DIOS

See your tree, Florida. See it bowing and bending under the smothered sky. Wind-whipped and swaying. See it through the scratched glass—the work of blades and nails and night after night of desperation. Rain hammered and storm tortured.

You got the white-girl blues again, Florida. I know. I can tell through these walls. I can feel from my own cell next door. I can vibe you vibrating with your hurt—a deep chord that shakes the cinder block like the bass on a car radio.

You’re heavy into that I don’t belong here shit.

But this is exactly where you belong.

Rich girls like you, Florida—blinder than the rest by far.

Yours is not one of those hard-pity tales that make the privileged feel as if they’ve moonlit in a rough world. Yours isn’t the story that makes women like your mother shed phony tears— if only for a moment—at the injustices in the world.