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.