and every brown girl i know is an oracle / every one of us has seen our end reflected on lcd / has kept an epitaph pressed beneath our tongues / just in case / i mean / we’ve all heard the stories / of girls / who look like us / girls / who went into the night / alive / and when morning came / they weren’t / you see / this is what it means / to be both brown and girl / means you are born knowing / that if you die violent in this country / they will shrug and call it evening / it is to know / that every day you wake to sun / it is in spite of this dusk-rite / and every brown girl i know / knows a brown girl / who became her own mythos / call her daphne / or laurel / or deathless aphrodite / our names will all become / a lapsed prayer / one day / in my town / a brown girl goes missing / plastic jars with her face taped across are placed on every gas station counter / they sit / for years / filling with spare change / and if you drive down slow enough / past the third house on westin street / the one with a “for sale” sign / staked into anhydrous earth / i imagine you can see candles burning / on the ofrenda of a shadow home / a tinderbox of unmade bed / still empty / and every brown girl i know / has felt the shadow her own absence/ has seen flickers on the walls/ fears her life will be a cautionary tale / if asked about the times she’s felt invincible / she will say / “i have always known / the smell of smoke / rising” / and after all / how much of survival / depends on the ability to remain calm / in a burning building? / what i mean is / all the brown girls i still know / no longer flinch /we know the secrets / of how to lemon juice and baking soda / soot stains and blood out of clothing / taught to play two hands / in her own erasure / and i think about the brown girls i’ve grown up with / how we would watch each other walk out the door/ and wouldn’t unclench / until we got a text message saying “i’m home.”/ how we spent whole summers laughing and sharing twin beds / laid up / in reflection symmetry / thought the closer we pressed our shoulders together / the less space there was for anything to sever us / what a comfort it was to know / in this moment / we were both here / alive / and breathing / now / every brown woman I know sleeps with her back / turned to her own spectre / i had a dream last night / ten thousand of us wade into the Atlantic / hands clasped / until there is no touch that can stop the tide / i open my mouth / and brine fills me / until all i know is burning / blood-peroxide froth and sea foam in my lungs / sediment yielding to my body / lulling me tranquil in this death quiet / and i / i look up to a nation drowned / a surface undisturbed / a stillness / without a name //

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.