To the White Woman in Dayton, Ohio Holding an I ONLY SUCK BLACK DICK Sign at the Counter-Protest to a KKK Rally in 2019
White women are gonna put me and mine
in an early grave too hidden for our families to find.
When I say I’m tired, I mean bone-deep. I mean, once,
a white woman just like you cried whistle
and a boy never came home. You don’t trust that Blackness lives
outside plantations, or growing red-wide in the street from holes smoked
into our backs. It’s hard not to feel like some part of us is always
on the auction block or divided up and jellied for future
generations. I know safety isn’t real. I have too many ghosts
on my doorstep. I’m all out of charm. But you knew that.
You didn’t come all this way for me. Just for the picture.
Just for the chance to rattle the slick of your spit
at all your crafted monsters. If a white woman could save the world
with only the flick of her tongue, she still wouldn’t do it if no one was looking.
Bloodmeal
After Kenneth Goldsmith’s reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy as conceptual poetry in 2015
There’s a white man who says he knows
the destructions of our bodies. Monotones
reports compiled from the trials of our ghosts. Calls it
experimental, transcendental, unflinching opening
into the seeds of poplar trees. An effort in undoing.
Good thick rope that doesn’t know
how to loop around the army of a neck.
He excises his name’s gloam, makes myth,
clinks champagne bottles with the rain of white voices heavy
on our heads. Oh, the joyous safety of never seeing
your blood marbling the streets. Of cramped family
reunions inside obituary. What sweet-sharp relief it must be to leave
home in the morning and know you’ll always come back.