To Breslin
To the little girl I babysit.
Notice, I did not say
“The little black girl.”
I did not leave this out
because I am colorblind.
I left this out because
our difference in skin color
should have no relevance here;
not when I influence you
the way I know I do.
That being said,
there are some things,
some little tips,
I’d like you to remember
as you learn and grow.
Your curly black hair
that everyone adores,
they will one day tell you
to tame, like an animal.
Don’t do it.
Let your hair be free,
one curl for every man
and every woman who was
held down in chains.
Your hair is their freedom.
The kids in your school
will hold their arms up to yours,
wanting to compare
the tones of your complexions.
Let them.
Show the difference, and
let them know you are proud.
The blood of your ancestors
runs hot in your veins,
darkening your skin.
Your first name is Irish,
more theirs than yours.
They’ll call you new names,
names meant to hurt you.
Stand strong.
Look them in the eyes
and remind them that you,
you who they scorn,
are not the gunshots if
they are not the lynchings.
And though my skin
is much lighter than yours,
I will carry what you give me,
I will help when I can.
You need only call my name.
But I cannot be there
with every tick of the clock,
and so I wrote you this poem.
I just beg you, please, darling,
don’t let them tame you.
The Penny Angel
A spark of copper
interrupts concrete,
catching the eyes
of those who pass by.
A young girl bends
to pick up the coin,
her eyes bright with
the delight of her find.
She turns to her mom,
and holds up her prize.
It lays there heads-up,
a sure sign of luck.
Her mother grins down,
while the young girl asks,
“Mommy, who left this
penny here for me?”
Her mother replies,
“Why, my darling,
the Penny Angel dropped
it down from Heaven.”
The Penny Angel
sat, her wingless back
pressing to the wall,
grinning as the two
went on their way.
Hunter
The funeral had drained her: she needed a mystery. She hadn’t been in the attic for a few months. Although she’d been up there several times, it always seemed to present something new. Besides, it would be better to start sorting through her parents’ things now before the initial shock wore off and the pain set in. Now was the perfect time. The evening activities had settled, and she was left to her own devices.
Kate had been in the attic for two hours before she found the letters. The stack was thicker than any of the books in the house, all of them handwritten on paper of various colors and sizes. They had been in a box under her father’s old medical books, leaving their coating of dust much thinner than almost everything else in the hot, stuffy top floor of the Blackwoods’ house.
Carefully, as not to rip the fragile papers, Kate lifted them out of the box and set them on the floor in front of her. She folded her legs underneath her and took the top letter for closer inspection. The paper felt thin and soft, like it had been read over countless times. The handwriting was pretty messy, and her first thought was that whoever wrote it was probably around her age. She turned it over in her hands a few times until the obvious questions pushed through her exhaustion: who wrote these letters, and who received them? This was the mystery she needed.
Her eyebrows pulled together as she lifted the paper closer to her face. The lack of light made it hard to read any of the sloppy cursive, so she reached over to grab her flashlight, shining it directly on the first line: Dear Dex,
Kate’s expression slacked a little in surprise. “Dex” was a nickname for her older brother, Xavier. He’d gotten it because when Kate was little she was unable to say his real name and had assigned one of her own. She shifted the beam of her flashlight to find the date: 08/04/07.
Kate would have been seven by then, so the nickname would have reached beyond the household. Dex would have been a teenager. The scribbles on the paper were about that age-range. She flipped it over to the writing on the other side, bringing her flashlight to the very last two words of the letter: Love, Hunter.
Who the hell was Hunter?
Kate set the letter back on top of the pile and rested her hands in her lap. She stared at the stack of paper, illuminated by the beam of her flashlight, and let her mind sort through the possibilities. Whoever Hunter was, he had to be about the same age as Dex. They also would have had to have been pretty close if Hunter had been willing to write three novels worth of letters. She pushed back her bangs and leaned forward a little, turning over several more papers and setting them aside in a different pile. They were all from Hunter. She chewed her lip. If they were this close, then why had Kate never heard of him?
She debated whether or not she should go downstairs and ask Dex about it. She was pretty sure she had heard him typing when she passed his room on the way up. She loved his poems and had always tried to avoid interrupting his creative process, but she had made a greater effort to keep this up in the last month since their parents died. The thought of her parents made her stomach turn over and her eyes burn. She swallowed the lump in her throat and made up her mind. If she didn’t start this investigation soon, she was going to go insane.
