Page 7 - Vo Vo | FIX MY HEAD #10: COMPLEXITY

JULIAN SMUGGLES
I crush the streets, hurling from my brown body a cover of Tiffany’s cover of “I think we’re alone now.”
Jenna is all like one time I had to brandish my knife at a bus stop, that’s the nature of white patriarchy.
So we’re holding on to one another hands in the gray ocean, toxic plankton in bloom. Track suit confrontation as I reminiscence about old growth redwood trees and the possibility of syncopated Sunday mornings.
How does the audience end up in this specific time and place with me?
I never. I never render a world where my stepfather would be so point blank like I hate
Mexicans, not just you.
I scramble to unearth antiquities from the small town moments in our shared memories. Consequences for malignant warfare possibly absorbing into his consciousness because of our emotional association to Coatlicue, the Aztec mother of gods, consuming and regenerating life.
Germaine has a pokeball shaved into the left side of his head, he wiggles his front tooth at me, and is all like look it is the small flashes that define us.
Visions of yourself at the mall 205 and a madre asks for your help in Spanish and you try to explain to her in broken French, je ne parle pas espagnol. You try to explain to her that your real dad refused to teach you. The woman all tears dropping onto her Louis Vuitton purse, her gaze meeting yours. Sweet birch meeting sweet birch pupil and you are all like the accent. The accent. It is Julian but no one ever says it that way.
The next day you dissociate and see a projection of yourself at a punk show, full of achromatic anarchists. You wake to the sensation of deficiency, brown, the least favorite color according to polls in the United States. You are hella fired up. You take a microphone and are all like radical politics, master-slave dialectic, Otro, otro, your people killed my people, and indigenous Mexicans didn’t know Spanish.
And so we’re running as fast as we can, swarms of jellyfish sweeping the beach killing all marine ecosystems, the smell of olive oil in freshly washed hair slowly dispersing.
Germaine pulls the tooth out after taking a bite of cardboard pizza, blood on his small brown hand. Germaine is all like see it isn’t that bad showing me the white seed.
I try to tell him that the lack of dollar bills under his pillow will define him; being mixed race leaves us out, outside of the Venn diagram. He asks me to tie his shoes, and is all like but we both wear Adidas doggie.
The coke can makes a scraping sound as he kicks it; other children scream his name,
Germaine!