We watch them do this, expand from all directions like lungs abruptly filling with water, as we hold hands and walk through the eye of another storm. A man grabs his crotch, offering it to my wife, flings a mouthful of spit and epithets towards us. Each pupil is a dim swamp flooding, silence blanketing a shallow body in Neshoba County, dusk shedding its absence across the congealed oven grease beneath a rusted burner. A woman’s neck swivels when we pass, wraps a hard vowel around her tongue like lighter fluid choking a glass bottle holding a fuse. On this corner, scored by dancehall and soca, there is nothing more novel than me and my love’s contrasting hues—it ignites a rush of color from these strangers’ faces. They ring us a violence familiar as February weather, mine our skin for metaphors, demand we offer answers to questions they are still forming like infants from their throats. I have watched my body’s primal wisdom flicker dark as a fist-concealed palm, ache so volatile it screams for release. Rage is a language I unlearn on the corner of Ocean Avenue and Church, no shoreline or cathedrals in sight, only fractured things decorating a broken sidewalk like littered snow. A new voice pierces the air, a flood of sound that hits me like a wall of ice, louder and higher pitched than those before, this time a small child with brown skin and green eyes, writhing in her flimsy stroller, pointing towards the dimpled oval bootprints I leave behind in the hazel-colored slush, squealing: Papi! Papi! Papi?