BGD Blog

Misanthrope decides how he feels about Jason Collins’ coming out

May 22, 2013

by Cam Awkward-Rich

I haven't lived in the world of men long enough

for each trip into the Stanford locker room

to be anything but a fresh surprise—the blond boys

who walk around uncovered, manhood waving

like the flag of some new found country,

and the black man of all my girlhood fantasies

whose eyes I feel on my back as I shower

in the next stall. And no one calls this gay.

Except me. In my head. Tinged with a desperation

I don't quite understand, the ambiguity of this want

to hold, to fuck, to master, to become, to kill, to open

and walk into like a house.

Today, like most days, I broke open on the treadmill.

Salt rubbed in slow. The wound, something outside

the body. I go to the gym mostly to do this, to sprint

toward the blue glow off the tv screen

and cry.

Today, Jason Collins is splayed open

on all six screens. White picket grinning

from his dark face. Sweat staining

the one body that makes black boys valuable,

I mean beautiful in this country.

Today, I think I am supposed to cry

somehow different. To feel relief

break inside me like wave,

like a changing tide. Salt

strained out, no sting.

I know, brown queer kids need their heroes.

It would have been nice if someone on tv

had told the boy growing up inside me

that he could be anything he wanted,

that he still could be a man. Yeah,

would have been nice.

But I think that nice is always only the gauze

covering the wound. A story we tell

about what people deserve—

just days before Jason became the only out gay man

in American sports, a black woman was killed

a few blocks from my house, right in front

of her four year old son. The next day,

like always, I watched the news from the treadmill

and felt my body become an ocean, all flooding

the absence of her name.

The first article I read was mostly

about how policemen bought her son

a happy meal, as if this was an act of heroism

and not just the most basic kindness. Routine

violence and suddenly the white lie is torn away

and there it is the slit, the wound,

the brown body splayed and opening,

that America crawled out from.

So, yeah. Brown queer kids need their heroes

So when Jason comes out on the court

to thundering applause, to claim his share

of the American dream, I hope he knows

what he’s doing as he runs into the spotlight,

white space that makes his black a little less

dangerous.

I know, who am I to ask anyone

to want in different colors?

Remember, I'm crying on the treadmill

of his ivy league university,

trying to sprint straight into my own

American girlhood dream, straight

into the body that makes a black man beautiful.

Straight through the glass, into tv static.

All work published on BGD is the intellectual property of its writers. Please do not republish anything from this site without express written permission from BGD. Yes, linking to this post on Facebook and Twitter or elsewhere is okay.

Cam Awkward-Rich is a student/poet/performance artist living in the bay area. He's read poems all over the place, has represented bay venues at various national poetry slams, and is pursuing a PhD from Stanford's program in Modern Thought & Literature. Mostly, though, Cam rides public transit and wonders if the bus is really a space ship and, if so, when it'll take off and leave this place behind.

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To the Queer Black Kids

May 9, 2013

by Mia McKenzie

Yesterday, while driving, I was stopped at a light and I saw a little boy, maybe six years old, waiting with his mother to cross the street. The way he stood, with one hip jutted out and a hand on the other hip, filled me with happiness. He had very large eyes and long lashes and as he looked around, he seemed to take everything into his small self, his eyes bright with excitement over the woman selling strawberries on the corner, and the sounds coming from the barber shop. As they started to cross the street, as they started walking, the mother reached over and grabbed the boy's shoulder and said, "Stop walking like that!" The boy's entire demeanor changed. His shoulders rounded, his head lowered. I couldn't see his eyes anymore.

I thought about all the boxes black children are forced into. All children are forced into boxes, but for black children there is a particular urgency about it. When his mother said what she said, her voice sounded angry, cruel, but also scared. Because for black bodies, it's a matter of survival, always. I don't need to quote statistics. You know what I'm talking about. If you don't, then this message is not for you.

