I.
She grew old in the white suburb
with only her own stereotypes to live up to and
with reflectionless glass shards
for eyes
on a faceless stretched mask
that served as a scab.

Her teachers told her:

we all have one soul, child
we are all the same, let us not THINK, not HASTEN to the bloody past-
OUR bloody path
and remember, this is not the city-
even you’re your blackest neighbor
has a white soul-
Rejoice!

II.
From her trips to the city she learned something simple:
not all blacks are whiteblacks like in her own suburb and that who are not-
those who are blackblacks-
are the homeless drugged out murders who rape white women
and apologize for nothing.

Said her neighbor:

They who live on street corners:
they are not men.
They are destined to die!

Young fast hardened and quick
as their leather skin melts into the dirt that they lay in--
their cardboard houses crumbling
as they even in their dying moments they try to reach toward the ceiling like volcanoes to POP open that seam and see
the stars.

Those freeloading lazy scoundrels
are simply byproducts of the white man’s
natural selection, he said, and then whispering like a prayer:

Those bastards DESERVED to die.

III.
There is something to be said too, for an identity.
For legacy and ancestors and a past:
but white girls don’t have histories:
they have futures that
promise to hide shame.

And soon, if they are lucky they will go from riding princess bikes
to popping out other white babies
who they too will coo to sleep.

And maybe their fathers, like hers, will laugh and talk
about reverse racism and how
white privilege is a myth.

IV.
The boy sat before her-
he was a blackblack one from the D-
and his face steeled as he told
about the times he had been treated
like an animal.

Nigger they called him
but he too was human.
He didn’t share her soul:
anger in response to insult to identity is pure and worthy as
her ill-disguised complacency with existence
that bruised her soul was not.

She sighed at his passion as she envied
his dignity.
She thought:
So THIS is what it means to be man!

V.
From her scab
some dried blood fell
and achingly two green eyes peeped out and
so as the roots of the city pushed and pulled on her suburb
she too learned to grow:
only steadied, halted
by her own self-effacing indulgence
of guilt.