In a box where nothing justifies my blackness, I am the temperature of the sky a minute after sundown. Only apostasy and my lust for godhood have kept me away from dying. Before now, everything without a shadow has hurricaned at me at the command of a magician and the air, too quiet to wind a limb from decay. I toll my blood for each drop that leaked from a bullet wound. There are so many dues to pay for this amount of melanin that absorbs the rays of sun. I braid my fractured limbs into an aged root that has talled a tree and broken its branches to survive the fury of gods since antiquity. This is how I know, like grace, blackness is a placeholder for death. Grief outlines my lineage, showing that I have a father whose brain is a constellation of stars, the size of my wishes in god’s hands—a mother whose understanding of sin has nothing to do with biting an apple against divine instruction, but everything to do with the uncolored campaign happening between her thighs, against her wish—a sister whose color is a confluence of night & pre-existence—and I, the cat in schrodinger’s box, not alive, not dead, just a poem on the wall saying black lives matter//end police brutality.
Ante Hamersmit