This message is for the queer black kids, queer in all kinds of ways, including but not limited to different, gay, quirky, dykey, and fabulous, who are learning right now that they shouldn't walk like that. Who are being told right now that there is shame in not being small enough to fit neatly into a box marked boy or girl. Who are being fooled into thinking that those boxes mean anything at all.

I want you to know I see you. With your hip out to one side. With your wide eyes. I want you to know that we are out here, too, that we were once you (in a way, because no one is exactly you), and we know.

We know how confusing it is when people talk about wanting you to be free, and then do everything they can to keep you from being free. We know what it is to wonder how freedom could possibly look like just the same old box.

Your mother may be trying to protect you. But hurting someone yourself to keep others from hurting them is really no kind of protection at all. I wish your mother knew that. I wish a lot of mother's knew it.

Anyway, I just want you to know that I am out here, that we are out here and that we love the way you walk. That it fills us with happiness to see you being who you are, whoever you are. That there are people who cross your path every day and come away better for it. That you are a gift.

Keep switchin' them hips.

Mia McKenzie is an award-winning writer and the creator of Black Girl Dangerous.

Get Mia McKenzie's debut literary novel, The Summer We Got Free. It's a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award!

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May 8, 2013

Hey BGD readers! Thursday, May 9th is Give OUT Day! It's a day for LGBTQ folks and our allies to come together for "24 hours of generosity."

Black Girl Dangerous isn't a part of it at all! Yeah, we missed the deadline. But that doesn't mean you can't donate to us anyway! Missed deadline or no, we're still here doing all we can to amplify the voices of queer and trans* people of color!

So, on Give OUT Day, while you're giving to a whole bunch of other amazing orgs and projects (which you totally should do), we encourage you to come over to our website and make a donation to BGD. Your money goes to supporting our writers, our workshops, and maintaining the BGD forum.

For more info and to donate to Black Girl Dangerous, go here: http://blackgirldangerous.org/donate/

For more info on Give OUT Day, go here: http://giveout.razoo.com/giving_events/giveout13/home

I Have A Crush On You

May 7, 2013

by Mia McKenzie

Today is International Tell Your Crush Day. When I heard about this, I got excited. I love crushes and I love talking about crushes just as much. I used to be the kind of girl who always told people when I had crushes on them, even when it was totally inappropriate. I don't do that anymore. But I am still pretty straightforward about my admirations, attractions and desires. I'm an Aries, so, basically, I say whatever the hell I want pretty much all the time, including, "I have a crush on you."

Just like it says on the ITYCD site, having a crush does not mean wanting to date someone. Crushing for the sake of crushing is super fun. My actual dating parameters (I only date visible people of color who are female-identified and in their mid-to-late 30s or early 40s who are not Libras, and I much prefer other Aries, Leos, Sagittariuses, Geminis and Aquariuses who are femme-presenting) eliminate many of the people I have crushes on as actual dates, but that doesn't make the crushy feelings any less fun.

Because crushes are the best, right?! And QTPOC crush-love is magic and stuff! All that shortness of breath and heart-racing. All that trying to be cool while feeling more awkward than ever. All that daydreaming!

So, in celebration of International Tell Your Crush Day, I'm going to shout-out some of my current crushes. But I'm just going to use their initials, because it's cute and mysterious and still just between us.

Okay, here we go:

Phew! Glad I got all that off my chest! ;)

(QTPOC! Post your crush initials on the BGD fan page! So, even if you can't tell them, it'll be out there in the universe!)

Mia McKenzie is an award-winning writer and the creator of Black Girl Dangerous.

Get Mia McKenzie's debut literary novel, The Summer We Got Free. It's a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award!

