Flying Down the Five

^{after Gala Mukomolova’s “On the Brighton Beach Boardwalk”}

Families roll on toward summer, its feral freedom, ocean waves 
beckon every sibling like schools of skipjack leaping together to  
catch the sun on their silver scales. Bundles of beach umbrellas  
waiting to be raised high & planted for their temporary kingdoms.  
Trucks bobbing with oranges, station wagons bouncing with  
babies in the back. Lovers fight in the red gleam of a rover or  
swerve in the sweat of a frolick behind the wheel. A highway  
stretch of to & fro, bodies raucous & guzzling. So many dreams  
leaking from gas tanks, the oil drip of wasted want. A congested  
uproar of miles in waiting. So many exits missed.  What-could-
have-beens, just beyond the turnpike. Dead ends. Concrete &
unmoving.  

My aunt, a tree cutting herself down & me with, turns to me from  
the front seat, says, some of us didn’t get the looks in the family, right?
You know how it is. My silence hits the lane markers, all we hear is  
bumpbumpbump. All I hear is my tías telling each other, you are  
beautiful, mija, but wear a hat so you don’t get too dark. All I hear is a  
world saying brownbrownbrown a little too much & I am furiously  
stuffing my mouth with plantain chips crunching centuries  
between my teeth, my lungs a bouquet catching a windfall of  
particles unseen. So much ugly 

I tug on my seatbelt to breathe a little easier, flicking all the dead  
ends off me. A cement barrier, the road of my throat. No one says  
anything, the words filling the car like murky green lake water after  
a tumble off the road. I imagine the doors stuck in the pressure of  
the plunge, my drowned body floating to the surface not pretty  
enough to salvage & burn. I spread to the shoals, a seasoned meal  
in undertow, delicious, at least, to the fish. I am the fish, feral &  
flying.  

But I am flopped against the window, a pane dusty with estival  
judgment. I roll it down, gills gasping for air, my face a drum of  
highway breath, the 65 mph hot wind on my cheek reminding me  
I am a body on an irreplaceable planet. Don’t take everything so  
seriously, I hear. Roll the window up, dear, it really is too loud. 

Copyright © 2020 by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 12, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This poem is part of a cycle I’ve been writing, called Fea Fabulata. Fea, Spanish for ugly, from the Latin foedus, for both covenant and that which is hideous. Fabulata, Latin for conversation, telling. ‘Fea Fabulata’ translates to ‘Ugly Conversation’ or ‘Ugly Telling.’ ‘Flying Down the Five’ is a conversation about ugliness, an ugly conversation, and touches on the disparaging and humiliating ways women and femmes are often taught to relate to each other, to do violence, cut each other down—a kind of anti-feminist social contract that emerges out of living under patriarchy. It is also a critique of the western aesthetic regime, colonized desire, and the racialized politics of beauty. And, finally, it is about the simple and deep need to feel seen, the pain when we do not, and the perhaps fleeting intimacies we seek in the loneliest moments, how a dream or even the wind can offer us embrace.”
—heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Black Lives Matter Anthology  
 

“Come all ye people, small and great,
    And crown her queen of all.”

—“The Black Queen” by Carrie Law Morgan Figgs