Akua Lezli Hope

UNREMEMBERED

I thought of the long-limbed girl with curly hair
laughing in my backyard. She has a ponytail.
I have bangs and my legs are folded under me
how I loved yoga taught by Richard Hittleman on Channel 13
in black and white, like the photo.
It is my birthday, there is a part down the middle
of my head and I have two cornrows tugging my short,
hot-comb straightened knots into neatness.
There is another girl on the grass,
smaller than both of us, the same age,
but less sprouted. I don't remember her.
I google the one I recall, her three-syllable name
becomes four in Italian, where it set Dante's heart aflame.
Her huge, dark father was a GI with a short war bride
Her mother taught me to use the abacus
my aunt sent as a souvenir from Tokyo
on the large ebony and ivory one in her home,
an elegant and alien tool, musical, smooth –
I wanted to say how special it all seemed,
how I never forgot her last name, its honorific quality,
but she didn't remember me.
Nor did the boy I was smitten with
his bold red lips, ever ready grin, unruly curls
My father knew, my brother teased
in the time I didn't like boys.
He gave me one of his dog's puppies.
In his radical autobiography, the picture
of our bad Shag's collie-like dam is there,
as is one of our elementary school class
taken on a day I was absent.

A third generation New Yorker, Akua Lezli Hope has won two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1987, 2003), a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship (1993), and The National Endowment for The Arts (1990). Recent publications include Three Coyotes, Fall 2011; Stone Canoe, 2011; The 100 Best African American Poems (2010) ; and a short story in Too Much Boogie, Erotic Remixes of the Blues (2011). Hope was paralyzed by transverse myelitis in 2005.