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D.I.Y & LOCALLY MADE FOOD: What the Hipsters Didn’t Tell You

April 29, 2013

by La Loba Loca

I got these patches from 1384 screenprinting at the last anarchist book fair in Los Angeles right after a horrible white fucking person yelled at a beautiful brown mama for selling chicken at the gathering. The horrible person, skin waste and excess population was so fucking violent towards the brown lady that her gorgeous chubby lil brown kid felt embarrassed and was telling her mama they should go home. This pisses me off A LOT, pero for reals whats up with the amnesia? Who the fuck are the people that create the most waste and use up the most resources in the world? Who da fuck is related to the people that own Monsanto and all that horrible shit? Who da FUCK are the people that colonized, raped and took over land and COLONIZE indigenous foods? GUESS! So yeah amnesia pisses me off.

Como si fueramos nosotrxs who made up the horrible meat industry, como se fueramos nosotrxs who own those fuking meat businesses. como si nosotrxs no supieramos lo que es comer real food. Fuk that shit! Our muxeres are the reason why this world still revolves, they are the ones that use plastic containers for pots, to pack lunch, to store their money, to keep their legumes...they are the ones that cross seeds from one country to another, LAS SEMILLAS NO TIENEN BARRERAS EUROPEAS. Our muxeres are the ones that make sure that the food is eaten to its last bite. Our muxeres are the ones that plant flowers and make homes and entire neighborhoods beautiful full with plants that attract colibris and birds and all that magical shit.

The lady selling the pupusas, tamales, tacos in the corner WITHOUT fucking permits, maybe without fucking papers are THE REAL FUCKING REVOLUTIONARIES, FUCKING RADICAL ASS BEEZHIES.

We are hella DIY, some of our people don’t even need dishes cause they wrap their food with leaves. Some of our people don’t even need to buy dipers cause they use those 100% cotton panales to re-use and re-use. Some of our mamas used reusable fucking pads before being an eco-feminist was “in”. Some of our people had almost ZERO negative effects on mother earth cause they lived up in las montanas y en el rancho. Some of our people eat meat in minimal quantities, and guess WHAT some of our people still kill their own food. Some of our people have never had cars pero have hella tight nice walking/running legs. GUESS WHAT ELSE! The colonial food system, that McShit, Wendy BS, Burger Caca ALL that white trash food that is killing our people and creating an epidemia of diabetes WAS NOT CREATED BY OUR PEOPLE. My people drink fucking REAL fruit juice with honey, bitch.

So yeah let’s eat local! Let’s pick fruits from the trees in our neighborhood, let’s support our local corner muxeres huslting, let’s TIP our muxeres. Let’s honor the REAL DIY queenz that make trash into magical useful things. Let’s honor our muxeres that use the little money they make in this patriarchal racist system to fill their children tummies with ancestral beans, corn, potatoes and all that beautiful foods that are truly BROWN and from this continent.

DECOLONIZE VEGAN, DECOLONIZE LOCALLY MADE FOODS, DECOLONIZE D.I.Y, DECOLONIZE EVERYTHING!

Feeling angry about this post? Wanna know why we're not nicer to white folks? READ THIS!

Who is la Loba Loca? Third generation vegetarian/vegan Peruvian cook, traditional tattooist, jewellery maker, photographer, biker, Masociclista, documentarist, self-taught sex educator, Angry Queer Brown Muxer. Follow me on FB facebook.com/lalobaloca or TUMBLR at lalobalocaart.tumblr.com

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Hey, White Liberals: A Word On The Boston Bombings, The Suffering Of White Children, And The Erosion of Empathy

April 22, 2013

by Mia McKenzie

Hey, White Liberals*:

I needed to break protocol to reach out to you and let you know that you’re killing me. No, worse. Much worse. You’re robbing me of part of my humanity.

In lots of ways, really, and frequently, but right now let’s just talk about this one way:

Your constant prioritization of the lives of white people over the lives of people of color is taking a serious toll on my psyche and those of many in my community. And by that I don't mean what you might expect. Most of us already know that racism and its BFF white privilege have detrimental effects on people of color. Racial oppression leads to any number of unhealthy conditions, including high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, diabetes and even asthma. But what I’m talking about is something different. Something I’m going to call DSWP: desensitization to the suffering of white people.

