Mariana Goycoechea
Malcolm X’s House Elmhurst [sic], New York
Four years ago | 189 views, July 2019
I used to ride the Q66 to & from high school every day when this elderly black man
leaned over to me pointed to the corner of 100th Street & Northern: You see that corner? Malcolm X used to preach there. That’s right. Know that. I was proud, elated really, to
see how a pointed finger tapping on the window of a crowded bus brought to life the
autobiography my brother didn’t bother to read or maybe he did, I don’t know because he
dropped out of high school & and was mine to wolf down that summer of 1996 when I
was ten. This summer I went to the Fisher Pool, a few blocks away from Malcolm X’s
stoop. It was July 4th & it was hot & I thought about how I would always clown the title
of DMX’s 1998 album It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot but man no words truer for that long
ass long line at 4:47 p.m. The cops surveilling black & brown bodies just made it worse
but hey they didn’t shoot anybody & I wonder if it’s perhaps they foresaw a possible
revolution on a day we were supposed to remember revolution so they just bowed their
necks to their phones instead at the thought of the prophetic mobs.
I overhear the Mexican dude in front of me say, Yo, you know how you get to the pool
quicker? You jump the fence. I roll my eyes behind his back & think like a good comemierda
like this is why we can’t have nice things & you the reason why the cops are here but
whatever we all get into the pool finally. It had been almost fifteen years since I swam in it.
I cried once my round body landed in the water. You didn’t ask for this but I’m a Cancer &
my Jupiter is in Pisces. Water owns me. You would never guess this but I wanted
to write about snow because the dead own me too. Mami loved the snow & she died
days before a blizzard hit NYC so bad that MTA buses were left abandoned in the
middle of the roads. Mami saw snow for the first time in Queens about eight years after
Malcolm X was killed & she told me how marveled she was at this new world wonder
& how she wanted to take some home to Guate. So I looked up snow & read this cool
fact that there are 421 words for snow in the Scots language but it was hot & I
remembered the pool & I remembered being so close to a national hero on July 4th.
I looked up his house & there it was
in a 2015 video on Daily Motion: avocado green, at peace.
The address: 23-11 Ninety-seventh Street.
In the shot: miniscule snow droplets dusting the air wet.
In Scots: spitters.