It’s the same every weekend: my mother and I outside
Clem’s Bottle House, waiting for the 11 to appear at 2,
as it always does. The bus full of tired cleaning ladies
heading to their afternoon shifts, Avon ladies ready
to kick off their shoes, to calculate their commission
as the fog of cilantro rice roars into the atmosphere,
hiding what they can in a prayer book or red envelope
under their mattress. We calmly sit in the second row
to the right, facing the driver’s window, like photographs
I’d seen of Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks in 1955,
refusing to surrender our seats or lower our heads
when a white man tells us to go back to our country,
to speak English or shut the hell up. This is our protest:
a bad bitch and her protégé cruising through Hillcrest
towards Downtown, its mowed and sculpted lawns
the color of jade, impervious, it seems, to drought,
scrutinizing the Christmas decorations, the caroling
reindeer, brown and leashed, like us, springing over
a nativity scene, a baby Jesus undisturbed in his bed
of straw, Mary smoothing wisps of his hair into place
the way my mother, also a saint, fixes my bowl cut,
tousled by wind and carelessness, lack of self-concept.
We point out what we decide are flaws in their design:
the lavish lighting, the Lexus rusting in the driveway,
its gaudy wreath of poinsettia and evergreen pine.
I invent stories about the perfect families imprisoned
in these hillside homes, their soap operas unraveling
behind the bougainvillea choked fences. I wonder if
they, too, stand in line for food stamps at the start
of every month, eat lice from each other’s heads
or make spaghetti by squirting stolen Burger King
ketchup packets on ramen when the paycheck’s late
and there’s bills to pay. I wonder if their kids attend
public school, if they turn away from their classmates
during Scholastic book fairs, hide under their desks
when armed shooters spray bullets into classrooms,
plant a bomb on campus. Do they play in the street
with their Cambodian friends, racing fast down 42
in orange roller-skates, the sun like a bag of Flamin’
Hot Cheetos, its seal ripped open? Do they know
this is all it takes to be free: a game of freeze tag
and the joy of being it, of nobody around to govern
us but us, keepers of the hood’s laws, its burdens?
It takes my mother and I forty-five minutes to get
to Horton Plaza, to lose ourselves in its labyrinth
of department stores, record shops playing NSYNC.
I follow her around Nordstrom, hiding in the racks
by myself as she inspects designer gowns, sketches
the secrets to their construction on scraps of paper,
eager to reproduce them at home. In a fitting room,
under a sales representative’s leery gaze, my mother
tries on a Chanel shift worth more than she makes
in a year, her moonlit skin against the oleander silk,
and for the briefest moment, I know she knows that
she’s beautiful, the kind of beauty we only believed
women like Hillary Clinton or Princess Diana inhabit,
a beauty so murderous and magical it emancipates us
from the poverty in our minds, the poverty it generates
to reinforce our dependency on it as a source and sign
of freedom, though, in the end, no beauty is enough
to protect us and these women from public humiliation
or death, a road tunnel we enter, chased by paparazzi,
in a black ‘94 Mercedes-Benz and never emerge from.