A few days ago, I was having lunch with a good friend who is Korean-American, and she told me that when she heard about the bombings at the Boston Marathon—the marathon itself being something she knew nothing about and immediately associated with white people—she found that she had a hard time…well, caring. I’m sure that sounds shocking to many people. But it didn't shock me. Because I was having the same feelings myself.

I really noticed it a few months back, during coverage of the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings. As news outlet after news outlet flashed photograph after photograph of mostly white children across TV screens and computer screens alike, I felt something I hadn’t remembered ever feeling before upon hearing of the brutal murder of children: I felt numb. Not numb in the way that people in shock feel numb. Not numb because of the great weight of what had happened. This was a different kind of numbness.

I couldn’t help but think about Trayvon Martin. He wasn’t an elementary school kid when he was shot and killed by a racist with a gun, but he was just a 17-year-old boy, unarmed, walking down the street with a bag of Skittles. I thought of countless other Black youth who have been murdered by crazed gunmen with badges and police uniforms in the last few years. I also thought about the hundreds of brown children in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan who have been killed by US forces on the ground and by drone strikes. I thought about how many times I didn’t see any of their faces, smiling and innocent, splashed across the TV or the internet for days and weeks on end. I thought about how white people I know weren’t posting links to stories about those children and what had happened to them. That they weren’t writing Facebook statuses about how unbearable those kids’ deaths were. And, seeing pictures of those little blonde children—because the blonde ones are always featured most prominently—I felt numb.

And it wasn’t just me. The same was true for many of my majority-POC friends and many people in my community. Many of us seemed unable to feel what a person should be able to feel when another person, especially a child, has their life taken away. After all, we had always been able to feel it before. I thought about the numbness of my friends and about my own lack of connection, and I wondered what was happening to us. I didn’t wonder for long, though, because the answer is really simple: you are happening to us, white liberals.

It shouldn’t have to be this way. While many white people may not be capable of connecting emotionally to the humanity of people of color, we POC have always been capable of connecting to yours. Because all our lives we are told white people’s stories--through news, television, movies, etc.--our ability to see white people as people has been pretty solid. (This is also probably due to the fact that we have never needed an excuse to kidnap, enslave, or mass murder you, which is always easier to do to a race of people when you can deny their humanity). But even in the face of all the evil that white people have perpetrated against us, most of us, in the face of some individual white person or small group of white people in pain or suffering, have still been able to feel compassion. Sympathy. Empathy. But lately…it’s getting more and more difficult to feel those things (for examples, see here and here).

Some of it has to do with the fact that the wars and subsequent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on for more than a dozen years. For many of the younger folks I know, that’s the better part of their entire lives. It’s a whole third of mine. For a dozen years we have watched as the mainstream media has ignored the deaths of so many brown children, day after year after decade. I mean, they were ignoring the deaths of Black children all over the world, including here, way before that, but we didn’t have to see them ignoring it so blatantly every morning and afternoon and evening and night on TV (that 24-hour news cycle is a bitch; they have time for everything except our stories). Also, before the internet, and specifically before bloggers, the killing of black children by police officers had much less chance of even being known about outside of the community in which it happened. So, you know, you could at least feign ignorance. But now we know how often these things are happening. And we know how often white people don’t have a damn thing to say about it.

This is also true when it comes to the disappearances of black and brown women and children, which are all but ignored in the mainstream media. When our children go missing, there’s barely a teardrop in the news cycle. When white children go missing, it’s a national event.

Why don’t our children get to be children? Why don’t they ever get to be innocent?

What all this has resulted in is the displacement of compassion and empathy with anger and resentment. Because when the names of slain white children are spoken, I can barely hear them anymore. My ears are plugged with the unuttered names of the Black and brown children whose lives didn’t mean enough to be spoken aloud on CNN. When I see photos of their smiling white faces, I can only imagine the smiles of fallen Black and brown children whose faces never grace the news.

I feel as if something important, something essential to my humanity, is being drained away every time you ignore the suffering and death of people who look like me and my family and my friends and my community, while devoting endless hours of attention to the suffering of people who look like you. Each time, I feel little less…well, I feel a little less.

