Unit 2: Vocabulary from Readings 2

I was neither blessed nor cursed, depending on how you looked at it, with skin milky enough to classify me as white or swarthy enough to render me black.

And the white kids, a salting of red and alabaster faces, had noses that were tapered and blunted, free of the slightly equine flare of my own, and lips that unobtrusively parted their mouths, in contrast to the thickened slabs I sucked between my teeth.

I was stumped. No one had ever asked what I was before.

They were rigidly partisan. The only thing that unified them was their inquisitiveness.

And I had a hunch, based on their avidity, that the question had a wrong answer.

Nowhere in their ringing questions was the elastic clause, mixed.

The only experience I had with cool had been vicarious, watching my father and his bebop-era revolutionary friends, and feeling their vague sense of disappointment when I couldn’t mimic their behavior.

"To belong is to understand the tacit codes of the people you live with.”—Michael Ignatieff

You know, my child, since the dawn of time, dynasties have succeeded each other but the kings always kept their promises.

You know, my child, since the dawn of time, dynasties have succeeded each other but the kings always kept their promises.

All the country's money went into ridiculous celebrations of the 2500 years of dynasty and other frivolities...

Meadow of crabgrass, faded dandelions,
querulous child-voices.

She takes
from her son's disgruntled hands the spool
of a kite that will not fly.

Feels the kite,
translucent purple square, rise in a resistant arc,
flapping against the wind.

Feels the kite,
translucent purple square, rise in a resistant arc,
flapping against the wind.