“I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.” -Frank O’Hara

We drift between our areola outlined pupils
expanding with flickers of artificial sunshine in Third Ward where the dead are buried

in gun cartridges

splintering into my city’s veins plump with cracked open IPAs and discarded plastic bags

choking baby turtles.

At midnight, you will find me nestled behind my crumbling apartment building from the 80s. The lady above me has a neon blue Christmas tree on her porch year round. My neighbor deals drugs. At 1 A.M., I hear her muffled steps in the hallway. When her mother died, her brother turned her eye into a decaying orchid and I swear it bloomed enough for pollen tears to leak the way her father’s veins did when he jumped out the window

rolled up in an Italian flag screaming, “Merci!”

(It means thank you.)

According to Google, the word Texas originates from the Caddo word taysha, meaning friends or allies: there is a war in Houston’s pot belly.
We shave fat from organs and stuff it into grandma’s cookies, but only if you’re white.
Abuela serves me turkey bacon baked in the oven. We bathe our chilaquiles in tofu sour cream.
It took approximately 30 missed calls before Abuela stopped calling me Isabellita and just

“Isabella, why don’t you talk to me?” an aria in Spanish,
piano keys screaming Clair de Lune every time I had a panic attack,
I would fall to the floor sobbing I can’t I can’t I can’t
and use every muscle in my trembling hands to cover myself in a thick blanket.
I would touch the edges so lightly I swore it was a butterfly wing.
In the confined space, there was safety. When people ask me how to trust, I am torn between
my mother’s delicate, painted fingertips gliding across my brown skin
the burgundy velvet pout of her lips twirling into an awkward smile
eyelashes reaching like ebony spider webs for a single light blue teardrop
her hand contorting into a paintbrush and every stroke is violet flower petal on my skin

When I applied to be the youth poet laureate of Houston, I was asked to write a poem about it. I sat on my bedroom floor with unwashed black ocean wave hair, laptop nestled against my

unshaved thighs.

They wanted love poems, wanted to know about Houston’s big ass and her redneck blush and

how she moans like black coffee brewing every time a steamboat rolls into her port.

They didn’t want to know that she is the sex trafficking capital.
That women with foreign tongues lay stripped in those boats, bones poking out of oiled skin.
That I was one of them               in my own way                                              in my own way