race ----- ethnicity ----- descent how one man’s skin parted from another’s the story goes that eventually sweat rendered either’s plateau saline till rivers ran saltless into the roofs of their heaving mouths as for me I only realized my body was brown when I was shown a lurid sky nursing dirt pouring over me the sooty rains of desire these days my face becomes a garland when someone in rapt attention calls me Brother I want to hang around them merge into the jowls of what we sprung from listen our skin is nothing but the bark of old trees in disguise — this is just how ecology works the sum of all skin is constant it wouldn’t surprise me if climate change morphed us all into one universal face — our voice, the only distinguishing feature imagine if accents stranded by mouths ran away to dig rivers imagine a rock sliced open by the language of eyes tell me would we still be jumping fence after bending fence ransacking needle, plundering clover would we still be using light to build periscopes in dollar bills or would light not choose to bend around then when I talk about the restlessness of evening moths & the way fireflies linger long on earth having outlived the joy of their spectacle all I’m saying is — our living bodies are forever in walking resonance with the dead wet in the blood of those that gave us away this antiparadise this frazzled earth shall root right where we seed shall flower on the beds we don’t decide but happen to peel

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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