Ways of Seeing My Brothers
by Grisel Y. Acosta
1. You are precise artisans, designing aircrafts meant to soar above the altocumulus, or pumping air
pulsating through twists of brass trumpet, pressing fingers down on valves to scream higher than a jet.
2. Smirking boys in a 70s photograph, unaware of the holes in your socks.
3. Fearless little men, walking into classrooms filled with children who will only think to ask,
“Are you a spic?”
4. I do not see you in jail the night you totaled Mami’s car
I do not see you stoned or geeked out, lonely and alienated in the college dorm
I do not see you terrified when you see no options in the want ads
I do not see you when you cry alone when your best friend fell in a rain of bullets
I only see the miraculous feat of survival, how you managed the impossible:
staying alive when the world told you every day you did not exist
5. I remember the day your daughter was born, dear brother, and you had to fill out a form, choose
Black or White. Your oblivious white wife saw the X by the word Black and asked you why and you said,
“Well I sure as hell ain’t white,” and all of a sudden you gave your own kind of birth.
6. I wore your clothes, walked like what we call a boy, talked knucklehead talk, became what you were.
7. The only time I met Tio Segundo en Cuba, who built his home with black market wood, his dirty
workman jeans the same as the ones I saw on you, brother, after a day of roofing, and my heart hurt
because I knew the two of you needed each other, drank yourselves into oblivion because you longed
for each other, yet you would never meet.
8. I listened at your doors Devo bang bang bang
Santana Black magic
sat for hours
wondered in AC/DC electric
curiosity fizzling like
guitar feedback
waited for you
to open the passageway
9.
are you safe, dear brothers?
I cannot protect you from this
obsession with your demise
all I can offer is what I have seen
remember, what I see is beauty
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta is an associate professor at the City University of New York-Bronx Community College. Her first book of poetry, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, is an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and it is forthcoming from Get Fresh Books in 2021. Recent work can be found in The Baffler, Acentos Journal, Kweli Journal, Red Fez, Short Plays on Reproductive Freedom, and Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader. She is a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet, a Macondo Fellow, and the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity, an anthology that features over Latinx 30 contributors and subjects. Her work focuses on her Afro-Latinx and indigenous ancestry, queer identity, the punk and house music subcultures, her birthplace of Chicago, and the destruction of post-colonial neoliberalism.
For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.