Gravity

After Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Kitchen Table Series”

I. THE STRAW

Can you throw this away Maybe you should hire more Black staff

Where are you really from You’re not busy are you You look ethnic today

Where’s the African American section Can you turn the music down

Fasterfasterfaster Let me see those eyes Beautiful If you were mine

I’d never let you leave the house It’s like you went straight to Africa

to get this one Is that your hair I mean your real hair Blackass

Your gums are black You Black You stink You need a perm

I don’t mean to be

racist

But

You’re scarred over, I’m the one bleeding

You’re just going to rip apart whatever I say

You’ve said sorry only two times

We tacitly agreed

Then dead me

II. THE CAMEL'S BACK

When you born on somebody else’s river in a cursed boat it’s all

downhill from there. Ha. Just kidding. I’d tell you what I don’t have

time for but I don’t have time. Catch up. Interrogate that. Boss. Halo.

I juke the apocalypse. Fluff my feathers. Diamond my neck. Boom,

like an 808. One in a million. I don’t want no scrubs. You don’t know

my name. Everything I say is a spell. I’m twenty-five. I’m ninety. I’m

ten. I’m a moonless charcoal. A sour lover. Hidden teeth beneath the

velvet. I’m here and your eyes lucky. I’m here and your future lucky.

Ha. God told me to tell you I’m pretty. Ha. My skin Midas-touch the

buildings I walk by. Ha. Every day I’m alive the weather report say:

Gold. I know. I know. I should leave y’all alone, salt earth like to stay

salty. But here go the mirror, egging on my spirit. Why I can’t go back.

Or. The reasons it happened. Name like a carriage of fire. Baby, it’s

real. The white face peeking through the curtain. Mule and God. I’m

blunted off my own stank. I’m Bad. I dig graves when I laugh.

Source: Poetry (April 2015)