And I’m not happy about it. I don’t feel good about it. I don’t want to be someone who can’t empathize with people who don’t look like me.

The only way to stop this is for you to stop ignoring our lives and our deaths and our stories. For you to put the names and faces of those Black and brown children in your news and on your Facebook pages. It is not enough for you to say, when confronted, that you care. You need to act like it. Because a part of our humanity—our empathy—is eroding. And that's not a good thing for any of us.

*I'm speaking to white liberals because I don't expect anything from conservatives.

Mia McKenzie is the author of The Summer We Got Free.

Feeling angry about this post? Wanna know why we're not nicer to white folks? READ THIS!

Mia McKenzie is an award-winning writer and the creator of Black Girl Dangerous.

Get Mia McKenzie's debut literary novel, The Summer We Got Free. It's a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award!

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Remembering How To Grieve

April 19, 2013

by Asam Ahmad

Our President says

those responsible for the bombings

will be held accountable; 

speaks of the 'full weight of justice,'

dread and nausea

swells up inside me

I know 

by "holding accountable"

what America really means 

is visiting violence 

ten 

or twenty

or a hundred fold

on those America decides are

‘responsible’; on those America thinks

look enough like

the ones responsible

I no longer know

how to grieve

"innocent" American victims

I can’t remember how

to bear my head down low

and wring my hands and nod

in agreement yes,

this was a horrific act of violence, 

yes, of course, violence is never okay

I can no longer bear the violence 

of these ritualized gestures,

the violence 

of this language of mourning 

reserved only for the upstanding 

Citizens of Empire; 

lives vaunted

and cherished

infinitely more valuable

than hundreds of thousands

of brown bodies that now litter

the Middle East because America

was too hurt

or too angry

or too traumatized

to see beyond its own

misty haze of grief

There is too much pain in this world 

and I'm afraid 

I no longer remember 

how to grieve

Asam is a writer, poet and community organizer. He is a tumblr, dim sum and reading addict, and is passionate about making the world a fatter place. He is also one of the cofounders of the It Gets Fatter Project.

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A Unicorn of Color Mourns the Day After the Boston Marathon

April 17, 2013

by Janani

The day after the Boston Marathon

my newsfeed is full of red and pink equal signs

next to posts from national press about the bombing.

In a way, these are

the same love:

government-sponsored ways

of expressing our empathy.

Boston is a rallying point for independence.

The marathon is a rallying point for independence.

Tragedy is a rallying point for the state

to exploit its people's fears.

Two men are stopped

at Logan Airport

for speaking Arabic on a plane.

Mourning brings forth a fresh imperialism.

At sunrise, at death,

brown bodies are supposed to return

to the sand they came from

to the dirt they labor on.

Equal signs appears in the horizon

like two towers bending over,

America remembering how to make

skin illegal,

how to steal colors

and put them in a rainbow.

The Middle East is backwards;

let's bomb it off the map.

Black people voted for Prop 8;

let's build more prisons to contain their homophobia.

Palestine does not have enough gay bars;

let's fund its occupation.

Asia has no sexuality at all;

let’s get them working at our call centers.

This Friday will be Day of Silence

every White liberal I know will

slap an ally sticker

to their chest

loudly:

I pledge allegiance to the American fag.

And President Obama will talk about Stonewall

and slip a check to Israel,

and send drones to Yemen.

And brown hands will construct these closets

for white bodies to come out of.

And the State Department

has allocated $3 billion a year

for LGBT rights abroad.

And we will stake our claims all over the world

which is not like colonization

because our new flags are made of rainbows.

And the people of Kabul will send love to Boston

and this is the language

the Department of Defense will listen to,

when they inscribe battle plans

and love letters

with the same X's and O's,

mask the thunder of machine guns

in the beating of pink hearts,

a Human Rights Crusade:

each marriage license,

a license to kill.

