The Poet X – WINNER OF THE CILIP CARNEGIE MEDAL 2019. Элизабет Асеведо
Читать онлайн книгу.
“You Don’t Have to Do Anything You Don’t Want to Do.”
What I Say to Ms. Galiano After She Passes Me a Kleenex
Going Home
Aman, Twin, and Caridad
Divine Intervention
Homecoming
My Mother and I
Stronger
Slam Prep
Ms. Galiano Explains the Five Rules of Slam:
Xiomara’s Secret Rules of Slam:
The Poetry Club’s Real Rules of Slam:
Poetic Justice
The Afternoon of the Slam
At the New York Citywide Slam
Celebrate with Me
Assignment 5—First and Final Draft
Acknowledgments
Friday, August 24
The summer is made for stoop-sitting
and since it’s the last week before school starts,
Harlem is opening its eyes to September.
I scope out this block I’ve always called home.
Watch the old church ladies, chancletas flapping
against the pavement, their mouths letting loose a train
of island Spanish as they spread he said, she said.
Peep Papote from down the block
as he opens the fire hydrant
so the little kids have a sprinkler to run through.
Listen to honking cabs with bachata blaring
from their open windows
compete with basketballs echoing from the Little Park.
Laugh at the viejos—my father not included—
finishing their dominoes tournament with hard slaps
and yells of “Capicu!”
Shake my head as even the drug dealers posted up
near the building smile more in the summer, their hard scowls
softening into glue-eyed stares in the direction
of the girls in summer dresses and short shorts:
“Ayo, Xiomara, you need to start wearing dresses like that!”
“Shit, you’d be wifed up before going back to school.”
“Especially knowing you church girls are all freaks.”
But I ignore their taunts, enjoy this last bit of freedom,
and wait for the long shadows to tell me
when Mami is almost home from work,
when it’s time to sneak upstairs.
I am unhide-able.
Taller than even my father, with what Mami has always said
was “a little too much body for such a young girl.”
I am the baby fat that settled into D-cups and swinging hips
so that the boys who called me a whale in middle school
now ask me to send them pictures of myself in a thong.
The other girls call me conceited. Ho. Thot. Fast.
When your body takes up more room than your voice
you are always the target of well-aimed rumors,
which is why I let my knuckles talk for me.
Which is why I learned to shrug when my name was replaced by insults.
I’ve forced my skin just as thick as I am.
Is Mami’s favorite way to start a sentence
and I know I’ve already done something wrong
when she hits me with: “Look, girl . . .”
This time it’s “Mira, muchacha, Marina from across the street
told me you were on the stoop again talking to los vendedores.”
Like usual, I bite my tongue and don’t correct her,
because I hadn’t been talking to the drug dealers;
they’d been talking to me. But she says she doesn’t
want any conversation between me and those boys,
or any boys at all, and she better not hear about me hanging out
like a wet shirt on a clothesline just waiting to be worn
or she would go ahead and be the one to wring my neck.
“Oíste?” she asks, but walks away before I can answer.
Sometimes I want to tell her, the only person in this house
who isn’t heard is me.
I’m the only one in the family
without a biblical name.
Shit, Xiomara isn’t even Dominican.
I know, because I Googled it.
It means: One who is ready for war.
And truth be told, that description is about right
because I even tried to come into the world
in a fighting stance: feet first.
Had to be cut out of Mami
after she’d given birth
to my twin brother, Xavier, just fine.
And my name labors out of some people’s mouths
in that same awkward and painful way.
Until I have to slowly say:
See-oh-MAH-ruh.
I’ve learned not to flinch the first day of school
as teachers get stuck stupid trying to figure it out.
Mami