Joanne Durham

What am I?

                  After Faith Ringgold’s “Hide Little Children”

my four-year-old asks,
meaning color, race,
meaning he overheard adults talking,

meaning as he plays hide & seek 
on the preschool playground
with Yesenia, Nazarene, DaQuan, so far 

their differences have all sorted in the same
folds of his brain with tall & short, 
skinny & plump, fast runners & slow, meaning

he doesn’t know from his white face
peering out of the bushes where they all hide
that his world looks different from how it looks

to Nazarene, Yesenia, DaQuan, or how
the white world fixes them all in their places, meaning
he will soon shed his innocence

like the cicadas molted their nymph skins,
exposed as their bodies hardened,
meaning we’ll do our best to teach him

the meaning of the long shadow white casts,
without casting him into its mold.

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books, 2023). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry South, NC Literary Review, CALYX, and Dodging the Rain. She lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Please visit her at https://www.joannedurham.com/.