Monopoly money to count
and checkers to slam down on boards, ants to flip
into blue plastic pants,
chess pieces to practice moving until we understand
their power
and when we don’t, Roman and I argue
that there’s another way to play
called Our Way. But Hope and Dell tell us
that we’re too immature to even begin to understand
then bend over the chessboard in silence, each becoming
the next chess champ of the house, depending on the day
and the way the game is played.
Sometimes, Roman and I leave Hope and Dell alone
go to another corner of the room and become
what the others call us—the two youngest,
playing games we know the rules to
tic-tac-toe and checkers,
hangman and connect the dots
but mostly, we lean over their shoulders
as quietly as we can, watching
waiting
wanting to understand
how to play another way.
gifted
Everyone knows my sister
is brilliant. The letters come home folded neatly
inside official-looking envelopes that my sister proudly
hands over to my mother.
Odella has achieved
Odella has excelled at
Odella has been recommended to
Odella’s outstanding performance in
She is gifted
we are told.
And I imagine presents surrounding her.
I am not gifted. When I read, the words twist
twirl across the page.
When they settle, it is too late.
The class has already moved on.
I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them
then blow gently,
watch them float
right out of my hands.
sometimes
There is only one other house on our block
where a father doesn’t live. When somebody asks why,
the boy says, He died.
The girl looks off, down the block, her thumb
slowly rising to her mouth. The boy says,
I was a baby. Says, She doesn’t remember him
and points to his silent sister.
Sometimes, I lie about my father.
He died, I say, in a car wreck or
He fell off a roof or maybe
He’s coming soon.
Next week and
next week and
next week . . . but
if my sister’s nearby
she shakes her head. Says,
She’s making up stories again.
Says,
We don’t have a father anymore.
Says,
Our grandfather’s our father now.
Says,
Sometimes, that’s the way things happen.
uncle robert
Uncle Robert has moved to New York City!
I hear him taking the stairs
two at a time and then
he is at our door, knocking loud until our mother
opens it,
curlers in her hair, robe pulled closed, whispering,
It’s almost midnight, don’t you wake my children!
But we are already awake, all four of us, smiling
and jumping around
my uncle: What’d you bring me?
Our mama shushes us, says,
It’s too late for presents and the like.
But we want presents and the like.
And she, too, is smiling now, happy to see her
baby brother who lives all the way over
in Far Rockaway where the ocean is right there
if you look out your window.
Robert opens his hand to reveal a pair of silver earrings,
says to my sister, This is a gift for how smart you are.
I want
to be smart like Dell, I want
someone to hand me silver and gold
just because my brain clicks into thinking whenever
it needs to but
I am not smart like Dell so I watch her press
the silver moons into her ears
I say, I know a girl ten times smarter than her. She gets
And Robert looks at me, his dark eyes smiling, asks,
Is that something you made up? Or something real?
In my own head,
it’s real as anything.
In my head
all kinds of people are doing all kinds of things.
I want to tell him this, that
the world we’re living in right here in Bushwick isn’t
the only place. But now my brothers are asking,
What’d you bring me, and my uncle is pulling gifts
from his pockets,
from his leather briefcase, from inside his socks.
He hands
my mother a record, a small 45—James Brown,
who none of us
like because he screams when he sings. But my mother
puts it on the record player, turned way down low
and then even us kids are dancing around—
Robert showing us the steps he learned
at the Far Rockaway parties. His feet are magic
and we all try to slide across the floor like he does,
our own feet, again and again,
betraying us.
Teach us, Robert! we keep saying. Teach us!
wishes
When he takes us to the park, Uncle Robert tells us,
If you catch a dandelion puff, you can make a wish.
Anything you want will come true, he says as
we chase the feathery wishes around swings,
beneath sliding boards,
until we can hold them in our hands,
close our eyes tight, whisper our dream
then set it floating out into the universe hoping
our uncle is telling the truth,
hoping each thing we wish for
will one day come true.
believing
The stories start like this—
Jack and Jill went up a hill, my uncle sings.
I went up a hill yesterday, I say.
What hill?
In the park.
What park?
Halsey Park.
Who was with you?
Nobody.
But you’re not allowed to go to the park without anyone.
I just did.
Maybe you dreamed it, my uncle says.
No, I really went.
And my uncle likes the stories I’m making up.
. . . Along came a spider and sat down beside her.
I got bit by a spider, I say.
When?
The other day.
Where?
Right on my foot.
Show us.
It’s gone now.
But my mother accuses me of lying.
If you lie, she says, one day you’ll steal.
I won’t steal.
It’s hard to understand how one leads to the other,
how stories could ever
make us criminals.
It’s hard to understand
the way my brain works—so different
from everybody around me.
How each new story
I’m told becomes a thing
that happens,
in some o
ther way
to me . . . !
Keep making up stories, my uncle says.
You’re lying, my mother says.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in between
all that I’m told
and memory.
off-key
We start each meeting at Kingdom Hall with a song
and a prayer
but we’re always late,
walking in when the pink songbooks are already open,
looking over shoulders, asking Brothers and Sisters
to help us find our place.
If it’s a song I like, I sing loud until my sister shushes me
with a finger to her mouth.
My whole family knows I can’t sing. My voice,
my sister says, is just left of the key. Just right
of the tune.
But I sing anyway, whenever I can.
Even the boring Witness songs sound good to me,
the words
telling us how God wants us to behave,
what he wants us to do,
Be glad you nations with his people! Go preach
from door to door!
The good news of Jehovah’s kingdom—
Proclaim from shore to shore!
