Things I Can't Tell My Daughter

When I was Black

I had a tear

That swept

Beneath the skirt

Of the ocean

It lays in rest

With the souls of Black folkx

Who knew

What survival might cost

When Breonna Taylor slept

In dreams of a family

In arms of a lover

In shelter

In alarm

Woke

To bullet pounding

Info terror propaganda

Whistle blower PD parties

Black woman lost to the whims

Of a thirsty media demon

Fed with likes and sad faces

And a people too tired and hungry to stand up

When Black men search for birds

Their phones should be fully charged and live camera capable

They should always beware of unknown white women

With god complexes

And should never attempt to correct them in any way

Lest they end up like Christian Cooper

Lest they want the noose

When we don’t mourn

A cop kneels firmly on our neck

And a no-knock

Carries us down the river

To ol’ massuh’s house

Where the sun don’t shine

And the bees don’t buzz

And ain’t no way to know

What it means to be Black

Ahmaud Arbery

If I were lynched in the streets

My children would avenge me

The moon with her sling 

The star with her bone

And my wife 

River

With a cauldron

What I mean is

Hands off the black godhood

Because you see

If

We had trapped a white man

Between two cars

And shot him down

No guns fired

I’d be in a black site jail

Until the klu klux klan

Had their grand jury

Instead I put my head

Between two lips

And wait for corona

To take my six times more likely black self

To sankofa

Sankofa, a Black person’s Valhalla

And if you don’t believe me

Believe that for running

You can lynch a Black man

But we won’t stop running

Not when cops say

Drop your skin or we’ll shoot

Not when doctors claim we don’t feel pain

Not when billboards say we don’t father the children we raised

Not when jobs burn the names off our applications

Not when crack blocks are our stimulus package

Not when American flags stretch our necks to pledging

Not when our children are sold, our mother’s confiscated and our backs stripped for a name

Ahmaud Aubrey

Say his name