it’s okay because we don’t eat ’em
LOL
Anyway, today, TBH I feel like Patsy in Twelve Years a Slave
Beaten for picking cotton.
I mean I like someone who is white.
Their partner is white.
They have stocks, trust funds, and a retirement plan
And I feel like fucking Patsy in Twelve Years a Slave
Alternately known as Mammy.
TWIZZLERS
Size color class I was never allowed to be little
by little I mean innocent
by little I mean allowed to play
make mistakes
If anything occurred in whatever setting
I was always blamed
I was mistaken constantly for being older than I was
At six when my stepmother came she refused to
allow me alone time with my father
If a moment occurred she asked
What were you doing with him?
As if I at six were molesting my father
I was caught once through an open bathrobe
trying to see my father’s penis
My stepmother never forgot
You were trying to look at him, she said.
I was not given toys books anything
Stuffed animals
Bows ribbons anything that may be attached to a little girl
I was also my mother’s sounding board for her adult problems
with my Dad
Constantly instructed to call the police
when he hit her
The only thing my parents could figure out to do together
for some small infraction was to give me punishment
Two weeks
So I never knew the nurturance
that girls got
My adult life has duplicated this
always to blame
always outside
refusing to see my little girl
On occasion my mother sent me to the store to get candy
Things that she liked
Fire balls
Reese’s peanut butter cups
Kit Kat bars
Black licorice
Sometimes red which I liked
Twizzlers
I remember once chewing a pack of red Twizzlers as an adult
the red stem hung out of my mouth
A friend at the time exclaimed
You’re such a little girl …
And once when I was with a woman
Someone looked on and said, Oh
your little girl is out
In relationships too I was never
the little girl
In fact in most of them I rescued radically immature women
I was their mother caretaker
the one with all responsibility
And of course when it ended I was always to blame
Everything to me lies around class race gender lines
Even in so-called evolved communities
Even with POC
I always know no one would treat a white-skinned woman
or a man the way I’ve been treated
In colleges where I teach
I’m always aware of the hierarchy
People screaming about diversity
I moan complain
How the AIDS narrative only belongs to men
They never ask women
Black women
As if AIDS didn’t happen to us
Our fathers brothers sons nephews
cousins acquaintances
The Black gay boys in the choir
became our disappeared
I remember a pair of Black gay men
who were spiritual
would act as ministers
and bury the dead Black boys
families wouldn’t recognize
These men showed up as the priests
and gave last rites
And what of the women
A mother nursing a grown son
returned to a baby
ravaged by AIDS
Me being young myself going into sick wards
like leper colonies
seeing those abandoned by society
I never forgot
Even my era did not allow me to be little
innocent
A threat if I spoke up
A competitor for middle class white girls
who had the world handed to them
And resented me/you for surviving
thriving despite all odds.
PARABLE OF THE SOWER
If you want to know the ending
How it’s all gonna turn out
The aftermath of Trump’s presidency
Don’t turn to analysts, Wall Street, or CNN
For an accurate portrait of where it’s all going
what it’s gonna look like
reread Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
set in California in 2027
People in fear/behind walls/gated communities
a woman raped so much
she can’t stand
gun violence/addiction/fires that can scarcely
be put out
people scavenging for food/trying not to become prey
compassion is gone
the main character named Lauren is a hyper-empath
she can feel others’ pain
which I think is a metaphor for artists
whatever you think of Marina Abramovic
her show title is right
The Artist is Present
from the beginning of time until now
Look again at the Hunger Games, the districts are
actually concentration camps with gray garb and barbed fences
that nod to Nazi Germany
Humans are pitted against each other to survive
Sometime after Trayvon Martin was shot, I finally understood
something deep about Star Wars
I’ve always rooted for good guys/always
Once I heard a friend at the movies rooting for Poison Ivy/
Batman and Bat Girl’s nemesis
I was shocked that anyone could root for a bad girl
But after Trayvon was killed by George Zimmerman
who walked free
I finally understood what could turn a character’s eyes dark
You could become so disillusioned
And then I understood in the Star Wars franchise
what made Darth Vader—Vader
I felt that again after Trump’s election
No more green, blue light
Only gray, dark drab, white bones, war
Last week, I worked with a class I hadn’t met before
On the subject of Black Lives Matter
I repeated something Gregg Bordowitz said to a group of students
“What if the only justice we have right now is here in this room?”
