For the Sonorous

Two black girls from Riverside, yet we take it upon ourselves to recite Florida Georgia Line’s “Holy” sitting in the front of a city bus headed home, but by recite I mean scavenge for the right lyrics because we have something to prove, because singing aloud distributes the burden, because those after-school nights where she scanned and I bagged were spent awake to whatever brewed over our heads as the song played every five minutes, low enough to assure the customers safety and for them to greet us warmly because everyone knows one good nigga, and no one wants to hear nigga while shopping through the dragon fruit or yo, I’m more rugged than slaveman boots, but by the time we turn down Loeb Street the chorus makes it to the seventeenth holy so my friend takes up the soprano like her mother taught her to when those good white women came to her home to see if her mother taught her anything, and we’re almost to her stop so like a kernel stuck between the teeth, we push with our tongues the last few words before the man wearing a red tracksuit throws his head back in annoyance like we ain’t welcome here, like we should know better, and we laugh as she steps off the bus without saying bye because we know it to be true, that you’d be waiting centuries trying to feel welcome in a home that isn’t truly your own, so on the bus we attempt to forget those nights where we walk up in the market defenseless, knowing we cannot afford this life & everyone relaxes while we sit behind the counters like produce on the shelves, ripe and waiting to be opened.

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This Ain’t No Singalong, But I’ll Still Teach You How to Count a Clip

 

To kick the truth to the young black youth speaks Inspectah Deck as I double knot my shoelaces and he versus me on spelling. Here, in the kitchen with recordings of Yo! MTV Raps is where I’m taught what it sounds like to be black. I carry these lessons on the walk to school, singing about dollars and rocks and bodies, my stutter snagging onto whatever told my mind otherwise. That’s what happens when you’re raised on smoke and paper and you’ve waited all your life for something to penetrate. Searching for anything coming at you live. No guitar strum or half-hearted drum, but more like an officer’s boot as it digs into a white woman’s face while I peek through my mother’s blinds. His fingers string around her neck in the safety of my own front lawn. She sits there, split open like my cracked lips the summer Mr. Lopez unbolted the fire hydrant, teaching our block the right way to give your body over. It is all communal. Even now as three more officers crowd around her. It doesn't take WuTang in the morning for me to know protect ya neck, to remind myself these are the badges kids in this hood earn, hands pinned to our chest like a cursed allegiance. Under god, disposable. Yet, I can't help but wonder what’s in her pockets. How much her life holds. What I’m missing. If she was also taught empathy, how to count a clip, to tell her mother thank you, or that the only difference between us is when she eventually figures out how much you have to take before you finally stop taking it.