Emancipation Queen
“Emancipation Queen” was a historically Black beauty pageant in Utah.
It’s true
that beauty
can be a tool
dually wielded
robin’s egg
who would know
come from a red-
breasted bird
taffeta gown
named for what
the body made
its blue
but not the maker
or the blue
from which come
the robin
is that emancipation
to leave beauty behind
a Black girl
on a stage
inside the egg
of a robin
a Black girl who is
a robin
repeating the question
From Golden Ax by Rio Cortez. Copyright © 2022 by Rio Cortez. Published by arrangement with Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Rio Cortez
Rio Cortez is the author of the author of Golden Ax (Penguin, 2022); I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains (Jai Alai Books, 2015); and The ABCs of Black History (Workman, 2020). Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.