Yesterday I wanted to table-top dance for you with my perfect hair, no cavities. I’ve begun asking my neighbours to name five things that make me better than the other people we both know. This is because I can’t explain drowning, and when I deliver five kids from Juarez to your feet, they’re all dead. While this is mostly a metaphor, five mothers are always standing by my bed, asking me to give my place up. I’m considering this as I breastfeed my reflection, hand out free shots to boys with dirty blonde mullets, while the entire continent celebrates my poise, my perfect hair, this je ne sais quoi, and all together they wonder how my English has gotten so good. I tell them my first word was water. Or baby. But either way, I said it just like that: in another language. If you keep taking a right every time you’re about to get home – eventually you understand direction. A system of incompleteness. I take my head out with my teeth to scream into my country. It’s the perfect Sunday. California has burnt itself down and the peace-loving Bushwick suburbia is building golf-courses over my brothers. It’s a dozen a hand. History with its own cancer. We are rollerblading across the thighs of America and I want to win. Push my luck at the border. Polish shoes with a toothache. A licensed ontology. Spinning over the gulf. Where the money goes. Where the ocean drinks light out of my refrigerator. Four-thousand birds falling. By official decree.