far rockaway
Robert only stays long enough
for my mother to thank him
for buying our tickets
for getting us home.
He does a fancy turn on his heel, aims
two pointer fingers at us
says, I’ll catch up with all of you later.
We tell him that he has to come back soon,
remind him of all the stuff he’s promised us
trips to Coney Island and Palisades Amusement Park,
a Crissy doll
with hair that grows, a Tonka toy, Gulliver’s Travels,
candy.
He says he won’t forget,
asks us if he’s a man of his word and
everyone except my mother
nods.
Hard not to miss my mother’s eyebrows,
giving her baby brother a look,
pressing her lips together. Once,
in the middle of the night, two policemen
knocked on our door, asking for Robert Leon Irby.
But my uncle wasn’t here.
So now my mother takes a breath, says,
Stay safe.
Says,
Don’t get into trouble out there, Robert.
He gives her a hug, promises he won’t
and then he is gone.
fresh air
When I get back to Brooklyn, Maria isn’t there.
She’s gone upstate, staying with a family,
her mother tells me, that has a pool. Then her mother
puts a plate of food in front of me, tells me
how much she knows I love her rice and chicken.
When Maria returns she is tanned and wearing
a new short set. Everything about her seems different.
I stayed with white people, she tells me. Rich white people.
The air upstate is different. It doesn’t smell like anything!
She hands me a piece of bubble gum with BUBBLE YUM
in bright letters.
This is what they chew up there.
The town was called Schenectady.
All the rest of the summer Maria and I buy only
Bubble Yum, blow
huge bubbles while I make her tell me story after
story about the white family in Schenectady.
They kept saying I was poor and trying to give me stuff,
Maria says. I had to keep telling them it’s not poor
where we live.
Next summer, I say. You should just come down south.
It’s different there.
And Maria promises she will.
On the sidewalk we draw hopscotch games that we
play using chipped pieces of slate, chalk
Maria & Jackie Best Friends Forever wherever
there is smooth stone.
Write it so many times that it’s hard to walk
on our side
of the street without looking down
and seeing us there.
p.s. 106 haiku
Jacqueline Woodson.
I’m finally in fourth grade.
It’s raining outside.
learning from langston
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.
—Langston Hughes
I love my friend
and still do
when we play games
we laugh. I hope she never goes away from me
because I love my friend.
—Jackie Woodson
the selfish giant
In the story of the Selfish Giant, a little boy hugs
a giant who has never been hugged before.
The giant falls
in love with the boy but then one day,
the boy disappears.
When he returns, he has scars on his hands and
his feet, just like Jesus.
The giant dies and goes to Paradise.
The first time my teacher reads the story to the class
I cry all afternoon, and am still crying
when my mother gets home from work that evening.
She doesn’t understand why
I want to hear such a sad story again and again
but takes me to the library around the corner
when I beg
and helps me find the book to borrow.
The Selfish Giant, by Oscar Wilde.
I read the story again and again.
Like the giant, I, too, fall in love with the Jesus boy,
there’s something so sweet about him, I want
to be his friend.
Then one day, my teacher asks me to come up front
to read out loud. But I don’t need to bring
the book with me.
The story of the Selfish Giant is in my head now,
living there. Remembered.
“Every afternoon, as they were coming from school,
the children used to go and play in the Giant’s garden . . .”
I tell the class, the whole story flowing out of me
right up to the end when the boy says,
“These are the wounds of Love . . .
“You let me play once in your garden, today you shall
come with me to my garden, which is Paradise . . .”
How did you do that, my classmates ask.
How did you memorize all those words?
But I just shrug, not knowing what to say.
How can I explain to anyone that stories
are like air to me,
I breathe them in and let them out
over and over again.
Brilliant! my teacher says, smiling.
Jackie, that was absolutely beautiful.
And I know now
words are my Tingalayo. Words are my brilliance.
the butterfly poems
No one believes me when I tell them
I am writing a book about butterflies,
even though they see me with the Childcraft encyclopedia
heavy on my lap opened to the pages where
the monarch, painted lady, giant swallowtail and
queen butterflies live. Even one called a buckeye.
When I write the first words
Wings of a butterfly whisper . . .
no one believes a whole book could ever come
from something as simple as
butterflies that don’t even, my brother says,
live that long.
But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.
six minutes
The Sisters in the Kingdom Hall get six minutes
to be onstage. In pairs. Or threes.
But never alone.
We have to write skits
where we are visiting another Sister
or maybe a nonbeliever. Sometimes
the play takes place at their pretend kitchen table
and sometimes, we’re in their pretend living room
but in real life we’re just in folding chairs, sitting
on the Kingdom Hall stage. The first time
I have to give my talk I ask if I can write it myself
without anyone helping.
There are horses and cows in my story even though
the main point is supposed to be
the story of the resurrection.
Say for instance, I write,
we have a cow and a horse that we love.
Is death the en
d of life for those animals?
When my mother reads those lines,
she shakes her head. You’re getting away from the topic,
she says. You have to take the animals out of it, get right
to the point. Start with people.
I don’t know what I am supposed to do
with the fabulous, more interesting part of my story,
where the horses and cows start speaking to me
and to each other. How even though they are old
and won’t live much longer, they aren’t afraid.
You only have six minutes, my mother says,
and no, you can’t get up and walk across the stage
to make your point. Your talk has to be given
sitting down.
So I start again. Rewriting:
Good afternoon, Sister. I’m here to bring you some
good news today.
Did you know God’s word is absolute? If we turn to John,
chapter five, verses twenty-eight and twenty-nine . . .
promising myself there’ll come a time
when I can use the rest of my story
and stand when I tell it
and give myself and my horses and my cows
a whole lot more time
than six minutes!
first book
There are seven of them,
haikus mostly but rhyming ones, too.
