It's not black & white

(My Chicana beloved hates that phrase.)

What's not black and white? Race in Are We There Are Yet? (Previous working title worked itself out of a job.)

What was black and white? Race in my childhood, spent in a suburb next door to a collapsing steeltown.

What does it mean when home also signifies a deeply familiar site of inauthentic relationship? Set-ups and stifled connection? I am finding ways into writing about this -- not in the performance piece, but in what I think will be a series of poems. Mostly not about my family. Mostly about historical figures. But (in a reversal of my process for Are We There Are Yet?) the pieces about my family seem to want to come out first.

An early draft:

August 17, 1968: Breaking and Making

Inside the limo, their heads are uncovered.
He has lifted the veil from her face
and pocketed his silk kippah.
Already they begin to shed their skin.
The shine of the sacred,
the film that swayed between
their sight of one another, already
behind them. Ahead, the reception,
and hours between this moment and
the one they know is coming. She,
in the white for which she qualifies,
wants it to be time.
Across the tracks,
the time is now.
Nighttime in the long hot summer,
season of promises consecrated in flame,
whole city blocks and human hearts on fire.
The driver takes the long way to the club,
steers clear of the east side of her hometown,
where cinderblock buildings she’s never seen
are burning to the ground,
and kids their age leap
before the prowling cars of the police,
their faces lit with the dream of a greater love.