One student said, “Nothing ever changes.”
So I responded by asking, “Are you telling me then
you can’t change?”
They were all surprised, shocked by my question.
At the end, I asked the class, “What have you learned today?”
A Black girl answered as if she were channeling Octavia herself,
“Change,
is up to us.”
PARABLE OF THE SOWER 2
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler is a dystopian science fiction novel
set in Los Angeles 2027
the protagonist is a sixteen-year-old Black girl named Lauren Olmeeda.
She is a hyper-empath who amongst war, hunger, gun violence, rape, and addiction,
builds a new faith called Earthseed where she reinvents God,
says God is change.
I’ve taught this book for many semesters at college
I think it’s profound and prophetic and the students, mainly students of color
aren’t used to Black gi
rl protagonists.
I ask my students how they feel about a Black girl protagonist
who creates and practices her own religion,
which I think is sheer genius.
I ask, “Is anyone allowed to create their own religion, why or why not?”
The students are always puzzled by these questions as it’s nothing they
are used to.
Somehow, in all of my readings and discussions of this work,
I missed something obvious about a Black girl building her own religion
amidst war, isolation, and gun violence.
Although, I did understand that Octavia Butler was forewarning us about
issues that would plague us in a not so far away future.
Also, in the novel she warns of a water crisis and in one of her
books she warns of a character/a politician who would come to power
with the rhetoric of “Make America Great Again”
she wrote this over twenty years ago.
She not only warned us but in the same seed/breath
gave an answer
Told us in the midst of chaos and destruction, to create something new.
“God,” she said through Lauren Olmeeda, “is change.”
Since the election and this new year I’ve been mulling over this epiphany
as I contemplate change in my own life asking myself
what am I willing to do differently
I’m tired of the schizophrenia of activism, two lives
living separate and opposite
people who say Black Lives Matter but secretly or openly attack Black women
and Black women and Women of Color are the biggest perpetrators of this
Then there are those who say they love queers, but are ashamed/
value straights/anyone over other queers.
Trans peoples lives are not the only lives at stake here.
I have never been safe.
I got a text recently after the New Year from a former student
of mine.
She is a Black lesbian. She invited me to a show.
I had worked with and helped her.
In an act of what I can only guess was self-hatred, as I once watched her
adore white men regardless of what they gave,
she and another Black woman led students in an elite school
to attack me.
It was brutal and I won’t recall the gory details.
For the most part, until now, I’ve stayed publicly silent,
but the results and repercussions in my life were long-lasting.
I was so stressed after the event occurred, a few years ago,
I fell down in my apartment and needed six stitches over my eye.
I never had stitches before.
I fell on a sharp plastic object that just missed my eyeball.
For her fear, hatred, and slander, I could have lost my eyesight.
Even the doctor who stitched me up said
“You’ll never get rid of the scar, it will last a lifetime,”
and it has.
I saw another woman/an ex-lover this past New Year’s day.
She’s a poet.
I saw her at an event and she was smiling at me.
Twenty years later, you could see she’d forgiven herself.
She looked so happy and at peace.
Everybody I believe should be happy and let go,
but I couldn’t go and say to her
like the scar over my eye, the wounds from our relationship
were long-lasting/that for years she and all of her friends
all white women who I don’t even know/harassed me
and spread wild rumors and gossip
because I am a tall Black dark lesbian from the working class
they all assumed like Susan Smith, a white woman who accused a
random Black man of killing her kids when she herself was culpable
They all said I did it.
For years I grieved, lost weight, and more.
One of the games some former friends played is they’d
invite me to parties
then pretend they couldn’t see me,
though I was the tallest, darkest there.
I will never forget one of my ex-lover’s exes who used to try to sleep
with me, helped my ex in a vicious campaign,
sat a dinner table with me just recently and pretended we’d never met.
She stuck her hand out and said, “Hi, I’m …”
I said, “I know who you are,” and laughed.
