Intersection–Falcon Heights, Minnesota

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“In July 2016, St. Anthony, Minn., police officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, a St. Paul suburb. The world watched the aftermath, live on Facebook. Yanez was charged in Castile’s death. Jurors found him not guilty on all charges on June 16, 2017.”

–MPR News

i.
Larpenteur at Fry–9 blocks
west of my old bike route to work.

ii.
Late spring, summer, fall, pedaling for three years
on maple-lined streets. Stopping for little toys
in the road to bring home to my son.
The tiny plastic dalmatian puppy
covered in grime. At work, within a year
of getting the tenure-track job
I’d struggled for three years to get,
I was terrified of being laid off.
Law school admissions falling and falling,
staff under threat for months before the fateful
meeting, the surreal champagne. And then
fear widening, sealing the untenured into its echo chamber.

But my forty-five minute bike ride–
from our stucco farmhouse with its treed, double-lot–
the oldest house on the block–to the brick liberal arts college–
those were moments I could think–could wrap
my body into action. Right at the end of our long driveway
onto County Road B East, then left onto Victoria, which jogs
to the left at Larpenteur,
the busiest street on my route. I would get off my bike,
push the pedestrian button, and walk across. The only time
I was ever scared in three years of riding was further on–
entering the shadowy Lexington Tunnel,
cut, mortared stones and cement arched above the bike trail, the worry
that someone could be lurking, but no one ever was.
My fear would muscle my legs into fast orbits
for those few seconds of shade.

C., who taught at the other St. Paul law school,
once told me biking to work was too dangerous because of all the traffic.
I looked back at her silently, the way I do when I know I’ll keep doing something
in the face of disagreement and don’t know quite what to say.
Inside I could hear my brain–my heart–refusing to relent.

M. and I knew we were leaving for a year before we had to,
and I kept hoping something would change–more law students would
sign up, more donations would come in, more senior professors
would retire, the one who planned to die in his office would change his mind.
We registered Z. for school because of the hope,
signing him up with the local district and also
entering a lottery for St. Paul’s JJ Hill Montessori. He was on the wait-list,
and the summer we left–2014–he got in. Sick to my stomach
with sorrow at the news.

iii.
JJ Hill was where Philando Castile worked as a culinary supervisor,
having started in district food services at 19. He was promoted
after eleven years–a month before Z. would have gone there. Z. would have been one of the kids
who’d laughed at his jokes and then–too early–become intimate with confusion and grief.

Castile’s dream he said during the supervisory interview was to
“sit at the other side of this table.” Did he also dream that someday
the police would leave him alone, stop filling suburban coffers
with his hard-earned paychecks, stop trumping up fines and give him
a break? His sister said it was partly the big sedans he liked to drive,
his dreads that gave them license. Thirteen years of driving and forty-six
stops, $6,000 in fines that he struggled to pay off. Only six of the stops
for things that could be noticed prior to sirens and flashing lights.
That leaves forty for driving while black, his life a time-bomb
awaiting eruption of some officer’s fear. The last officer saw
a wide nose and fastened on robbery suspect. And the jury
refused to penalize fear, clutching instead the collective belief that fear
justifies anything. Fear that goes back hundreds of years to the slavers’
estimation that black men were more valuable than black women–
purchasing preferences birthing the buyers’ own fear. And all of us still living under it,
this slavers’ creed, this disease. Fear construed

as alibi. Imagine how he must have tensed up when he got into his car.
Imagine how lucky we all are that he could still manage to joke
with the pupils and serve the district well all those years
after he graduated from that school. “My son loved this city, and this city killed my son,”
his mother said after the verdict.

iv.
For three years, I crossed Larpenteur nine blocks east
of that intersection. No harm ever befell me.
Unlike in Michigan where motorists sometimes screamed
at me for biking or Seattle where a car pulled in front of me and stopped
on Yesler’s steep downward slope and I hit the wrong brake
and sailed over the handle bars, the unruffled driver continuing to park.
Three years without knowing the price of my peace.