It’s the music around the words that I hear
in my head, even though
everyone swears I can’t hear it.
Strange that they don’t hear
what I hear.
Strange that it sounds so right
to me.
eve and the snake
The Sunday sermons are given by men.
Women aren’t allowed to get onstage like this,
standing alone to tell God’s story. I don’t
understand why but I listen anyway:
On the first day, God made the heavens and the earth
and He looked at it, and it was good.
It’s a long story. It’s a good story.
Adam and Eve got made,
a snake appeared in a tree. A talking snake.
Then Eve had to make a choice—the apple the snake
wanted her to eat
looked so good—just one bite. But it was the only apple
in a kingdom full of apples
that God had said Don’t touch!
It’s the best apple in all the world, the snake said.
Go ahead and taste it. God won’t care.
But we know the ending—in our heads, we scream,
Don’t do it, Eve! That’s the Devil inside that snake!
He’s tricking you!
But Eve took a bite. And so here we are,
sitting in a Kingdom Hall
on a beautiful Sunday afternoon
hoping that God sees it in His heart to know
it wasn’t our fault. Give us another chance
send that snake back and we promise
we’ll say no this time!
our father, fading away
In all our moving, we’ve forgotten our family in Ohio,
forgotten our father’s voice, the slow drawl
of his words,
the way he and his brother David made jokes
that weren’t funny
and laughed as though they were.
We forget the color of his skin—was it
dark brown like mine or lighter like Dell’s?
Did he have Hope and Dell’s loose curls or my
tighter, kinkier hair?
Was his voice deep or high?
Was he a hugger like Grandma Georgiana holding us
like she never planned to let go or
did he hug hard and fast like Mama,
planting her warm lips to our foreheads where
the kiss lingered
long after
she said I love you, pulled her sweater on and left
for work each morning.
In Brooklyn there are no more calls from Ohio.
No more calls from our father or Grandpa Hope
or Grandma Grace
or David or Anne or Ada or Alicia.
It is as if each family
has disappeared from the other.
Soon, someone who knows someone in Ohio
who knows the Woodsons
tells my mother that Grandpa Hope has died.
At dinner that evening, our mother gives us the news but
we keep eating because we hadn’t known
he was still alive.
And for a moment, I think about Jack . . . our father.
But then
quickly as it comes
the thought moves on.
Out of sight, out of mind, my brother says.
But only a part of me believes this is true.
halfway home #2
For a long time, there is only one tree on our block.
And though it still feels
strange to be so far away from soft dirt
beneath bare feet
the ground is firm here and the one tree blooms
wide enough to shade four buildings.
The city is settling around me, my words
come fast now
when I speak, the soft curl of the South on my tongue
is near gone.
Who are these city children? My grandmother laughs,
her own voice
sad and far away on the phone. But it is
a long-distance call
from Greenville to Brooklyn, too much money
and not enough time to explain
that New York City is gray rock
and quick-moving cars.
That the traffic lights change fast and my sister must
hold tight to my hand
as we cross to where a small man singing
Piragua! Piragua!
sells shaved ices from a white cart filled
with bottles and bottles of fruit-flavored syrup
colored red and purple, orange and blue.
That our mouths water in the hot sun as we hand him
our quarters then wait patiently as he pours
the syrup over the ice, hands it to us
in paper cones.
We’ll be coming home soon, Grandma
each of us promises.
We love you.
And when she says, I love you, too
the South is so heavy in her mouth
my eyes fill up with the missing of
everything and everyone
I’ve ever known.
the paint eater
In the night in the corner of the bedroom
the four of us share,
comes a pick, pick, picking of plaster
paint gone come morning.
My younger brother, Roman,
can’t explain why paint melting
on his tongue feels good.
Still, he eats the paint
and plaster until a white hole
grows where pale green paint used to be.
And too late we catch him,
his fingers in his mouth,
his lips covered with dust.
chemistry
When Hope speaks, it’s always about comic books
and superheroes
until my mother tells him he has to talk
about something else.
And then it’s science. He wants to know
everything
about rockets and medicine and the galaxy.
He wants to know where the sky ends and how,
what does it feel like when gravity’s gone
and what is the food men eat
on the moon. His questions come so fast
a
nd so often that we forget how quiet
he once was until my mother
buys him a chemistry set.
And then for hours after school each day
he makes potions, mixing chemicals that stink up
the house, causing sparks to fly
from shaved bits of iron,
puffs of smoke to pop from strange-colored liquids.
We are fascinated by him, goggled and bent
over the stove
a clamped test tube protruding
from his gloved hand.
On the days when our mother says
she doesn’t want him smelling up the house
with his potions, he takes his trains apart, studies
each tiny piece, then slowly puts them together again.
We don’t know what it is he’s looking for
as he searches the insides of things, studies
the way things change. Each whispered Wow
from him makes me think that he
with his searching—and Dell with her reading
and even Roman with his trying to eat
to the other side of our walls—is looking
for something. Something way past Brooklyn.
Something
out
there.
baby in the house
And then one day, Roman won’t get up,
sun coming in bright
through the bedroom window, the rest of us
dressed and ready to go outside.
No laughter—just tears when we hold him.
More crying when we put him down.
Won’t eat and even my mother
can’t help him.
When she takes him to the hospital, she comes back
alone.
And for many days after that, there is no baby
in our house and I am finally
the baby girl again, wishing
I wasn’t. Wishing there wasn’t so much quiet
where my brother’s laugh used to be, wishing
the true baby in our house
was home.
going home again
July comes and Robert takes us on the night train