Jehovah’s Witnesses drive by in SUVs, creeping up and down my block all weekend. I hide behind the blinds, doing them a favor; I’m an apostate, dangerous to their faith.

00 First Child

I am not wearing white.

Everyone else is in ivory, alabaster: my mother, my aunts, relations who claim to have met me at birth—how familiar you are, Sonali, they say, as I try in vain to disguise my five-year-old bewilderment—everyone but me, it seemed, was dressed in white.

You drove through the city where your mother arrived decades earlier, her clothes tied up in a bedsheet, her Chinese-to-English dictionary dog-eared on the page with your name. You passed fields pearled with people, stopping at a gas station where everyone stared at you, the man in a truck…

Over their twice-monthly pint of Guinness, two friends discover that their babies-to-be, the first for each man, are due only a week apart and that both will be daughters. The fair-haired friend’s happy exultation touches off a series of congratulations from the other patrons; the bartender, who has little girls of his own, serves them several more rounds on the house.

I hear chains as they approach. There are other rez boys around, so I know I will pay for staring, but I stare. Boys like us are bloodied here. Boys like Micah and me.

When Angela cornered Lucy in the girls’ locker room and said, “White girl!” there was a moment when Lucy wanted to tell her how she wasn’t white or black, only the perfect mix of both, which is what her father liked to say. Instead, she turned away as her mother had taught her. Her mother would say, “Don’t fight. Be better than those petty girls, baby.”

The Café Delice menu was just big enough to hide Rosemary’s face if she ducked down. She had made sure to sit with her back to the window, so that the afternoon sun fell directly on her quarry: the late middle-aged couple sitting two tables in front of her.

Sometimes, I throw a light on my bloody history and see myself running through the street of my childhood. Sweat and water dripping from head to toe while my body cruises through space and time with great speed, and passion tingling down my hollowed soul. I ran toward the cathedral.

The thump rocked the concrete walls of Helene’s grocery shop, unleashing echoes from her years living at Prospect Manor, a low-income apartment complex in Oakland, California. There, youths had haunted the basketball grounds at all hours, seemingly drawing energy from dribbles on the cracked asphalt, which harbored in its crevices ancient gum and cigarette butts.

There’s something in the woods behind the house. Laura can hear it through the open window underneath the patter of rain as she nurses the baby. The thud of paws against the ground.

—a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner.

God cut a slit in their souls/ Baptists say
is the gateway to hell—
some black hole defiling their rigid

Enter the dust devils, the dervish grasses,

prairie schooners creeping in their ruts.

Enter sod busters and ploughshares,

settlers in dugouts raving in the wind,

Outdoors in my sun-blasted xeriscape, a sapling

shivers with memories of green rain, greenery

of jade dishes, of scallion chins afloat in a bowl

of seaweed miso-broth, of uranium milk glass

Before bed, my smallyets ask if I’ll meet them

at the signpost we create in sleep, & when

they wake, they’ll ask do I remember.

The immortal dogs of my fictions,

exhausted from centuries of fetch,

are laid out in puddles of sun

How to rebuild me when I fall apart
After Roger Reeves

I want a spine lined with cement,

Like a key

change

terror goes

polyphonic

as a frog heart

beating without the frog

jughea d potted s hell he ad precious po tted jug pot she rd shard pitch er she ll woven s he l l it was multiple
and my head was a joke my head was a joke? my head became a small vessel and a precious metal was put in there

You can count on the crows

before sunset, bickering.

This is my faith.