Visible–Invisible — They coded the child. She rewrote the file.
Content note: racial slurs, colorism, domestic abuse.
This poem is an archive of a childhood sorted by skin tone and utility. It uses a “case file” format because that’s how it felt — documented, not seen. It’s about the ways love gets rationed, and the small, stubborn light a child steals back.
✦FILE 0009C — COLOUR — CODED CHILDREN✦
Subject ID: 0001C
Filed Under: Racialised Domestic Hierarchy / Invisible Labour
Status: Visible–Invisible
Redaction Level: High
Notes: Child misidentified as servant.
SYSTEM ENTRY — AGE: 6
Core Theme: When love arrives for some, others are erased.
She brought them home like prophecy —
swaddled / pink / perfect.
Triplets.
Three white suns dropped into our brown sky.
“Hold them.”
“Don’t drop them.”
Not siblings — assignments.
Not love — labour.
They were porcelain.
We were children infrastructure.
We were siblings shadow-hands.
✦HOUSEHOLD VISUAL LOG✦
(breath marks indicate pauses)
They / rose /
we / lowered.
They ate peaches from pastel spoons—
we scraped crusts, knees to floor.
They had highchairs // halos —
we had commands:
Say yes, miss / Speak clearly / Don’t embarrass me.
When the social worker knocked:
flashbulb
family
fabricated.
Door shuts / breath holds /
we return
to the floor that raised us.
If love is a photograph,
frame the porcelain —
crop the girl until only
her hands remain.
✦SENSORY ENTRY — SKIN AS EVIDENCE✦
My white siblings floated
on milk-light & mother-laughter.
I wiped their mouths
with hands still shaking from last night’s inspection.
She brushed their curls like scripture —
she touched my hair like contamination.
They were held.
We were helped used.
We were not siblings —
we were scaffolding.
✦EXTERNAL OBSERVATION — SCHOOLYARD COLOUR CURRICULUM✦
White girls burned themselves brown
and called it glow.
Black girls said I wasn’t Black enough.
Teacher roll-call:
What are you?
(always before
How are you?)
I stood between teams
no one remembered choosing —
a blurred body,
wrong shade,
wrong shape
of belonging.
A country
with no flag but skin.
✦BATHROOM REPORT — SINK-LEVEL SELF-CORRECTION✦
Location: Stainless steel basin
Equipment: Lukewarm water / harsh cloth / silence
Climbed into the sink because baths were for other children.
Water hissed / skin burned / breath stuttered.
If I scrub hard enough —
lighten / brighten / belong.
Brown peeled.
Pink flared —
a false dawn.
Diagnosis recorded:
“Sensitive skin.”
Unrecorded:
attempt to bleach self into love.
✦STEPFATHER DIALECT — UNREDACTED✦
(Approved for racial trauma protocol)
No metaphors.
Only impact.
nigger
coconut
filthy beast
lazy Black nothing
Slurs swung like ropes in a house built on ranking.
The porcelain heirs were exempt —
untouchable // already forgiven.
We were infantry,
marched by melanin,
punished by contrast.
I folded my spine into silence,
wondering when brown became burden,
when skin became sentence,
when a child became evidence.
✦ANOMALY — LIGHT EVENT, TIME-STAMP UNKNOWN✦
Morning cracked —
a slit of amber landing on my hands.
Chestnut / copper / ember.
For one breath-long moment
I wasn’t servant or stain —
only hands
holding light.
I kept that colour.
Stored it like contraband.
A private inheritance:
proof my brown could shine
without apology.
✦FINAL ENTRY — UNCLASSIFIED RESISTANCE✦
I don’t scrub anymore.
The porcelain heirs kept their fairy-tale frames.
I kept the sink,
the slurs,
the silence —
and still,
this body
refused
to vanish.
They colour-coded us
to keep the story clean.
But I am the misfiled girl
who stepped out of their frame —
still brown
still burning
still building light
from every place
they tried
to dim me.
✦FILE CLOSED / SUBJECT CONTINUES✦



It's interesting how the 'case file' format, typically used for objective documentation, becomes such a potent insturment for revealing subjective truth and the systematic erasure of identity, a point with which I profoundly concur.
I can’t imagine what this was like - to feel wrong in your own family because of skin they gave you. The contrast of the brown skin and the porcelain is harsh - and I’m sorry you lived it.