Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976
1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or
condemn me
I must become the action of my fate.
2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?
I must become a menace to my enemies.
3
And if I
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries
And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.
Copyright © 2017 by the June M. Jordan Literary Estate. Used with the permission of the June M. Jordan Literary Estate, www.junejordan.com.
the bullet is his whole life.
his mother named him & the bullet
was on its way. in another life
the bullet was a girl & his skin
was a boy with a sad laugh.
they say he asked for it—
must I define they? they are not
monsters, or hooded or hands black
with cross smoke.
they teachers, they pay tithes
they like rap, they police—good folks
gather around a boy’s body
to take a picture, share a prayer.
oh da horror, oh what a shame
why’d he do that to himself?
they really should stop
getting themselves killed
Copyright © 2015 by Danez Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 3, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets
one is hard & the other tried to be
one is fast & the other was faster
one is loud & one is a song
with one note & endless rest
one's whole life is a flash
both spend their life
trying to find a warmth to call home
both spark quite the debate,
some folks want to protect them/some think we should just get rid
of the damn things all together.
Copyright © 2014 by Danez Smith. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
adj. or n. (1891) : that has or have been left over : not used up or disposed of : surviving from an earlier time
xiao mei, xiao mei, they call you
mini-America, little beauty
stranger woman-girl
your body has more definition
than when you left at twelve
& nobody knows what to do with it
the men talk to you about choices
as in the ones they made for their wives
the women talk to you about children
but not the ones they buried in shame
they insist on being helpful
as in they don’t want you to be
one of those, as in wan le, as in
game over, which you used to confuse
with its homophone, as in
frolicked, as in finished joy
they gave you a name & once again
you had no say in the matter, as in
abandon, as in you leave home
to find it had left you
Copyright © 2018 Yuxi Lin. Reprinted with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Autumn 2018.