Not enough for a real book until
I cut each page into a small square
staple the squares together, write
one poem
on each page.
Butterflies by Jacqueline Woodson
on the front.
The butterfly book
complete now.
john’s bargain store
Down Knickerbocker Avenue is where everyone
on the block goes to shop.
There’s a pizzeria if you get hungry,
seventy-five cents a slice.
There’s an ice cream shop where cones cost a quarter.
There’s a Fabco Shoes store and a beauty parlor.
A Woolworth’s five-and-dime and a John’s Bargain Store.
For a long time, I don’t put one foot inside Woolworth’s.
They wouldn’t let Black people eat at their lunch counters
in Greenville, I tell Maria.
No way are they getting my money!
So instead, Maria and I go to John’s Bargain Store where
three T-shirts cost a dollar. We buy them
in pale pink, yellow and baby blue. Each night
we make a plan:
Wear your yellow one tomorrow, Maria says,
and I’ll wear mine.
All year long, we dress alike,
walking up and down Madison Street
waiting for someone to say, Are you guys cousins?
so we can smile, say,
Can’t you tell from looking at us?!
new girl
Then one day a new girl moves in next door, tells us
her name is Diana and becomes
me and Maria’s Second Best Friend in the Whole World.
And even though Maria’s mother
knew Diana’s mother in Puerto Rico,
Maria promises that doesn’t make Diana más mejor
amiga—a better friend. But some days, when
it’s raining and Mama won’t let me go outside,
I see them
on the block, their fingers laced together,
heading around the corner
to the bodega for candy. Those days,
the world feels as gray and cold as it really is
and it’s hard
not to believe the new girl isn’t más mejor than me.
Hard not to believe
my days as Maria’s best friend forever and ever amen
are counted.
pasteles & pernil
When Maria’s brother, Carlos, gets baptized
he is just a tiny baby in a white lace gown with
so many twenty-dollar bills folded into fans pinned
all over it
that he looks like a green-and-white angel.
Maria and I stand over his crib
talking about all the candy we could buy with just one
of those fans. But we know that God is watching
and don’t even dare touch the money.
In the kitchen, there is pernil roasting in the oven
the delicious smell filling the house and Maria says,
You should just eat a little bit. But I am not allowed
to eat pork. Instead, I wait for pasteles to get
passed around,
wait for the ones her mother has filled with chicken
for Jackie, mi ahijada, wait for the moment when
I can peel the paper
away from the crushed-plantain-covered meat,
break off small pieces with my hands and let the
pastele melt in my mouth. My mother makes the best
pasteles in Brooklyn, Maria says. And even though I’ve
only eaten her mom’s, I agree.
Whenever there is the smell of pernil and pasteles on
the block, we know
there is a celebration going on. And tonight, the party
is at Maria’s house. The music is loud and the cake
that her mother’s been making for three days are
absolutely perfect.
We take our food out to her stoop just as the grown-ups
start dancing merengue, the women lifting their long dresses
to show off their fast-moving feet,
the men clapping and yelling,
Baila! Baila! until the living room floor disappears.
When I ask Maria where Diana is she says,
They’re coming later. This part is just for my family.
She pulls the crisp skin
away from the pernil, eats the pork shoulder
with rice and beans,
our plates balanced on our laps, tall glasses of Malta
beside us.
and for a long time, neither one of us says anything.
Yeah, I say. This is only for us. The family.
curses
We are good kids,
people tell my mother this all the time, say,
You have the most polite children.
I’ve never heard a bad word from them.
And it’s true—we say please and thank you.
We speak softly. We look adults in the eyes
ask, How are you? Bow our heads when we pray.
We don’t know how to curse,
when we try to put bad words together they sound strange
like new babies trying to talk and mixing up their sounds.
At home, we aren’t allowed words like
stupid or dumb or jerk or darn.
We aren’t allowed to say
I hate or I could die or You make me sick.
We’re not allowed to roll our eyes or
look away when my mother is speaking to us.
Once my brother said butt and wasn’t allowed
to play outside after school for a week.
When we are with our friends and angry, we whisper,
You stupid dummy
and our friends laugh then spew curses
at us like bullets, bend their lips over the words
like they were born speaking them. They coach us on,
tell us to Just say it!
But we can’t. Even when we try
the words get caught
inside our throats, as though
our mother
is standing there waiting, daring them to reach the air.
afros
When Robert comes over with his hair blown out into
an afro, I beg my mother
for the same hairstyle.
Everyone in the neighborhood
has one and all of the black people on Soul Train. Even
Michael Jackson and his brothers are all allowed to wear
their hair this way.
Even though she says no to me,
my mom spends a lot of Saturday morning
in her bedroom mirror,
picking her own hair
into a huge black and beautiful dome.
Which
is so completely one hundred percent unfair
but she says, This is the difference between
being a grown-up and being a child. When
she’s not looking, I stick my tongue out
at her.
My sister catches me, says,
And that’s the difference
between being a child and being a grown-up,
like she’s twenty years old.
Then rolls her eyes at me and goes back to reading.
graffiti
Your tag is your name written with spray paint
however you want it wherever you want it to be.
It doesn’t even have to be
your real name—like Loco who lives on Woodbine Street.
His real name is Orlando but everyone
calls him by his tag so
it’s everywhere in Bushwick. Black and red letters and
crazy eyes inside the Os.
Some kids climb to the tops of buildings, hang
over the edge
spray their names upside down from there.
But me and Maria only know the ground, only know
the factory on the corner with its newly painted
bright pink wall. Only know the way my heart jumps
as I press the button down, hear the hiss of paint, watch
J-A-C- begin.