Actually, I was in shock.
I was in a museum the other day seeing the work of Kerry James Marshall
and I passed by Ralph Ellison’s classic, The Invisible Man
There was an article going around the internet about high schools
and they said the most discriminated against,
the persons falling through the cracks, the most unseen,
most unlikely to have needs met,
most likely sent to detention were Black girls.
I know I’m not a girl/I’m a woman
A friend of mine recently
told me to grow up/stand up/fight for myself/she’s right
but there are repercussions for me as a Black woman making myself
visible that she could never know
that my entire upbringing and society silences me
I’ll put my friend’s comments in the category of
another white woman with a trust fund/has never been to therapy
rarely has had a job/takes recreational pictures all day and told
me once flippantly, “You should work harder.”
I won’t say how old I am but at this age
I feel like Benazir Bhutto emerging from exile
I’ve been thinking about taking art classes and driving lessons
Things I’ve never done
And I feel like Dorothy Allison said about when she chose to write
I am just beginning to live.
BEY
I have to say I envy Beyoncé
That she gets to show up after the fact in New Orleans
With her hair and make-up did
Going down on a police car
That she epitomizes Black cool
With a voice-over from Messy Mya and Big Freedia
The Queen of sissy bounce
I envy her Lemonade when she got to have Serena twerking
A few frames before the mothers of sons lost to police violence
And no one called her out on that
I envy her Black Panther and feminist garb in Formation
That she is a declared feminist
The one who bore the kids
Whose body got stretched out
Didn’t care for herself
Got tired and too caught up
Disillusioned
Had needs
The one who got left for a glamorous other
Because real life activism isn’t that glam
There’s lots of loss and invisibility
And it’s just incredulous you hear people saying things like
She’s so beautiful
Admiring her hair and make-up
And will pay anything to hear her sing
And relish in the Bey and Jay soap opera
Talk about how abused she is
While there are still so many real-life Black women
Standing right next to you
Who are also beautiful
Whose lives got used up paving the way
And you wouldn’t pay ten dollars or a dime to hear
The people of New Orleans are still struggling
Lost their homes
Their city
I always teach the work of Safiya Bukhari, a Black Panther
Who died in prison at fifty-three years old
Advocating for
the rights of political prisoners
It’s a simple book
It always calls out to me.
UPRISING
Sixteen years old
from the suburbs, Boston
I’d go into the city shopping
with my cousin and friends
we’d venture into Boston Commons, the Park.
There were hustlers there, I didn’t know then
with a set-up table.
They played some sort of game with shells
hid money under a shell or a plastic cup
moved their hands real quick
made it purposefully look so easy
naïve sixteen years old, I bet
fifty dollars, a lot of money for me then.
They made it look so easy.
You just had to pick the right one.
Of course, it was rigged
I lost
felt dizzy,
sick to my stomach
lost my gaze.
On Tuesday night after the election I felt the same way
heisted in a shell game.
Walking outside on Wednesday, in my neighborhood
a white woman who barely ever speaks was crying
asked, “What do we do?”
I answered earnestly, a teacher, an artist, professor
who always tries, “I don’t know.”
Later, I walked up the street, a white man in an SUV
with the window down drove by.
He wore an expensive business suit
had a big brown cigar
like when babies are born
expensive like in gangsta films
like Goodfellas
or on
The Sopranos after a kill.
He looked happy, smug,
that’s when I realized the Trump Presidency is a hustler’s game
Ballers club
Players only
Pimp paradise
Wives with teased hair and lots of plastic surgery
on the white BET.
They made it all look so easy
like a choice
Who knew
The American Dream was a side hustle for big businessmen
with all their ugly red white blue striped flag merchandising
available at Walmart and Target, I’ll never buy into again
Who knew
Freedom was a marketing idea/consumer product
Hallucinatory drug cooked up in some Rove-ian as in Karl type of
laboratory sweatshop
Maintained by the architects of apartheid
Freedom like air if you’re white and male and rich enough
to keep breathing
Today, I started to cry as I wrote
to my students
knowing that in everything so far, I’ve tried to protect them
and realizing there are places in this world