Naturalization
- Naturalization
I haven't yet come out to my fam and I'm dating a white man named Matt.Everyone has a part of themselves they keep private, these days the secret is their issues with race or desire. Mamá always wantedto be American, but she'd read in Essence magazine about how its Black women were the least married in the country because ball players preferred white women on their arms.Can you hear her crying as I play ball with my white boyfriend?Hand jobs are the latest sex act in fashion. But then again, love is an older kind of allegiance than citizenship.Sometimes, I wear a cop uniform during sex and throw my loverbehind bars. This role play is not called Black Lives Matter. It's calledLove and Basketball. Matt plays the white college ball playerI've arrested for slipping a roofie into my drink while I was undercover at a frat party. [End Page 87] And now, in jail, he begs for my forgiveness. I tell him no one man can save himfrom a system; mass incarceration is the American way. But I, at least, can apply some lube and help ease the pain.Don't believe this part; it's too dark to be true. The American Dreamis not a fantasy. It's as real as the resurrection of turkey on Thanksgiving and the healing properties of apple pie.There isn't much difference these days between religion and history; if you believe it sothen that's how it happened. People believe more in their points of view than in facts. Maybe I shouldn'tbe any different. Maybe I'll just believe my mother already knows her son is in love with Jesus or some other white man. Mmm… Yes,I believe we all know it, to some degree, a truth so universal others, on some level, must know it too,if only they could make belief. Then maybe, just maybe, the rest could finallybe as free or American as I've just now come to be. [End Page 88]
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Migrant Psalms (Northwestern University Press, 2021) and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poem "Praise Song for My Mutilated World" won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. He is an assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches creative writing and playwriting, and a faculty member of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. More at darrelholnes.com.
