Our Big Bang

An African Dominican American Lion enslaved to forever Dodge Impalas

Patron Saint of the Corner, blocking the bodega entrance.

Lion taught in overcrowded schools. 

Street smart autodidact in perpetual in-school suspension.

From detention to probation never on time, always doing time.

Lion rehabbed in overcrowded prisons

where deadbeats reunite with sons

and stepsons long to murder stepfathers and sex grandmothers.

A Street Fighter villain-- an endangered species-- like some American Bison 

hunted whenever outside the redlining around the reservation.

This lion is herded by pigs protecting property, 

and then scalped and branded Felon.

Lion suppressing the roar in his lungs 

with cough syrup and a high fructose corn syrup diet.

His reality dissolves like sugar in boiling water

like opium poppy on a burning spoon.

The tension in his chest crackling 

like baking soda on a frying pan.

Lion raised where aimless gunshots are more punctual than sunrise.

Lion confusing murder with a starting gun and a late start with fate.

Lion ashamed of his Timberlands, scuffed like his criminal history.

Broke and broken, daydreaming on the next “come-up,” and new Timbs.

Lion made up of song samples and the boom-bap in a DJ’s diaspora inner city mix

Afro Americanized Taino hick, tempted to get a fix whenever he recalls it’s all fixed

and that he won’t get a piece until the day it all explodes to bits.

Until one day the Lion remembers the roots under 400 years of cement

while pouring Cognac over concrete and the spirits splash and stain his Timberlands forever,

but this time the Lion harnesses the love inside to slaughter a pig with it’s own snout

and when the blood hits his Timberlands that will be our big bang.

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“Our Big Bang” was originally published in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: Latinext (Breakbeat Poets) edited by Felicia Chavez, Jose Olivarez and Willie Perdomo.

JP Infante is the author of On the Tip of Your Mother’s Tongue and Aquí y Allá: Winston Vargas Photographs the Dominican Community in Washington Heights. He is the winner of PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and Thirty West’s Chapbook contest. His writing has appeared in Kweli, Guernica, The Poetry Project, and elsewhere. He has been awarded scholarships and fellowships from the PEN America, The Center for Fiction and Baldwin for the Arts. He holds an MFA from The New School.