10 things muttered to myself at the Crossroads:

1. These streets don't need you! They're already paved with the black off boy's skin, torn there from his knees when a fat pig fell from a great blue tower in a thin ballistic line and landed on his neck.

2. These streets don't want you!
They''re already painted with the hot summer's fresh new red paint, splashed out in an ballistic line of racism 450 years old and only 9 millimeters wide, what a bridge to be carried over by 6 to be dropped 6.

3. When they carry me over, bury me face down so all you MOTHERFUCKERS can KISS MY BLACK ASS ONE LAST TIME. And fold my hand up between my thighs, letting my extended middle finger point up toward the stars through my rough backside -road in a digital chocolate ballistic line like an Atlas 5 taking off to point the way.

4. Let the ESSENCE of the world who fucked me come leaking out over MY fresh claws. Let it be the creamy white center between the dark cookie moons and show me for the wonderful snack I was, BEFORE I got twisted open. Before I got dunked on and into; Putting vanilla frosting on the outside and the inside so I can finally be the OREO those boys called me.

5. When is the devil getting here? Just like a tar heel to be stuck on the ground and making me wait. Waste my time on his contracts. and schedules, and his deadlines.

6. Say my name. #SayHerName. Hash Tag, Bodybag, dag, man. Like, how're you supposed to get over it, when the blood river has been flowing for so long, and keeps getting wider ever year, eroding away the shore on both sides until the whole world-
banks are starting to col-
laspe into silence like a still heart of-
Darkness is WHO I AM.

7. The historical trajectory of my life is an unstable, broken ballistic line back through time from Seattle to San Jose to Plymouth to Cleveland to Plymouth again to Cleveland again, to Plymouth again, to Golden Valley, to St. Louis Park when Mothership Doctor Debora Lynn Brooks-Golden (so much Culture) released me for my acceptance trials. Her line goes back to Cleveland and then back through her mothership to Tennessee. And I don't really know where it goes from there. Maybe further south. Might've gone east.

8. We were headed north, though. Following the Drinking Gourd to freedom. Away from I don't even know and can't even imagine, to Uncle Shot's tobacco farm through World War 2 and the Air National Guard, and the East End Barber shop and Antioch and Glenville and booksellers and Case's Sci-Fi Film festival where my mothership and fathershuttle had some of their first matched orbits.

9. I used to want to be on these streets before I knew who they had paved over. I wanted to be outside with the little black boys and girls, screaming in the fire-hydrants, dancing their dances, dancing their hands, skipping their ropes,playing their ball, listening to their music and speaking the sweetest, wettest, ear-tickling flow a girl could enjoy, smoothing and blending and REMIXing the worst possible language into something beautiful and moving just in how easily it could hold a child's joy. The scream of 10 black kids running after an ice cream truck just hit different.

10. Seriously where the fuck is he? I got all his baggage on my back, in my pancreas, inside my mind. Soon as he whips out that fiddle, Im finna beat his ass with it. Maybe he can follow the lines in this road.