Brown Girl Dreaming Read Online Free

and stories and whole new worlds
    tucking themselves into
    my memory.

birch tree poem
    Before my teacher reads the poem,
    she has to explain.
    A birch,
she says,
is a kind of tree
    then magically she pulls a picture
    from her desk drawer and the tree is suddenly
    real to us.
    “When I see birches bend to left and right . . .”
she begins
    “Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
    I like to think”—
    and when she reads, her voice drops down so low
    and beautiful
    some of us put our heads on our desks to keep
    the happy tears from flowing
    —“some boy’s been swinging them.
    But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
    As ice-storms do.”
    And even though we’ve never seen an ice storm
    we’ve seen a birch tree, so we can imagine
    everything we need to imagine
    forever and ever
    infinity
    amen.

how to listen #6
    When I sit beneath
    the shade of my block’s oak tree
    the world disappears.

reading
    I am not my sister.
    Words from the books curl around each other
    make little sense
    until
    I read them again
    and again, the story
    settling into memory.
Too slow
    the teacher says.
    Read faster.
    Too babyish,
the teacher says.
    Read older.
    But I don’t want to read faster or older or
    any way else that might
    make the story disappear too quickly from where
it’s settling
    inside my brain,
    slowly becoming
    a part of me.
    A story I will remember
    long after I’ve read it for the second, third,
    tenth, hundredth time.

stevie and me
    Every Monday, my mother takes us
    to the library around the corner. We are allowed
    to take out seven books each. On those days,
    no one complains
    that all I want are picture books.
    Those days, no one tells me to read faster
    to read harder books
    to read like Dell.
    No one is there to say,
Not that book,
    when I stop in front of the small paperback
    with a brown boy on the cover.
    Stevie.
    I read:
    One day my momma told me,
    “You know you’re gonna have
    a little friend come stay with you.”
    And I said, “Who is it?”
    If someone had been fussing with me
    to read like my sister, I might have missed
    the picture book filled with brown people, more
    brown people than I’d ever seen
    in a book before.
    The little boy’s name was Steven but
    his mother kept calling him Stevie.
    My name is Robert but my momma don’t
    call me Robertie.
    If someone had taken
    that book out of my hand
    said,
You’re too old for this
    maybe
    I’d never have believed
    that someone who looked like me
    could be in the pages of the book
    that someone who looked like me
    had a story.

when i tell my family
    When I tell my family
    I want to be a writer, they smile and say,
    We see you in the backyard with your writing.
    They say,
    We hear you making up all those stories.
    And,
    We used to write poems.
    And,
    It’s a good hobby, we see how quiet it keeps you.
    They say,
    But maybe you should be a teacher,
    a lawyer,
    do hair . . .
    I’ll think about it,
I say.
    And maybe all of us know
    this is just another one of my
    stories.

daddy gunnar
    Saturday morning and Daddy Gunnar’s voice
    is on the other end of the phone.
    We all grab for it.
    Let me speak to him!
    My turn!
    No mine!
    Until Mama makes us stand in line.
    He coughs hard, takes deep breaths.
    When he speaks, it’s almost low as a whisper.
    How are my New York grandbabies,
he wants to know.
    We’re good,
I say, holding tight to the phone
    but my sister is already grabbing for it,
    Hope and even Roman, all of us
    hungry for the sound
    of his faraway voice.
    Y’all know how much I love you?
    Infinity and back again,
I say
    the way I’ve said it a million times.
    And then,
Daddy says to me,
Go on and add
    a little bit more to that.

hope onstage
    Until the curtain comes up and he’s standing there,
    ten years old and alone in the center of the P.S. 106 stage,
    no one knew
    my big brother could sing. He is dressed
as a shepherd, his voice
    soft and low, more sure than any sound I’ve ever heard
    come out of him. My quiet big