Poetry

​

I hear it in my home

Quick tastes of a language I have yet to learn

Patois implanted in my brain but

Not my palette. 

Only an ungraceful American accent,

My mother’s tongue.

My grandfather is on the landline

And my father is laughing back.

Creole shapes his words,

Round and feminine.

I see it in the expatriates.

Ladies in the Bed-stuy bakery

Chanting “we no have that”, 

as I recite the menu line by line.

A flaked beef patty in a pillow of cocoa bread

Oxtail. Goat that is curried.

Chicken blackened by a jerk.

Rice and peas.

I see it in the fisherman at the market, 

unscaled yellow snapper eyes clear and empty.

My father can

paint the kitchen in curries with

Meats too exotic for the freezer aisle.

My father, the painter,

tells people that he’s from New York.

When I see their reaction, I see too

The benefit to being yourself only in part

Or letting your culture bleed to the periphery of your 

Day.

The answer is only wrong to me.

But in my age I understand the way

That assimilation overrides culture in 

The way you speak, the way you eat and what you 

Run from.

There’s the parts you can’t see.

Tribal dusts sifted in the sands