I remember everything. The house. 
Woods. Creek. My car, egged. 
Things I never told my parents. 
Sounds of a coyote killing a rabbit 
in the dead of night. My body drive-by egged 
off Gentleman Road on Halloween. 
The kids on the bus in elementary shouting 
I was gunna blow them up. And if not me, 
then my brothers. A hand-drawn picture 
of a gorilla passed around in middle school  
with my name underneath. The picture recreated 
next year, when we learned Shakespearean insults. 
I counted 180 days of school a year. I missed  
as much as I could. Panic attacks, stomach aches,  
the nurse’s office. I learned to hide my fear deeper.  
This time, my portrait as a chimpanzee. A slap  
across the face each 7th grade day before English class  
by the bucktoothed future-quarterback 
just because he could. The entire class watched. 
The teacher always late. The teacher 
one day writing I think you are striking 
on my response to her journal prompt  
asking if I’d rather be brilliantly brainy  
or awesomely attractive. The white boys shielding  
their eyes on pool day, after I spent all night burning  
the hair off my skin. The white boys making a game  
of not looking at me, as if their eyes would burn  
like my body did, when I walked out of the locker room 
in a red bikini with pink hibiscuses. If only.  
You see white violence? The sharp rise of it?  
These are only the stories I am willing to tell. Younger,  
when I tricycle past his house, the small neighbor boy  
shoots me with his nerf gun first, BB gun next.  
In front of friends, the teenage neighbor boy  
punches me square in the gut. I am six. I remember clearly 
what it feels like to be a lambi larki 
punched in the stomach by a bigger, older gora. 
So when one day in my twenties, I watch a white man 
punch a hole in the wall and imagine my face, 
I think back to that first gut punch, just a baby. 
I think I’ll never catch enough breath to speak again. 
It feels like blood in my mouth, like I had it coming, 
like I’d known what it would feel like the moment 
I was born. A promise. Or prophecy.