My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE

My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 32

Niño de la Calle Campos A few coins? Can I leave you? Can I walk by without leaning in holding you close, telling you stars’ pathway beyond this math? In the camp, children suckle popsicles, ice cubes, turn tops same as every era Niño de la calle, every evening moving from the huffing voom to isolated despair, translucent, like me once, and I love you, I do. They tell me nothing can be done, the boys, gone to glue, abandoned here, believed gone. And I know the boy who left lock-up for reservation home who returned to us his mind half-gone, so the asylum brain scan shown. I know. sprawling north picking someone else’s money, handing it over in leathery balls, in tiny hearts, in stiff shoots they cradle, held there reverent to tastes, savory, clutched, cradled, caressed for someone else’s table. Yet, here, your eyes, damn it — Can I not leave this duty, the state, reach down, lift you, remember my own soul starved, muffled, what then? 31 BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE Each boy our son.