Nia McAllister is a Bay Area born poet, writer, and environmental justice advocate working at the intersection of art, activism, and public engagement. As Public Programs Manager at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Nia creates participatory spaces for creative expression and literary dialogue. Nia’s writing has been featured on Poets of Color podcast and published in Radicle magazine, Meridians journal, and Painting the Streets: Oakland Uprising in the Time of Rebellion (Nomadic Press, 2022). Nia featured in the Hell/a Mexican reading hosted by the Redwood City Public Library in 2022.

Poem on Belonging

650

They name the streets after presidents around here 
          (the dead and not so dead).
They alphabetize them, rank them, and make entrance exam of our sidewalks. 
It helps us remember that our streets like our surnames
are somebody else's blood legacy.

I didn’t live on the other side of the tracks, 
but I lived on the other side of Jefferson. 
To some I just repeated myself.

I didn’t live on the other side of the tracks,
I lived on the other side of Jefferson.
A surveilled intersection, a crosswalk waiting to claim another school child. My mother gripped my hand tightly at every opportunity.
She knew Clinton was too busy to ever see us coming.

There was never any place to park on Adams Street.
And our neighbor kept his three jeeps, his boat, and his nephews’ fleet 
in the red zone he painted for himself.

My mother still writes chalk messages
along the pavement telling them
two cars can fit in the space in front of our house. 
She is proud of her curbside protest:
A reminder that we’re not going anywhere.

In 4th grade my friend and I used post up in my backyard
with a pair of binoculars, spying on the gangs in the apartment building behind us. 
Today I visit my parents and poodles in puffer vests
walk down our potholed alley.
I seem to have misplaced my binoculars.

They name the streets after dead presidents around here, installed flashing lights, 
painted a mural of brown children on the side of Whole Foods.
Our block is now worth millions.

I imagine my mother the first day I walked to school alone: 
Anxiously perched on the top step of the porch
willing the cars to slow down.
They only see you coming from the other side of the street. 
I still look both ways before I cross.

Copyright © 2022 by Nia McAllister. Used with permission of the author.

Tony Robles, “The People’s Poet,” is a San Francisco native and the nephew of Filipino-American poet, historian and social justice activist Al Robles. He was a shortlist nominee for poet laureate of San Francisco in 2017 and the recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission individual literary artist grant in 2018. His two books of poetry and short stories, Cool Don’t Live Here No More: A letter to San Franciscoand Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike (both published by Ithuriel’s Spear Press) take on the issues of eviction, gentrification and police violence in communities of color. He is also the author of two children’s books, Lakas and the Manilatown Fish and Lakas and the Makibaka Hotel, published by Children’s Book Press and Lee and Low. Based in North Carolina, Tony was named the 2020 Carl Sandburg Writer-in-Residence and is currently pursuing his MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Poem on Belonging

WHITE AMERICAN (A deli counter encounter)

The customer approaches
the counter

She looks as if she
has had more than her share
of trips to the make up
counter

I offer her a
hello to go with my
brown face

Working the deli
counter, slicing turkey,
ham, salami, pastrami
chicken and cheese

scooping potato salad,
cole slaw and ambrosia

I want White American
she says

a half pound

White American? I ask

Cheese, she replies

I search the meat
case

I search and search
and come upon it

White American
cheese

I had been somewhat
familiar with the government
variety, a big block with an
orange tint

I didn’t know White American
cheese existed and I am
thankful for the extended
education I am receiving from
the deli that employs me

I slice that
block of cheese

White American

Wrap it with
my brown hands

in plastic

to go with the
words: Thank you, come again

Copyright © 2021 by Tony Robles. This poem originally appeared in Migozine Summer 2021.

Vince Gotera teaches at the University of Northern Iowa, where he served as Editor of the North American Review (2000-2016). He is also former Editor of Star*Line, the print journal of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (2017-2020). His poetry collections include Dragonfly, Ghost Wars, Fighting Kite, The Coolest Month. and the upcoming Pacific Crossing. Recent poems appeared in Altered Reality Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Dreams & Nightmares, The Ekphrastic Review, Philippines Graphic (Philippines), Rosebud, The Wild Word (Germany) and the anthologies Multiverse (UK), Dear America, and Hay(na)ku 15. He blogs at The Man with the Blue Guitar. Born and raised in San Francisco, Vince also later lived in Daly City in San Mateo County. Vince featured in “Kapwa: Filipino Writers on History, Legacy and Building Community,” hosted by the Daly City Public Library.

Poem on Belonging

PACIFIC CROSSING

The pier, a great concrete semicircle,
stretched into San Francisco Bay
like a father’s arm around a daughter.
On Sundays, we would venture on that pier,

Mama in her broad straw hat, a country
woman in some rice paddy on Luzon.
In his lucky lime-green short-sleeved shirt, checked
by orange pinstripes, Papa would heft the net.

I would lean over the rail, watch the two
steel hoops—the smaller within the larger,
criss-crossed by heavy twine in diamond shapes—
loft out over the dark water and sink

in a green froth. A small wire cage nestled
in the center of the hoops, containing
chunks of raw meat. Papa would say, “Best bait
is porterhouse. Crabs really go for that.”

Sometimes he would let me pull the net up.
The rope slimy and tight in my small hands
and then the skitter and scuttle of claws
on the wooden deck of the pier. Later

at home, I would play the radio loud, hide
that same skitter on the sides of the large
enamel-white Dutch oven, concentrate
instead on the sweetness I knew would come.

One of those Sunday evenings, I dropped in
at my friend Peter van Rijn’s house. Dinner
had just been served, and the family rule
was: all the neighborhood kids had to leave.

But I didn’t. There was Pete’s father, like some
patriarch from a Norman Rockwell painting,
poising his carving knife above the shell—
huge and bountiful—of a red King crab.

I said, “Wait.” Their heads swiveled toward me
in shock, as if I’d screamed a curse word out.
Old Peter, the daughter Wilhelmina, his sons—
Paul, Bruno, Guido, my friend Pete—

the Mom whose given name I never knew:
a good immigrant family. The heirs
of European culture, I always
thought, these direct descendants of Rembrandt.

I said, “Wait.” And then I shared the secret
passwords to being a Filipino.
Here is where you dig your fingernails in
to pry the top shell off. You suck this green

and orange jelly—the fat of the crab.
This flap on the underside tells if it’s
male or female: pointed and skinny or
round like a teardrop. Here’s how you twist off

legs, pincers. Crack and suck the littlest ones.
Grip it here and here, then break the body
in half. These gray fingers are gills—chew but
don’t swallow. Break the crab into quarters.

Here you find the sweetest, the whitest meat.

Copyright © 1993 by Vince Gotera. This poem originally appeared in Liwanag: A Journal of Pilipino American Literary and Graphic Arts, Volume II, 1993.