She blinked the tears out of her eyes and stuck the end of the flashlight between her teeth, gathering the letters up in her arms. She looked around the attic to make sure she wasn’t leaving anything other than her unfinished work; she would come back for that later. When she had cleared herself, she started carefully back down the ladder, holding on with her one free hand.
It wasn’t until she was in the light of the hallway that she realized how dirty she was. Dust streaked her skin and clung to her clothes, and she was certain that it probably thickened her hair as well. She used her palm to wipe away the one tear that tracked down her face. Her mother would have been furious. She folded the ladder back up into the ceiling and took the flashlight out of her mouth, clicking it off and stuffing it into her back pocket. She adjusted her grip on the letters and headed for her own bedroom, saving the expedition to Dex’s room for when she didn’t look like a dust rag.
She knew she was probably tracking dirt into the carpet the entire way to her room, but she didn’t care. They would have to move out soon, anyway. Kate paused outside of her brother’s closed bedroom door. When she held her breath, she could hear the soft clicking of Dex’s fingers on his keyboard. The corner of her mouth twitched, unable to decide whether to smile or cry again. She looked down and took a deep breath, stepping forward to continue down the hallway. She elbowed her own door open and dumped the letters onto her bed.
She looked around her room that had felt less and less her own every day since the accident. There were her Sherlock Holmes posters on the wall. On her dresser there were framed photos of her and her family frozen in different stages of life. Taped to the wall over her bedframe was her favorite one: a picture of seven-year-old Dex holding Kate the day she was born. They were nestled into the hospital bed beside their mom, their dad leaning over the railing and smiling at the camera. Her bookshelf was still stuffed full of detective books, and her laptop with Fox and the Hound stickers still sat on her desk beside her Cinderella lamp she’d had since she was six. But no matter how familiar the objects in the room were, the vacancy in her chest was too unfamiliar, and made the entire house uncharted territory.
She tried her best to ignore the smiling faces inside the picture frames. She grabbed a clean outfit, making sure that it was just as comfortable as the one she was already wearing. She took the clothes with her to the bathroom to change into them after her shower. It was one of the quickest she’d ever taken. Her heart starting to pick up it’s pace in anticipation of her latest case. She didn’t even bother to dry her hair when she got out, she just hurried to her room to get the letters.
Kate gathered them up in her arms once again, her eyes darting over the words but not reading them. She wanted to know the story, and she wanted to know who Hunter was and how he and Dex knew each other, but it felt wrong to read through the letters before talking to Dex. She wouldn’t want him reading through her journals, after all. Privacy was one of the few lines that had never been crossed between the two of them, right after never sharing each other's secrets.
Kate went back down the hallway and again paused in front of her brother’s room. He was still typing, but the ticking stopped when she knocked lightly on the door. She heard the plastic of his office chair creaking.
“Come in,” Dex said from inside.
Kate nudged her way into the room, chewing on her lip again. Dex was leaning back in his chair, his body turned to face her directly. His room held less of his personality than her room did, but he had only moved back a few weeks ago. He had a few pictures on his desk of their family, and the room smelled very strongly of vanilla, which came from the candles he had on his dresser. These were currently providing the only light in the room beside his laptop screen. He hadn’t unpacked much else. There was no way a twenty-three-year-old in college could afford the upkeep of the two-storied house. They’d already sold it.
Dex rubbed his eyes rimmed in red, dark shadows beneath them. His hair was a mess of brunette curls that fell lower on his forehead than he liked it. It was the same shade of brown as her own. They both looked like their father except for Dex’s green eyes, which were currently glancing between her face and the papers she held.
“What’cha got?” He asked. He sounded nearly as exhausted as he looked.
“Can I turn on the light?” She asked.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
Kate stepped over to the wall and flicked on the light. They both winced away from it for a moment, but their eyes quickly adjusted. Kate moved to sit on the foot of Dex’s bed, setting the letters down beside her. He walked his chair closer, his eyebrows pulled together in curiousity.
“I found these in the attic.” Kate said. “I didn’t read them because they’re all addressed to you, but-what’s wrong?”
