The South will birth a new kind of haunting in your black girl-ness, your black woman-ness becomes
a poached confection—honeyed enigma pledging to be allegiant. The muddied silk robe waving in their amber grains of bigotry. Your skin—
a rhetorical question, bloodstained equation no one wants to answer. You will be the umber, tawny, terracotta tongue spattered on their American
flag, beautiful brown-spangled anthem. You will be the bended knee in the boot of their American Dream, and they will stitch your mouth the color
of patriarchy, call it black girl magic when you rip the seams. Southern Belle is just another way to say: stayed in her place on the right side of the pedestal.
Your sun-kissed skin will get caught in a crosshair of questions like: No, where are you really from? You will be asked, where are you from?
more than you are asked, how are you doing? Like this name, this tongue, this hair ain’t a tapestry of things they made you forget—
the continent they forced to the back of your throat. And that’s what they will come for first—the throat.
They know that be your superpower, your furnace of rebellion. So, they silence you before the coal burns, resurrect monuments
of ghosts on your street to keep you from ever looking up. Build a liquor store on every corner so we don’t notice the curated segregation,
call it “redistricting.” Our cities muzzle the men with gallows for tongues, call it “obedience school.” Synthesize ghettos, graffiti them in gold, call it “urban development.”
The South will make bitch a sweet exaggeration of your name: sit, speak, come when spoken to.
The leash will always be taut, gripping around a word you never said. Your body an apparition—hologram of your former
self. Too much magic in one room turns sorcery, witchcraft; and we be witches reassembling the chandelier of our reflection.
We spin a web of shade and make it a place to rest under—broad oak that it is. They will suck the mucus from your jubilation,
our gatherings now a cancer. We will clap back with shaking hands, ’cause that’s all we’ve got— these voices, these throats,
this righteous indignation. They start with the muzzle—always taut to melt the metallic of our wills.
Always a rusted bit in the mouth of the horse, too stubborn to ever be spooked by their ghosts.