SHAVING MY HEAD FOR THE FIRST TIME, I THINK ABOUT MY FATHER, RENÉE GOOD & HER FATHER

Darren Donate

my father never let my brother or me
cut our hair short,
afraid we would be mistaken 
for Cholos,
animal-shelter pitbulls, 
the archetypical Mexican
Hollywood made Noel Gugliemi famous for. 
He didn’t want to raise white boys
but didn’t want dead boys either—

Older now & only a few weeds of hair left,
I take the razor to my scalp
& yield to what he was
afraid I would be:
the profile of a threat—

I think of him lying in bed with my mother
worn from welding
in boiler rooms & machine shops,  
days fizzled from making another white man rich 
but always tracking,
semiconscious,
the images on TV,
worried about what was unfolding in this world
but powerless to stop it—
His biggest fear
was to see us on the news
or in the back of a police van— 

He believed he could save us
from this nation’s rage—
bright as atom bombs.

They said Renée was alive for 8 minutes after
& the President of the United States
said he hopes her father is still a fan of his—

I wonder how Renée’s father must have felt
watching the news & later hearing 
there was a part of America
that consolidated her death was deserved  

& how back in 1999, to be undetected meant
to act white & how that’s not enough these days,
the nature of camo keeps changing—
structural oppression continues to sophisticate
& how no one’s father can really protect them
from a white man’s hair trigger.

My father always wanted us to behave
with self-preservation as priority.

Back in the days of Prop 187
when we still had neighbors that voted yes
they shut down the schools
& my brother marched
& came home that evening proud that he had done something 
so small
& my father in hysterics forced my brother
to take off his shirt
& beat him with a welding cable
& told him he was doing it
out of love for him—

I don’t know how we can keep each other alive—
my mother petting my brother on the shoulder
saying he’s doing it for your own good.

When I see the hair accumulated in the sink 
I know it doesn’t make a difference.

Renée didn’t look the part 
& they cut her down just the same.

Darren Donate is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. His work has appeared in ANMLY, the minnesota review, The Berkeley Review, Dialogist, and other journals.