By the look on Dex’s face, you would have thought he’d just witnessed someone being stabbed. He was pale enough that she could see his freckles, and his eyes had widened quite noticeably. She immediately felt guilty, even though she wasn’t sure she had even done anything wrong. He opened his mouth to respond, but he just ended up shutting it again without saying anything.
“I didn’t read them.” Kate repeated, hoping he wasn’t about to have a heart attack or something. “I was just wondering who Hunter was.”
“He was- um- a… friend…” Dex stammered. “From school.” He added, regaining a bit of his composure. Kate looked at him worriedly. Dex ran both hands through his hair, flattening it out against the back of his neck. He kept glancing at her, but never met her eyes. The majority of his focus was on the letters beside her. His chest was rising and falling heavily under his t-shirt, and his right leg was bouncing up and down rapidly.
“If you guys were friends, why haven’t I heard of him?” She asked.
“We, uh, we weren’t very close.” Dex said, but he obviously knew how stupid it sounded; the regret was in his sigh that followed.
“Dex, the letters stack high enough they could work as a booster seat.” Kate replied, her voice gentle as she tried to avoid freaking him out any further. She took a deep breath.
“You know, if you’re gay, that’s fine. You can tell me.” She said. She could see his neck move as he forced himself to swallow.
“If I was, Aunt Kia wouldn’t let you stay with me.” He said, not quite admitting to it yet, but she could see it on his face.
“Yeah, well, who’s gonna tell her?” She asked him, with a pointed look. The corner of his mouth lifted a little like he wanted to laugh. He didn’t. He still avoided looking at her, letting his eyes rest on the letters for what felt like a very long time. Finally, he spoke.
“Do you remember Nicole Shields?” He asked. At last he lifted his eyes to meet hers.
“Your girlfriend in highschool.” Kate had always liked Nicole. She and Dex had been good friends as long as Kate could remember, and Nicole was one of the few people Kate had ever met who was able to juggle being both responsible and laid back at the same time. Even in middle school Nicole had been the one making sure everyone else got their homework done.
“Hunter is her older brother.” Dex said, shifting around a little awkwardly in his seat. Now the name started to ring some bells.
“Was he the one with the reddish brown hair who ended up moving to like, New Jersey or somewhere people never actually move to?” She asked, grinning a little. Dex let himself laugh this time, nodding.
“Yeah, that’s the one.” He said.
Another long moment of silence passed. Kate had only met Hunter maybe once or twice when she was with Nicole. She didn’t remember very much about him other than his hair that was always a mess and that the few times she’d seen he was wearing an animal claw necklace over some 80s band shirt. He had been nothing like his sister.
Kate pressed her lips together and looked at Dex. He was leaning forward with his fingers knitted together in his lap. The color had come back into his face, maybe a little too much, leaving his cheeks a little flushed. He kept rubbing his palms and crossed ankles together a bit awkwardly. Kate sat up a little, scooting closer to the edge of the bed so her fingers would curl over the edge.
“So, you and Hunter were like, a thing?” She asked, her lips curling into a grin on the word ‘thing’. Dex laughed under his breath.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think people have to know about it for it to be considered a ‘thing’.” He said. “But yeah.”
Kate nodded slowly. She had never suspected anything, but she couldn’t really say that she was surprised. Dex had never seemed to connect very well with any of the girls he’d dated. There had always been a kind of stiffness around his relationships, she had always just assumed that it was something else. Their mom had commented on it several times, saying how cute she thought it was. Kate felt kind of stupid now that she hadn’t put the pieces together sooner. Some detective she was.
“So, what happened?” She asked. “I mean, like…”
“Why did we break up?” Dex finished for her. She nodded. “Well, let’s just say that he wanted to know all of my secrets, not be one.”
Kate pushed her eyebrows together and shrugged while she asked, “Why didn’t you just tell us?”
“Do you really think Mom and Dad would have had anything to do with me if I did?” He asked, his voice tightening a little. He had a valid point. Their parents probably had the most southern-based values in the state of California. It was not irrational to assume that they would cut him off. “I would have told you, but I thought that if I told one person, I would start telling more than one person. I never told anyone but Hunter. I actually started dating Nicole because their parents were getting suspicious.”
