A poem has a lot of love in it. You read it and it does something to you, because what you are feeling is there on the paper and in your own heart, too. It's like finding my Easter basket this morning, behind the red chair. Pop put it there. He is in the far garden where he goes now since Mom passed on, every morning he goes, Easter or no. But I know when he put this basket together with this purple Easter grass, these yellow chicks with the little brown eyes and curvy beaks, the brilliant green pen and notepad for making my poems, his heart would feel the same when hiding it as mine does finding it. For just then, we are the same, Pop and me. Love, it's a lot like that.

But there is something else I found out, not like love at all, and so unlike Sis, who is on the top stair yawning, smiling down at me, "Pepe hasn't licked the chocolate eggs this year, has he?" Her eyes going for her basket. "No, not a one," I say. Sis is just a minute searching, long enough now we are older, she sixteen, me eleven, we like to look for our baskets but not like when we were littler. And because it is Easter Sunday Auntie Lidia and Uncle Troy come by bringing with them corn relish, half a smoked ham, spice cupcakes with buttermilk frosting, and their boy, my cousin Aldo. A cousin who comes in the kitchen door chomping on a long piece of straw. He still wears the 3-D Space Specs that he has worn the last two times I've seen him. Ever since in a science magazine he spied planet Saturn behind Jupiter. "Look," he said.

"Behind that fat planet. I couldn't even see it." It got by him without the glasses. After that he wouldn't take them off. "Hey, Aldo," I say, right away being polite, which is my first mistake because polite or not he comes up to me, the top of his frizzy head under my chin, hands on hips, and says in his squeaky-brakes kind of voice, "Who are you?" And I know, even though Aldo is a shrimp for a nine-year-old, and even though he has only enough friends to count on one hand, not counting the thumb and pinky, and the ring finger is in doubt (meaning two that I know of). He gets a bull's-eye with me every time. It's like I don't see the arrow coming. He fools me because he has dimples and freckles and he's kind of cute, in the way of a Jack Russell terrier, so I don't see it, his bite.

And then, ugh, he's got me with a joke, a trick no one else in all the world would ever fall for. Like the time he told me bean sprouts were like little worms and I could use them for fishing. Which I did. I even began growing them in Pop's garden, watering them every day with my blue watering can, imagining little sprouts I could pick for fishing instead of going nightcrawling and digging by the light of my flashlight for a big, clumsy worm. Yup, I believed it. Then the time Aldo said Yvette Carne, a girl I admired, dove into Quarry Lake. I imagined her diving in her lime tank suit like a dart into the murky water of Quarry Lake. Next time I saw Yvette, I told her, "I am going to jump.

Just like you." I said it bold-faced and up close. So when she said, "That water's dirty! I would never do that." I shrank back wordless. And do you think I would get it with him, even now? A cousin who knows very well who I am? "Hey, are you listenin'?" he squeals. "Who are you?" What I think to say are those words from the poem, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" The poem I was told to read aloud in my reading-readiness class. But I don't want to be nobody, because for a long time now I have not known who it is I am or what I am supposed to be doing. It is.