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UPBRINGING

In an alternate version of this story
I grow up in Denver, Colorado, fenced in
by calcareous mountains and thread-thin air. Who might
I have become had we driven eighteen hours overnight to flee
the Red Zone, Chiron lighting the sky, Detroit’s bass chasing behind?
I imagine Denver homes are large. Ivy clings to the wall
like sap. I imagine I could have walked to school unguarded, no knife
pressed to my ankle in fresh Js my mama wouldn’t buy in the City.

Once the factories stripped the grass of its green, she was willing to leave
her mama on Jane Street and my aunties scattered from Cadieux to Van Dyke.

A diamond band convinced her to stay, but she models
what could still become of me: slips and stockings,
subdivisions, propriety. I could have run when I had the chance
but I’m a daughter of the East Side, that old girl set in her ways.

I grew a mouth like the grown men in my hood. Bouquet of tattoos
across my shoulders. Where brown hair was, a field of watercolors.
 

The old window gave a grand view of Yellow Tree, trunk to branch. They called it Yellow Tree even though the gingko was yellow for only about a week each year, its fan-shaped leaves rustling to the ground at the first suggestion of a breeze. Annie and Edward held the baby to the window and said, “See? Yellow!” But she was too small to say “yellow” in response. She just looked and watched and touched the glass. They wiped her fingerprints from the window and kissed the fingers that made the prints. Then the leaves fell, and the scenery changed. Some views show less than half of what needs seeing.

When the rent became unpayable, they went in search of a more affordable living situation. What’s your living situation? Annie turned the phrase over in her mind, the situation of their life. They had not saved nearly enough for a broker’s fee, let alone a security deposit.

“It looks smaller than it really is,” Edward said, leading Annie around the new apartment. A dimly lit lopsided square. “Give it some time, it might grow on you!”

“You mean it might literally grow?” Annie asked.

At the new apartment, there were no views of Yellow Tree. The introverted windows were gated and clasped and huddled around a central shaft that Edward dubbed Pigeon Tunnel. Edward and Annie liked inventing proper nouns for their world. Yellow Tree, Pigeon Tunnel, Closet Mystery. Closet Mystery was Annie’s term for the mystery of their single, overstuffed closet. Upon opening, what would catapult forth? It was a bona fide enigma. Edward and Annie picked a proper noun for their baby too. Her noun was Rose.