Dex leaned back in his chair and sighed through his nose, running his hands over his hair again, pushing it down instead of messing it up. Kate looked back down at the stack of letters and over the sloppy handwriting. He had kept all of them. She was only sixteen, so she didn’t really have much relationship experience to go off of, but she was pretty sure that was weird, since they broke up and all.
“Okay,” She said. “But if you guys aren’t together anymore, why do you still have all of the letters?”
Dex shrugged, just a slight movement of his shoulders. “I don’t know. I guess it just felt wrong to throw them all away.” He said, his voice carrying reluctance. He wasn’t telling the whole truth. Dex was a terrible liar, and so leaving things out had always been his version of lying. She grew up learning how to tell when he was and wasn’t telling her everything.
“And…?” She said, drawing out her voice and leaning forward a little bit. “There has to be better reason than that.”
Dex shrugged again before pushing himself out of his chair. He hummed an “I don’t know” and walked over to his dresser to blow out the candles that were still burning on top of it. Kate sighed. She knew it wasn’t her business, but now she was too attached to the story to just let him off the hook. She hadn’t even asked half of her questions yet, but it was becoming clear that Dex wasn’t going to have the patience to answer them all anyway.
“Dex, come on.” She begged, folding her hands together and holding them under her chin. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
“No, you won’t,” he responded, turning to look at her again. “Because there’s nothing to tell. What time is it?”
She rolled her eyes but let him change the subject. She lifted up her left hand to look at the watch on her wrist. “It’s almost eleven,” she told him.
“Oh, good. So I can tell you to go to bed?” He asked. Part of it was sarcasm, but another part was genuine. He had been her unofficial guardian for only a month, and she’d been pretty self-sufficient for the most part. Most of his parenting knowledge came from Baby Daddy, which he’d been binge watching on Netflix.
"Well, yeah. I guess so,” she said with reluctance.
“Awesome, go to bed.” he said, stepping over to his desk to close his laptop before reaching up to rub his palms against eyes. He yawned.
“Fine,” Kate said, pushing herself off of his bed and stepping into his arms that were open for her. She hugged him back, and he kissed the top of her head. They exchanged “goodnight”s and “I love you"s, and then she left with the letters still in his room.
She didn’t sleep much that night between wondering about the letters and missing her parents. Perhaps the former was her purposefully masking the latter. Either way, she spent several hours that night staring at her ceiling. She lifted her eyes several times to look at the picture that still hung on tape above her headboard. Finally, she fell asleep with the image of her mom’s blue eyes and her dad’s warm smile vibrant behind her eyelids.
Mask of White Lies
Grandpa sits at the end
of the table, Grandma
always at his right.
I carry her name; my
brother carries Grandpa’s.
We are nothing alike.
We have cut ourselves
paper masks, and we
must always wear these
when we’re with them.
Our masks, posture and grace,
look nothing like our real
faces. We are just kids.
The questions are always
the same. The cycle
never ends. Yes, I am
getting big. Yes,
school is fine. Yes,
I do like croquet.
White lies.The worst
part is that if I took off
my mask and showed
them my real face,
they may never
speak with me again.
Maybe I want that.
But I keep my paper face
because my father still
loves them, and I love him.
I will not ruin him
in their judicious eyes
with who I really am.
A Love in Parallax
He begged her to touch him,
but not with her skin.
He wanted to feel
the galaxy of her mind
caress his broken soul.
She saw the void in his eyes,
and felt the dark matter
of his heart, but she was
drawn in by his cosmic smile,
and the way he said her name.
He watched her in awe,
traces of her left auroras
in the dark sky of his mind.
Every word she spoke lifted him
higher into her atmosphere.
She felt him clouding her capacity,
creating a greenhouse effect,
but she continued to connect
the constellations in his freckles.
She let herself love him.
He met the phases of her moon
and let her shift his tides,
but he desired more than the
stars in her eyes, he strived
to become her only sense of gravity.
She allowed her judgement to
be shadowed in the umbra
of his eclipse as they pressed
craters into the moons of each other,
and she fell blindly into his orbit.
He had reached the high
in her altitude and darkened
her spectrum. He had tilted
her axis and was losing his balance.
He craved a new zodiac connection.
She had fallen victim to his charm.
She fell into his magnetic wavelength,
but he is now light-years away, in the coma
of someone else’s comet. She had been left
to her own extinction.