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2020 Quarantine Killings
And they ask, 'How do black boys write about their city?
How do we know street if we don't know uncracked sidewalk?'
They ask, 'How do these Black boys know anything about their city?
How the buildings are sitting on corners where brothers' bodies
are still learning how to rot?'
There are small crosses placed in the grass where families cannot
afford to bury their loved ones,
reminds my brothers and I that we are early graves before we are anything else.
We call those corners playgrounds.
We call those corners the killing fields.
We call our bodies bullets, even if we were never aimed in the right direction.
We call the remnants of our mothers' family the disaspora tree.
We make a catalog of prayers out of broken hands.
We pray for our family tree to make its way back home to this soil.
We use our hands to dig the graves we cannot afford.
We are farmers of broken Black bodies.
We have never know city, never known comfort,
never know safe street in any city.
We use our feet to walk streets paved by sunlight
and ask our shadows if they meant to choose this skin.
We make a catalyst of bodies our dinner menu
and we eat with our eyes closed.
We are fed lies so easily it tastes like medicine.
Always conflicted between being Black and being people.
I wish God could've given us a choice.
For years, we have been told that there is something we need to scrub off this body,
as if this dirt could go away.
Working in the field make you realize how easily Black can cook in the sun,
how easily we turn on each other for a little slice of the pie.
We don't know this city, how it was built with our grandmothers' arthritic hands.
How we couldn't have gotten a house or a bed when it was first built,
when it was first settled, when it was first taken from the Indians,
when our gods believed in the same beginning.
We don't know home.
We know how generations of our people could use these legs,
could run miles on into the night,
our faces bedazzled with the remnants of the stars.
We will forever search for our forefathers' footsteps.
We don't know home. We know run.
We know this land has never been ours.
We know how to fold ourselves into nothing.
We know our sweat and tears tenderized this soil.
Somehow we make fertilizer for the soil.
We know how to make these hands be useful.
We are the farmers of every revolution.
No country was built without the piling up of dead bodies.
This country just happens to be where our dead were dragged and hung up.
America, the land of the free and home of the brave.
We fought and died for that slogan, right beside our white brothers.
And doesn't that make us worth something?
Tonight, a riot is the language of the unheard.
Playon Patrick
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