MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 29)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about black girls as note passers in white schools, tarrying before overlooked photos, silence, distraction, Big L, crow smarts, the 2016 Trump election, the Ganges
“Shoot me, nigga: I wanna live in your fuckin head forever!” degrees rescinded due to atrocities later committed accusing him of pulling away too quickly from the hug crows will chase squirrels into the roadkill lane—that smart a land where tomboys must really be boys then sewage shallow enough now to wade through for bodies of family withering without attention the thing you loved turned into a career hatred for this president could result in unsafe-optic professors stripped of degrees— no joke, nigga—after some video surfaces from decades earlier of them rapping along to the lyrics of their father figures: “It’s that nigga with knotty hair who Gotti fear!” hush dotted by staccato pops from the backyard flames, hands warm over the planks in which you and your dad put so many, too damn many, tree-house nails (only a heartbeat ago, it seems) clocks ticking and walls closing, you need to get her out so you can poop and have peace, not knowing what to say or do now as another dinner approaches the museum curator, unable to face his shadow, convinced himself the artifact was cursed poverty creeping up ivory towers, the officer knocks his flashlight on the passenger window as professor Simons grades papers before bed every White House solar panel torn away for spite and cameras on move-in day afraid of change, you would be the Jew who did not get out in time education as a proxy for class makes it easier to ignore how poor all of us—even PhDs—are becoming we imagine future anthropologists sifting through our digital archives— mistaking our LinkedIn profiles, say, for totems of our radical polytheism— ultimately to deny the looming annihilation of all caretaking of legacies between family members long-separated filling the silence takes time and energy, and so the poorest are less likely to reach out those for whom a fortune cookie is just as good as a therapist just because the river’s water is holy does not mean it is drinkable dependent on the distraction of daily troubles assume that someone has something to say and even silences speak studying the photo, which you normally overlook each day that urge to prove one’s belonging to whatever group it may seem to advantage one to belong to to a creature in need of words, why not just say the words if you already show the love those words are to designate? in a white grade-school, the one dark girl finds herself in the role of note-passer between crushes
This is a portion of an ongoing mosaic poem called Made for You and Me. This portion is from the first installment: hive Being (Stanzas 2016-2020). More specifically, it is from the 2017 portion of that five-part work.