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Dear Yu Honor

Yu may rmember me when yu visits prison

here I am Walter Boyd Leadbelly #42738

yo best big niger from Sugarland Farm

wit my stella guitar and songs yu like

I play it all like a black machine for yu loud an slow

Down in the valley    What a frend we have in

Jesus an I Sugarland shuffle like pickin cotton far as

eye cn see I need my freedom like yu said yu was gone give me

yur honor all I need a second chance rmembr me

yu sed I was som niger   som niger need they pardon

GOVERNOR

thank yu for yo kind kind hand yo wisdum.

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

CHOTON

I’m just saying like taxonomically, does it even make sense to categorize my genitalia and your genitalia as the same thing, like…

He indicates RAHEEM’s penis.

…if that’s a penis then…

He pulls his boxers down to show his own penis.

I mean what is this? It’s a polyp.

RAHEEM

Okay.

CHOTON

It’s a little nunu.

RAHEEM

Well I like your little nunu…

RAHEEM examines CHOTON’s penis. He pulls back his foreskin just a bit. CHOTON winces.

CHOTON

Ow. Careful.

RAHEEM

What?

CHOTON

No it’s— it’s just sensitive.

Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.

Snake dreams uncoil,

                        burrow into the spine of books.

Night spills from cracked eggs.

Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.

We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.

My sister was enrolled in a beauty pageant for virgins, a contest I thought she could win. She was cute enough, but also, how many teenage hymens were left in America anymore? Even the emu-faced girls had been initiated by twelve. Fewer contestants fueled better odds.

- You might actually win, I told Nabisase.

- I’m glad that this surprises you, she said.

ALEX: I get panic attacks over nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’ll be at work, or at home, or at school, and suddenly I’ll start shaking and I won’t be able to breathe.

          (pause)

School counselor says that it might be a chemical imbalance. Or, she says, it might have something to do with my past. I think it has something to do with my past, so if you’re my father, it’s probably your fault.