The crooks

Inspired by Resmaa Menakem's work and teachings ... and a recent podcast he was on

Your body was 

not your own

it served at 

the pleasure of 

the kings and elites

their feasts and 

festivities fueled by 

the blood and 

sweat and tears 

of laborers and peasants

whose skin was 

darkened by dirt 

sun-baked in fields 

you weren't allowed 

to ever eat from

servitude and subordination

a birthright passed 

down through your 

bloodied European bodies

and only deemed white

once you were 

able to turn

that generational rage 

outward, to reclaim 

a sovereignty of self

stolen from you

by stealing the 

land, languages, lives 

of pigmented people 

on a new land 

you would rape

and pillage the 

same way your 

predecessors were on

your own ancestral homelands

--

April PAD Day 7 prompt: villain

What a pretty name

Hi, my name is
not nearly as important
what you call me 
behind closed doors, closed 
minds, or closed hearts 

where you fetishize an 
exoticness that once threatened
your grandparents so much 
that they sent mine
to Arkansan incarceration camps 

emerging years later with 
broken hearts and steeled
wills, a thirst to 
prove their Americanness/humanity,
become a model minority 

modeling resilience after abuse,
white-adjacent acceptability, and 
generational trauma embedded deep 
in the DNA that
became this face you 

now deem desirable

— 

April PAD 2021

Poetic Asides Prompt Day 1: introduction poem

operating system

is it just a quirk
in the system
that those who are dying

on the frontlines of injustice
across our country
are mostly black and brown?

or is it built into
the system to 
oppress those with skin tones

darker than the colonizers who
stole this land?
I'll say: it's no quirk.




--
April PAD - Poetic Asides Day 22: quirk