Humor in poet­ry does not always soft­en the blow secret­ed with­in a poem. Michelle Peñaloza knows that a tiny grenade sits in the mid­dle of ​“Dop­pel­gänger”, a seem­ing­ly pass­ing com­ment, but one full of all the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, shame and com­plex­i­ty of fam­i­ly lore and our culture’s painful truth: ​“it’s more like­ly she is/​racist”. But there is, in the poem, a ten­der­ness that lies in the poet’s appre­ci­a­tion that her ​“tita” is more than this. She is also a myth, a sav­ior, a queen, and more, she is tired, and in this she is Oprah’s ​“dou­ble walker”.