Christmas, blue lights refract through the wet
windshield. Us, in the backseat,
while my brother drives through the richest
neighborhood in Orange County. It’s tradition.
From the passenger, my sister says,
Who’s the white girl?
I don’t know what to call you.
In my room, we sleep on our right hips,
side by side. This is the closest we get.
Evenings, linking elbows, we walk
past chlorinated fountains
& a dry, man-made lake.
I love listening to you describe the light.
Dappled, like memory.
In the poem where you compare me
to your father, you describe a cigarette stain
on my teal futon, which was never actually there.
Alli Cruz (she/her) is an American writer of Filipinx and Cuban Descent. A 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow, her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Margins, swamp pink, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and resides in Los Angeles.