after Aurielle Marie Let the record show, I've arrived here by way of a violence enacted upon my body. Every inch of this self-discovery, a means to reclaim some agency I once believed in. I tried to do a white thing— claim proprietary over myself, but oh how whiteness flays. & as I erupted dark molasses flesh, let it be known, I was loud in my lament— My white woman therapist wants to know why I keep calling it "violence" I become a fugitive in my own skin. Retreat so far into myself, all I can hear is you aren't allowed here, because you are black echoing like a second heartbeat. What was said hangs over me & storms a dark cloud, try as I might, I can longer enter rooms without thundering in announcement: I am Black & a womxn, already I have been failed. This is a raced thing & a gendered thing & a queer thing & a fat thing, this is an immigrant thing & a thing about unbelonging. A thing about houses in towns that were built to keep me out. Institutions & Black femme bodies, our pains peddled for white edification. Let this never go unsaid, I am a throat you slit open, & whatever cursed song is yeasting in my gut will come piercing through—