Slam Poet Elizabeth Acevedo Debuts Novel, ‘The Poet X’

Excerpt from The Poet X:

Stoop-Sitting

The summer is made for stoop-sitting
and since it’s the last week before school starts,

Harlem is opening its eyes to September.
I scope out this block I’ve always called home.

Watch the old church ladies, chancletas flapping against the pavement,
their mouths letting loose a train of island Spanish as they spread he said, she said.

Peep Papote from down the block as he opens the fire hydrant
so the little kids have a sprinkler to run through.

Listen to honking gypsy cabs with bachata blaring from their open windows
compete with basketballs echoing from the Little Park.

Laugh at the viejos—my father not included—
finishing their dominoes tournament with hard slaps and yells of “Capicu!”

Shake my head as even the drug dealers posted up near the building
smile more in the summer, their hard scowls softening
into glue-eyed stares in the direction of the girls in summer dresses and short shorts:

“Ayo, Xiomara, you need to start wearing dresses like that!”
“Shit, you’d be wifed up before going back to school.”
“Especially knowing you church girls are all freaks.”

But I ignore their taunts, enjoy this last bit of freedom,
and wait for the long shadows to tell me
when Mami is almost home from work,
when it’s time to sneak upstairs.

Unhide-able

I am unhide-able.

Taller than even my father, with what Mami has always said
was “a little too much body for such a young girl.”
I am the baby fat that settled into D-cups and swinging hips
so that the boys who called me a whale in middle school
now ask me to send them pictures of myself in a thong.

The other girls call me conceited. Ho. Thot. Fast.
When your body takes up more room than your voice
you are always the target of well-aimed rumors,
which is why I let my knuckles talk for me.
Which is why I learned to shrug when my name was replaced by insults.

I’ve forced my skin just as thick as I am.

Mira, Muchacha

Is Mami’s favorite way to start a sentence
and I know I’ve already done something wrong
when she hits me with that beginning: “Look, girl…”

This time it’s “Mira, muchacha, Marina from across the street
told me you were on the stoop again talking to los vendedores.”

Like usual, I bite my tongue and don’t correct her,
because I hadn’t been talking to the drug dealers,
they’d been talking to me. But she says she doesn’t
want any conversation between me and those boys,
and she better not hear about me hanging out
like a wet shirt on a clothesline just waiting to be worn
or she would go ahead and be the one to wring my neck.

“Oíste?” she asks, but walks away before I can answer.

Sometimes I want to tell her, the only person in this house
who isn’t heard is me.