Paper

I've spent more than enough moments begging. My performative presence decries how the need to weep is louder than the crying. My tears are reclusive, muffled, shut up in my bones and bedsheets. I've learned how to wear the mask. Dunbar had no idea his poetry was a reckoning for a future that included me. He just wrote how to survive. Fixing my face will not fix flagrancy. Silence still doesn't teach. To master that much self control is to deny the self you are showing up for. Explanations. Excuses. Who are we without the words to justify either our existence or erasure? Does my audacity unnerve you? Angelou been telling me, all my life, how gifts, talents, and craft all run through my veins. Black writers taught me about talent. The raw ingenuity to learn illegally and make a profit. Black writers gave me gifts that no Hallmark card could. I am their imagination. They see me as a niece, grandchild, or cousin. I am family in ways that are intentional and crafted. I am not the craft. I am not an expository on how or why. I am. My creativity rummages pages of words desperate for the essences. The tools only enhance. They do not define me. I am bigger than the leisure and wealth assumed to support art. My face still twitches and tires. My eyes wander. I'm looking for greatness where mediocrity is the means. And, it's very mean, very angry, very indignant. Hansberry knew being young, gifted and Black was dangerous. How many paper cuts come with being Grown, gifted, and Black? Should I beg the system to redesign itself, so hurting isn't the greatest vehicle? That's too much like right. I am not at war with what I cannot be. Begging won't bring me peace. 

A Raisin

 I have an angst, an angry dangling carrot, rotting in my pocket. Why carry seepy stench? Why be putrid and petrified? My power is gunpowder. Black girl Magic is a shotgun. Womanism is the bullet. My target is closer than the length of the barrel. She became the friends I thought loved me, until sleeping over was out of the question. Her mother decided being a friend meant paying me to watch her siblings. She chose humiliation loudly, attacking every insecurity in a chant that I'll never forget. She always calls me cute. She pets my hair. We laugh. She denies she would ever walk to my house. All of them had cars, even if their older siblings drove them. None of them shopped where I did. Some of them went to the football games. They cheered for different players. Players who parked under 8 squares of plastic covered bulbs and drank from scary loud pick up trucks. The players I knew souped up cars with pine boxes, rims, and sat at the carwash til midnight. Our cars are clean, not new. Your cars are not new or clean. We were friendly, at best. The inside of home was a couch we'd sit on in dreams. Real friends find a way to bend back the fears until shooting means a camera. Violence cannot build. Passive aggression smells like racism rotting in my pocket. Desperately loving power, loving those who wield it, withers in the sun. It dries up, too brittle to add to gunpowder. No shots will fire. My pockets weep.