or, the glamour of a systematically oppressive MFA program
or, questions I asked my future self when the future was my impeding breath:
1. Can you breathe?
2. Who saved you?
3. What is the urgency in your writing and who are you going to save if not yourself?
4. Sometimes the future is tomorrow, are you ready?
5. How much longer will you wait to talk about the things you have chosen to write?
6. Who will care?
7. Are you willing to die for this?
8. Is it possible to promote your own blackness in the presence of antiblackness?
9. Is any of this worth retraumatizing yourself?
10. Will any of it ever set you free?
The first thing she said to me after the diagnosis was that I had every right to be bipolar. She grabbed me by the face right here on this campus and made me feel one. There’s no way for a black woman to exist and persist in this world without experiencing the extreme of every high and low it has to offer. I agree, I am everything they say I am. I also know that I am none of these things. That itself is a huge knot in my throat. My gall to disagree is the crime that justifies my end. It never sounds like a lynching until the rope snaps. Until the trachea submits and the eyes roll home. Patriot and patriarchy be one and the same in the classroom, where a queer black woman mistakenly breathes a breath that no man sanctioned. Here, he is law and fuckboy, passed and passing as some creed we must abide. He is well traveled but hunts here for sport. (me). Here, I am always something different. One thing before the other. Right now it’s black. Right now it’s woman. Right now it’s queer. Right now it still does not matter. (to him). My intersection is just another crossroad. A red light he will surely run—with no regard. The classroom is his crash site. So many bystanders. So much rubbernecking and still no one calls for help. Just watch him burn in his own racial insecurity. My tinsel-wrapped throat, all sparkly and constricted, dangles high from an oak in the distance. My eyes will never be as bright as his headlights. My cries never as loud as the gridlocked horns. My body never as wrecked as the cars. The rope snaps. The knot tightens. The gasping is drowned out by the sirens. Soon, he will be safe again. Blanketed by the warmth of some emergency professional or bro or mansplaining woman. I’ll have choked down everything I meant to say in the name of feminism or blackness for the sake of existing. Waiting for the rope and gravity and my own resistance to do me in.