I see them consuming our pain
Bite after bite, like it’s an appetizing kernel of the popcorn in their hands
Taking in the stories of our youth, our desperation, our devastation of opportunity
Like they’re candy
I’m sitting here, thinking to myself,
These are the stories of poverty, of pain,
The stories that can become happy endings with
Investments in education, opportunity,
Valuing culture, life, love
And I look around and see
Movie-goers
Blissful in their separation from a reality
The silver screen a portal keeping them from feeling, seeing, smelling, choking on what they see
I can’t breathe
(too anthemic to speak those words on their own…)
I can’t breathe as I leave the theater
A young man’s blood pouring from his face
Into my lungs
Drowning me in his life
Drowning me in his life
I can’t swim to escape this
His desperation reflects in the eyes of every street dweller I pass
Ornaments
With brown eyes like mine
Black hair like mine
Cocoa-mocha-chocolate-whatever-you-wanna-call-it euphemistic skin like mine
THE STORY DOESN’T END IN THE MOVIES!
And I can’t unsee it
No
Not the film
Not the reality
Not the drowning
I can’t unsee it…
…and I can’t unsee the flags
The flags flying high above the crowd
Heralding all those near and far
to the violence not near but far
Far away in that other land called Africa
Where the brothers and sisters of those mocha street dwellers
Die a different kind of death
Green, yellow, red
A banner that once hearkened a warm, but distant sense of home
Now burns as it flies
Aflame with the passions of a people
A people tired of dying and living as the dead
Arms crossed, raised over my head, our heads
A rebellion against death has begun
A resurrection of sorts
I am dying
Drowning in the blood of the near
Burning in the passions of the far
And helpless to unsee each
How do you unsee this?
I choke as I breathe, first on blood then on smoke
And I ask, what does respite look like?
What does it look like to be a free Black woman,
Black citizen of this world,
Where neither the blood of this country
Nor the flames of the next
Consume you?
To feel this is to begin to die
To not feel this is to certainly have died,
Killed the empathy, the heart, the soul of oneself
And to consume, as an appetizing kernel of popcorn
The misery of our world
I lack a Lens quite as clear as this
Neither the camera lens
Nor the magnifying glass
Nor the two eyes in my own head
Can show me grief
Like this Lens has
Ethiopia,
Oakland,
Black,
Tragedy.
What does it look like to be a free Black woman?