Two men will be stopped for

speaking Arabic on a plane in America.

Two men will be celebrated

for being gay in America.

To have and to hold,

till death do us part.

Janani is a South Asian electron spinning around the Bay Area making scholarship and art. They like thinking about apocalypse, decolonizing the food system, and making space for quantum queers everywhere. They're also Assistant Editor here at BGD. You can read more of their writing at queerdarkenergy.sqsp.com, and check out their shenanigans as part of the spoken word duo DarkMatter at bit.ly/queerdarkmatter.

Want to support a queer project that doesn't already have access to hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of lobbyists? Awesome! SUPPORT Black Girl Dangerous and help amplify the voices of queer and trans* people of color!

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Get BGD creator Mia McKenzie's debut literary novel, The Summer We Got Free. It's a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award!

A Few Words on 'Accidental' Racism and Forgetting

April 12, 2013

by Mia McKenzie

There's a lot to say about the Brad Paisley and LL Cool J song "Accidental Racist" and everything it brings up. Like the fact that being an "accidental" racist is not a thing. Doing racist stuff, whether 'accidentally' or on purpose, is just plain old 'being racist'. So there's that. Plus a whole bunch of other things. Way too much, really, to attempt to tackle in a single post. Maybe I'll write more about it in the future, but right now I just want to say a few words (relatively speaking) about a couple of things.

I've been thinking about this "Accidental Racist" thing for a few days now. If you don't know, it's a song by Brad Paisley and LL Cool J about race relations and how, basically, we should all just get over slavery and Jim Crow and, you know, the entire history of racism in this country and not be mad at Brad Paisley for wearing confederate flags on his clothing. My first reaction to it was "Bwahahaaaahaaaa!!! What were these dumbasses thinking and how did they get to be so damn stupid?" I mean, it's hard to get too worked up about a bad country song that's partly a bad rap song with an almost unbelievably bad take on a subject as serious as racism. It just seemed like a ridiculous joke. I was all, "LL, you peaked at 'Round The Way Girl', homie."

But then I remembered how often I hear many of the sentiments that are expressed in this ridiculous song, particularly as editor of Black Girl Dangerous. While most of our regular readers are people who have at least some analysis on race, often random folks of all races stop in to say incredibly stupid shit on the subject. A few weeks ago, a dude actually commented that he had "lost [his] white privilege long ago" because he was a long-haired hippie and had spent time in prison. Yeah, he was still white, though. And in response to How to Be a Reverse Racist, a satire meant to highlight the reasons why racism against white people can't exist (because it's a system of oppression and stuff), a Black person accused me of being racist against white people. Yep, that happened. Thinking about it, and adding the Paisley/Cool J song on top of it, I realized (what I already knew, of course) that those of us who understand what racism is, understand the insidious ways it operates, and understand its effects in all their complexity are in the very, very small minority. And the people who don't really understand any of it...well, they outnumber us by the millions.

That thought depressed me. And for a day or so I thought this Paisley/Cool J collab was maybe signaling the end of the world. Because if we're in 2013 and people are writing songs like this, it makes you wonder if anything legitimate we've ever said about racism has even been heard. And if it hasn't, I feel it's safe to say that humanity as a whole is just a bunch of intellectual cavepeople with no real capacity for learning or growth and is just a total lost cause at this point. And I was like, 'fuck it' and watched 4 hours of Smash.

Then something happened that brought it all back again. My friend who works at a cafe told me about an incident where a young Black boy of about 15 years walked into the cafe and was immediately approached and harassed by the owner, a white man who is always doing stuff like that. The kid was doing nothing but existing, breathing, blinking, etc. and the owner was so sure that he was some kind of threat that he got all up in his space and asked him what he was doing there and basically harassed him until he was shaken and angry and sad. The owner, who, again, has done this stuff before, thinks he's protecting his staff and his customers from anyone who looks "suspicious". And surely if called out he would say it wasn't about race. And if anyone pointed out that he only does it to Black males, and that's racist, he might say it was "accidental". In other words, racism isn't his intention, he's just busy protecting his cafe and racism is some kind of by-product. But guess what? NO.