  • “Intersection–Falcon Heights, Minnesota” was first published in Mobius: The Journal of Change

Beholden

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he exited my body and immediately knew
what he wanted to do. one nipple cracked and bled.
the other became tender as sunburn.
he took hour-long breaks,
but it felt constant to me. in the hospital,
lactation specialists hovered, offered nipple protectors,
hydrogel pads, recommended formula supplements, rest
for my damaged breast. i slathered on wool wax,
ruined shirts with nipple-range
grease spots.

months later, when skin began to heal, his mouth
became a strange tickle.

once in those early months, i took a plane cross country
and stowed my pump in checked baggage. before the flight was done,
my breasts had become baseballs,
ached like they might explode. i remember pained small talk
with the taxi driver en route to the hotel, squelching tears
during check in.

somewhere around six months, he started to toy with me,
pulling and turning one nipple while he sucked the other.

at eight months, he screamed at the ensconcing
of the nursing cover. i became a reluctant
exhibitionist. men in restaurants stared. a woman
glared unabashedly. now he’s almost three.
i unsnap my bra, push him on, and try not to see myself
from others’ eyes. to some, i’m all body,
exactly what i never wanted to be.

he strokes my unused breast like a lover,
kneads my belly contemplatively.
his fingers search out the left side’s mole,
which he rubs like a rabbit’s foot.

sometimes i try to stop him. others, i wonder
if i’ll ever be loved this much again.

 

“Beholden” was first published in Bared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts (Les Femmes Folles Books 2017).

damage

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sometimes it snows in the mountains
although the valley stays dry, so you awake
and, driving wherever you have to go, see
blankets of snow in the foothills coating clearcut patches
between tall evergreens. the snow–alternating with stands
of mostly bare trees–makes a quilt that eases the eye.
i had almost the same feeling tonight
soaking up pink-orange sunset that had been enhanced,
i could see from the thick haze surrounding it,
by refinery smoke. even rain-filled tractor tracks
striping sky across green field gravitate my eyes.
i feel sorry for myself sometimes, compelled not just
to love the world but to admire the damage. once
i dreamed i saw earth from afar, and, in places where blue
ocean should’ve been, there was a deep earthy brown
instead. in bewilderment and panic, i could only repeat
but that’s beautiful too. and it was.

 

“damage” was first published in Olympia’s Works in Progress newspaper.

Interior Architecture

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It’s almost meaningless to say the house was bulldozed,
that house with its pale yellow clapboard exterior, deceptive somehow.
White shutters with red shapes, rotting window boxes.
It was a place that a child could not invite friends to,
it was a prison of artificial walls, the stacks of newspapers, old mail, the boxes
of who knows what, the careful stepping of the child through those rooms.
The child didn’t notice the careful steps, how they became part of her.
This is not surprising, this is how learning happens, without noticing.
The crowding happens that way too, slowly. It feels worse
when someone else sees it, like the man fixing the furnace
looking at the girl, now ten, and she at him, wordlessly.
And she imagined pity, but those were her own thoughts talking.
What passed between them was clear-eyed, steady, indecipherable.

It was decades later that the house was bulldozed
by the buyer of the land, after the tax foreclosure. There are likely records
to prove it, permits and the bills of a contractor, filed somewhere.
One can even drive by where the house used to be and see a better house,
the yard almost filled with its oversized footprint. It’s nicer,
the father of the little girl says to his grown up daughter,
and the pleasure that tinges his sentence estranges her.

But the house is inside the child and the grown up woman. She sits in the study
of her new house in another state and feels the old house in her.
Looking out the window at night, the street light a few yards off
evokes it, the dirt driveway with a long, narrow swath of yard on the other side.
She remembers her mother telling her about watching the bulldozer, how the new owner
threatened to call the police if she touched her piles of stuff, now littering the yard,
while neighbors sifted. The daughter knows her own stuff was in there too and that all of this is true,
but the house still frames her eyes, those crumbling shutters.
Looking out of her window at night, she feels herself within it.
She still walks carefully, without thinking about it.
What is it that loss takes from us?

 

“Interior Architecture” was first published in Altered Scale.

“blue”

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if i said bluebirds and steller’s jays are not really blue,
that blueness is a trick their feathers are engineered
to reflect, would this mean anything
to you? as if other blueness were a state of being– Read More