by Courtney Faye Taylor
When I finally set
to write my own elegy,
I want my cerebrum streamed through
my nostrils like Cleopatra.
Generations from now brown nobility
will appear west of the Atlantic,
rest braids on bedspreads in
Lorraine Motel, temples to the oval rug
of a Kenyan-white machine,
and when they reach the Boston Harbor,
instead of tea they’ll study my head, the
mutated cells that held poetry.
And when the little royalties kick
their fetterless feet out
from the blue dock instinctively
and wonder what I mean by
diabolic dye or
benighted soul I hope
their tour guides explain that
back then Queens
were called niggers. “Lucky for you all,
God lost his mind.”