Poetry

my breath catches in my throat as the continuity of life is abruptly disrupted. again. as i sat down to write a poem about my slain brothers and sisters. (and sisters). another was murdered. i watched live streams of black souls gathering in berkeley, missouri [...]

   ~ For Chris Brown Rape doesn’t happen to men Not even boys if you know how To spin your tale & feather it up You’re from that special, faraway place It’s different in the country Just couldn’t say no to it Kind of, like, hot [...]

WE MUST BE THE NEW GUARDS: OPEN LETTER TO WHITE POETS "But when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw [...]

(For Mike Brown, Lennon Lacy, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, and so on, and so on ...) they kilt that boy lynched him just as sho' as my name is what it is they did it cause that's what they do in kokomo Mississippi [...]

We had pride and there was a care we took with each other. Though there were normal middle school cliques and dramas, there was also a strength and loyalty among us. On that bus, we were family. I felt like I belonged. But when I [...]

To Mulugeta Seraw What could we have done but give your son our crooked handwritten, misspelled condolences? We wrote letters and poems on construction paper, neatly folding them like your resting hands in the casket.   We slipped our notes between fruit [...]

next summer my brother will be the same age trayvon was when he died. and you will no longer think of him as the polite and adorable little boy at camp kaleidoscope with teeth too big for his head. and a head too big for his [...]

I am sick of writing this poem but bring the boy. his new name his same old body. ordinary, black dead thing. bring him & we will mourn until we forget what we are mourning & isn’t that what being black is about? not the [...]

I’VE LEFT EARTH in search of darker planets, a solar system that revolves too near a black hole. I have left a patch of dirt in my place & many of you won’t know the difference; we are indeed the same color, one of us [...]