american gothic

the star

in 2043 my kid is not gonna be as sad as me, cause they'll have figured out how to make sugar free taste just as sweet. and heaven will meet us down here.

in 2021 Houston has a real ass problem now cause the white supremacists were worried about latino aliens from a secret Costco on Mars, but didn't believe in climate change, and now Texas is underwater. so what? we banish them. we move inland. we figure out how to live together.

in 2036 all our air is clean, we know how to stop giving the Earth bronchitis. they take all the carbon emissions at the end of everyone's old Honda and pump them through old vacuum tubes, twists and mad scientist apparatus, blue beakers and bubbles, and they make it into brown crayons so we can draw pictures for our children and show them how smoggy this fucking city used to be.

in 2016, Trump was elected president. we took to the streets that us nigga's get grown on, we told the world that he was not our president, and the world told us to grow up.

I am grown up. I have grown up. I have grown up with people following me around the grocery store, I have grown up with my father getting pulled over for, oh you know, being black, I have grown up with my brother jokingly saying "They didn't kill me!" every time he comes home from late night walks to the grocery store. And everyone laughs but not because it's funny, because that's when we realize we've been holding our breath the whole time he was gone. you wanna whip niggas so bad that you made a broken time machine to take you back to a time when it was ok. I can't grow up that way, in a broken time machine. How am I supposed to grow up when you keep turning back the clock?

in 2021 we are 20. and when we are 20 we throw around slang like people throw coins into fountains. when I am 20, I have a part time job at the pet store, and I talk shit like people talk their feelings out to the goldfish. when I am 17, I am scared, running from the crime scene of severed girl limbs, boy parts their DNA all over me, of my hands between my thighs, the evidence is dripping out of me, I'm running so fast I can't find my right shoe, thinking how I'm gonna get it together in just 3 years, not realizing I'm not gonna. I am a nigga, and I am told to stay off the streets, but I am a nigga, and I own the street.

I'm gonna run. Not from the cops, I'm gonna run for no damn reason. Down the alleys and backstreets just to feel the subway rush push up my sundress. Away from the kid I'm babysitting while he chases me in his scary batman pajamas. Into the bagel shop cause I'm hella excited about the cholesterol buildup I'm about to catch from this red velvet cream cheese.

I'm gonna meet people at the laundromat who dress like it's 1983, and borrow their clothes if I pinky promise to get laid in 'em, get advice on how to lay my edges, and get my palms read by a 4 year old while her mom separates the whites.

I'm gonna be with people in the street and run around really late and be in neon 50's style diners that good christians used to kick me out of for giving midnight a pulse. But it's 2021, or some shit like that, and somebody shot Trump, and that same somebody is now president of the United States, and now I stretch my African legs that aren't running in fear anymore, i play makeshift checkers with the sugar packets and ketchup bottles you used to pour on my head in 1963 for giving this midnight skin a pulse.

with bloodshot eyes on a sugar high I haven't come down from for just about all of my 20's, and wear my dirty sneakers and have my hair in my face. Or maybe I finally chopped it. and someone's arm on my shoulder and someone else's laugh in my ear, and skin, and the smell of laundry detergent from my fresh clothes, mixing with dying flowers while I sit there with my friends and drink some cherry vanilla coke at 2 am. We take pictures of it, flash pictures, kinda ugly and overexposed, and random people we don't know in the background, and my eyes in mid-blink and your mouth in mid-talk, your hands awkward like when you kiss her for the first time and don't know where to put them. eyesore. like a bad haircut. but not care how I look.

I wanna take pictures of this, and save them in a shoebox, so that maybe 20 years later my kid will be digging around in my shit and find them and say wow with a smile, and post one on instagram with a sweet caption "my mom when she was my age." the ugly one. the one I nearly choked on my shrimp crackers when I first saw, why the fuck did I used to do my eyeliner like that, I nearly threw them out while we ate Chinese food in some mad shady dudes apartment, and leaned together like sleepy pups while we went through the ones we had developed even though you dropped out of art school and you have a whole red room to yourself, and you laughed so hard when my funny lookin' face showed up on that blank photo paper.

the wicked ugly one. the one that made my nose look wide, wide enough to catch the coins and the Brooklyn, gasoline, girl gang slang and the shrimp crackers. the one I didn't like, and stuck at the bottom of the pile, with my smile too big for my teeth to be so yellow. flash photo, and overexposed, and grainy where it's not blinding white like raw milk. like dawning morning sun. like melted vanilla ice cream in summer streets, some toddler up in heaven just dropped it on my sons head. it melts down his eyelashes, in his mouth like "mom did it, I think I can too."

and I'm okay with that sugar high, kid. you don't ever have to come down.