There is nothing "accidental" about making a bee-line for a Black boy because he looks suspicious to you. That is some George Zimmerman shit. That is some very usual, very run-of-the-mill, is-happening-all the-time somewhere, straight-up racist shit. And you know what else it is? It is a CHOICE. While you may not have complete control over what you feel when you are confronted by something that makes you uncomfortable (for whatever ingrained racist reason it does), you certainly have a choice about what actions you take. And harassing a kid because he's Black and his pants are sagged is a bad choice. A racist choice. Just like wearing a confederate flag on your t-shirt is a choice, Brad Paisley. If you know what the flag is and what it represents and you still put it on your body and walk around in it and get in front of a camera wearing it, that's not an accident. You didn't trip over the corner of the rug and fall into the shirt. You made a choice. A really, really racist one.

This whole idea that racism is something that happened in the past and that we should all 'get over it' is so absurd on so many levels, not the least of which is that IT'S NOT IN THE PAST. Racism--in particular anti-Black and anti-Brown racism--is a system of oppression and violence that continues, every single day in every single place across this country. It happened in that cafe yesterday and it's happening right now in cafes and on streets and in corporations and on movie sets. Black people are killed and caged every day for being Black. Honestly, that kid in the cafe got off easy. At least no one put him in handcuffs or shot him.

"Accidental Racist" is more than just a joke of a song. It's an example of the ignorance of Americans and the unwillingness to even try to understand racism, let alone do what needs to be done to end it. And it's more than that, too. It's propaganda. It's white supremacists saying, again, this is not our fault, the real problem here is your unwillingness to forget.

9/11? Never forget.

The Holocaust? Never forget.

400 years of rape and murder and enslavement of an entire race, followed by 140-plus years of pretty much the same stuff, much of which is still happening right this very second? Forget. Now, motherfuckers!!! Forget!!

Mia McKenzie is an award-winning writer and the creator of Black Girl Dangerous.

Get Mia McKenzie's debut literary novel, The Summer We Got Free. It's a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award!

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Poems By Joy KMT (Part Two)

April 4, 2013

by Joy KMT

Charms

I have licked my mothers face clean of tears.
I have keened my tongue against the moon.
The sun rises in the morning,
I call that luck.

rabbits,
boots and pavement
In that order.

Respectable Politics

they say we ratchet we
dream with fairy dust
in the corners of our eyes, swing
our hair like black rapunzels daring some
intrepid fairytale to climb through the cracks of

shattered-glass lullabies
singing it is our duty to celebrate 1952
when the nooses hung empty and any proclamation
worth more than the spit of a dog thrown at
the feasibility of rescuing the black race

from itself
don't throw no crumbs at us, you boogie bitches
determined to save the ghetto from itself
we be choking like orchids sussing nutrients from
this trail of garbage they call equality/ charity

we don't want your leftover respectability
no place in the corner of the room so when
you get done eating you can cut us open
like swedish cake, display our entrails
and tell us the state of our hearts
pussys and mouths playing
operation save-a-hoe

mean streets, bad broads
politicians shank us with soft promises
and hard lies, you worried about the color and texture of hair weave
killers kill us and our babies
mark our wombs with tombstones on billboards
they want us practicing everyday for our funerals
and when we give less fucks about the deaths
you think are appropriate for us
you call us ratchet. kiss
teeth. kick
rocks.
Ain't nobody got time for that.

Second post of two. Read the first!

Joy KMT is self-taught &queer &black &femme &hood &poet &mother &lover &. She happens to enjoy the subversive acts of reading and writing good and hood poetry. A Macdowell Fellow as well as a recipient of a Heinz Endowment fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Check The Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Emcees and Poets, Amistad: Howard's Literary Journal, bloodlotus and Backbone Poetry Journal. Facebook me! https://www.facebook.com/joy.kmt

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