Between

folded into girlhood out of parchment paper

bare bark belly dancing brown untouched

by sun and man. bitter brown but not

coffee or chocolate or butterscotch

brown. raw sugar calloused palm

barefoot in some cash crop

somewhere brown.

Blue Ivy brown. the daughters of

big-lipped fathers brown like Flint water

crisis color brown like copper pipes. two buckets

on one splintering stick. starved root and mulch and parched

flower blossoming anyway brown. black sheep in the baby’s

breath brown.

black brown.

and the fine

fabricated

line

between.

 

 
 
***

The Brown-Skinned girl Van Morrison Never Wrote About

I’d bet she was warm and wet like

the timber frame of a chapel in Georgia in summer

 

And the mist fell off her skin like

she took each step out of a scalding bath

 

Which is how the dew came those days like

Tuesday’s child born the Thursday before

 

Especially those days

 

Especially hidden; shaped like

things that disappear

 

Which is how she left his memories like

rock raw sugar

 

And somewhere among them made love to him upon the very ground she’d grown out of like losing virginity in a childhood bed

 

But what was her name?

 

Shaniqua

Latoya

Deenaysia

Dawanda

 

Shanice

Lashauna

 

Sha, La

something

 

Sha, La

 

Something

 

 
 
***

Hair

You two-way, three-way, four-way stop. You cross

roads. Let mommy show you how to look both

ways. The span of your hips. The stride of your step.

The color of your lipstick. The color of your father.

The color of your face in March will change by August

will fade in Autumn. Fade in. Haircut. Hair weave.

Six hundred dollars and a dream. I will have no clip-in

hairpiece in this house. No thick headed sons, no

tender headed daughters. Rubber bands and water.

Wide tooth comb that never gathers your curls

the way it would a white girl’s. Like a handful of

wedding silk.

 

By the time you’re born, Kylie Jenner will have invented

the corn row, and what are we going to do with all that hair

that burns like a flag? And when they touch it? Whine and

won’t sit behind it? I won’t have it in my house. No thick headed

sons, no tender headed daughters. And I pray to six hundred

dollars you are born with a good head on your shoulders. That

you won’t have your mother’s hair.