MINE | Pando Girard

I name this whole body mine everywhere I take it

Standing in the kitchen before dinner

My dad gives me a talk about

Wearing my pik in my hair

Slicing through block of high-top

Spikes and power

Says my pik comes with a certain perception

I should be wary of

The word black doesn’t leave his lips

But seeps through the air anyway

I am beginning to unfold myself and learn my history I look through old photos and my dad has always stuck out

The only black man on his physics team in his lecture hall in our neighborhood

Abuelita told me the story

He skipped school to run around Havana

With his white friend to a rich neighborhood

Told like a warning like near death

Like when he ate a hot coal when he was in third grade

And the poison black ash painted his lungs

Like when I am in third grade

We get pulled over for making a wrong turn on red

And the memory looks too familiar now that I’ve seen it end with gunshots

But I must name this target body mine everywhere I take it

So I let my hair grow my steps rock

Bump music body-hum loud

Teach my scalp the static-pop rhythm of my pik

I write Aldo Leopoldo Pando Girard in sharpie on my wrists and my neck

Punch out the dude saying you should put that right here

Pointing to my pik and his touch-of-grey-ass beard

Swat away all the hands trying to pet me

Rip off the locs turned dreadful on white scalps

Bust open every prison cell, every handcuff

Faerie Godmother every cop into compassion

Swaddle myself with belonging and besos and Abuelita cocinando arroz con frijoles

Tío Carlos on the grill

Tío Ernesto showing us New York

Comiendo en la mesa we tell our own stories

Yoruba was never drained from our skin

We uninvent The Shackle and The Gun

I sing and taste Home in the humming air

Home in the four rooms of my heart

My veins Euphrates, Congo, Nile, Mississippi Feeding the hungry maw of the Atlantic

All flood-brown and rushing and alive

My skin mi papá singing guajira too loud Saturday night over friends and too much rum

Floorboards creaking under salsa swaying bodies

My whole body is woven with stories

Mansa Musa gives away enough gold to destabilize currencies

Afternoon paints gold onto all of my friends

Playing half-football in fall-withered field

All blowed and smiling and safe and alive

My pik does hold deadly perception

Walking down the street it feels like power

And a little better than what are you And where are you from

And no, really I may not know where my ancestors come from

But I feel less like an explanation

Like an impurity

Like a sum of fractions always just shy of whole

This feels like a nation Wrapped up in the fist Crowned obsidian upon my head

My pik says one word: Black