...Ghetto Rose...

I am a woman born of desecrated city streets, potholes filled with lies and public humilities, raised on my family's defecations and oral vomit...I've learned poetry. And I am beautiful.

The first type of poetry I learned was the kind I hated. It was the rythmic smack of my mother's hands to my bare skin...it was the silent thought that my skin was made of golden dirt, and I could never become who I wanted if I lived in filth like that...it was the flick of cigarette butts, my father's indifference, a baseball bat crying out its blood-lusts for tethered rubber baseballs in a little-league game...

The words were growing in me.

I've had many unstable homes. My first was my mother's womb. If it weren't for my dad, the tobacco she refused to give up would have been a part of my bloodstream, instead of just my memories. The second was a crib, idling next to my older sister's in the room I've always known. The rest came and went in a blur, and I don't know the order...there were just so many...An apartment with both parents. Low-Income housing with both parents, where we occupied the ground floor, and another family occupied the second. I believe we were in Keansburg there...or maybe Atlantic Highlands...

When my father left, mommy grabbed the three of us now from apartment to apartment, complexes for single mothers, run-down single rooms, my Papa's house, and others. Sometimes daddy was there, and sometimes he wasn't.

My little sister holds resentment towards me. I don't know why, but ever since we were young she has attempted to poke at my nerves, stretch them to as far as they could go before I snapped at her. She loved to manipulate me. Her not getting her way as a baby resulted in her crying until she stopped breathing.

My grandfather called her Princess.

I remember one night, he noticed me being forlorn and tossed into the backgound, and he took me on his lap and gave me a nickname. I was Manda-Panda...

This upset her very much.

My older sister used to take her thumb to my thighs when I was asleep, as punishment for taking her and Alysia's attention away from the adults.

I was a bruised wall-flower for a time...

Kindergarten taught me who I was, even before I realized its significance. I was coquettish...flirty...and I loved arts and crafts. When we learned our alphabet, I learned to read. I would sit by myself by the bookshelves and read whenever we had free time...or I'd find the mini bongos in the box of instruments Ms. Diana kept, and play...I would climb up to the piano bench and finger the keys, like sweet ivory, so smooth...I'd let them fly, making up tunes that were beautiful, even if they only were to me.

I lived inside my fantasies, because my reality was so dissappointing.

Every night I was forced to lie in bed with my Papa, I would close my eyes and imagine fiercely that I was in my grandmother's room, snuggled beside her and not him...

I can't remember what he did to me.

I have a fear of older men...men with white hair...heavy-set, with shark eyes...loud voices, and big hands...I freeze around them, when they pat me on the head, or talk to me...I imagine that my eyes turn muddy brown instead of what they are now...

My grandfather tried to culture my younger sister and I. He would take us to Manhattan, or to Brooklyn, so that we could see the museums and the botanical gardens, the zoo, anything different from what we were used to. Beauty and history.

They told me Papa raped my older sister.

They said they found scars inside of her, but when they took that man to court, no one stood up for the children.

Our mother abandoned us, because he bought her a house. Our Nana abandoned us for a fur coat. My mother's sister refused to come up from Texas to testify against the man who had committed the same horrors on her that he did to Katie and me.

I'm tired of these memories.

More later...