my fist tasted teeth for the first time in an Idaho parking lot.

he told me my name was spit and that he was going to kill me

I believed it while he was slamming my head against the asphalt just before I lost consciousness I thought of my mother
wondered how to protect her eyes from the bruises I now carried

in high school I used to believe that the sun hated me while my closest friends found ways to tease me for the melanin
that refused to vanish from my skin, jokes hurt more than fists, when the ball fell across the fence I started climbing my
P.E. teacher yelled out oh yeah Myrlin he's good at jumping fences everyone laughed

Mexican was always a dirty word to me I changed brands of soap frequently but you cannot wash away pain when it bears
the name epidermis and I am this runt child the one New Mexico left in a dumpster because my tongue can I bend
properly the runt child Idaho built into a prison so I could learn how to hate the walls and fences of this body

I told my parents nothing I held it all inside sewed my mouth shut with clandestine middle fingers and missed curfews told
myself this pain was not real let it sit inside my chest like a time bomb waiting to explode while I shoved my spirit into
empty bottles of vodka

Beneath Two Skies By Myrlin Hepworth

I used to stare in the mirror and tell myself I don't believe in ghosts I've walked a long ways by now using crooked tree
please don't place me in your boxes it's not easy to be the runt child of two worlds whose skies could never love me
when I was young my mother told me that I was brown that some people would fear me and not understand what I was branches for balance and ballpoint pens to help nurse this pain away
she did not tell me about the crooked tree branches or the empty bottles of vodka but that day I believe she saw them
somewhere in my eyes headed across this road I would inevitably travel in New Mexico my fingers spent summer
so I will not spill ink in the boxes that represent make-believe words like Hispanic or Caucasian I will not choose one
morning scanning rosary beads thanking God for my family
in Idaho my father taught me how to worship in the forest his fly rod knew how to coax out purpose with each bend parent over the other I love them both
placing insect imitations above fishes noses he told me the river was deep and that I needed to learn how to wade
carefully some would come to call him gringo I just called him dad
I spent years digging shards of broken mirrors out of my skin trying to put pieces back together so I can find the strength
I remember along fishing trips when we traveled through backwards towns were white men there who wore of fear
than they did of love used to gag at the sight of my father's pale hand interlocked with these brown knuckles that then and courage to say that my mother and my father are both beautiful and so am I
did not know the taste of teeth
my mother told me that they would fear me but I was the one trembling when my distant cousins collected crooked
tree branches beat me outside of a wedding reception in New Mexico because they thought me different while
swinging sticks formed red canyons across my flesh I thought of my father's fly rod wished I could have held his pale
hand through the entire beating
on the ride home from New Mexico to Idaho I wondered if this is what the middle passage felt like. At age 9 I
understood that bleeding was the cathedral visit often
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