of her head

touched my breast bone

if she tippy-toed.

I grew

Until I was a tree that she could climb up on

nerves pressed us into something other,

some other something

was uttered it unraveled

the her of she  from my I of me,

     She whispered

beneath a radio chatter

just low enough that her man would not overhear,

You     Nigger       Bitch.

my heart

beat into my head

my eyes, turned inside out

And then,

I was all grown up

Histories colors cut the chord

Created discord cut away at my shoulders had nothing for no one to stand on

I directed my words elsewhere, anywhere else

a yearlong break times three

Me

othered by the mother

   who,     I could suddenly see,

believed herself different

       from me

or maybe we are so much the same,