by Roya Marsh
& make dresses.
& teach lessons.
graceful rage & aggression.
raisin’ legends.
look at me: Fluorescent!
in broad dayliGht black catcalled dykes look grumpy
catcall II
Ayo, ma!
gucci girl
gimme a smile
gimme a minute
least i aint say gimme a dolla
i love your locs
can you twist mine
i could sit between your legs
i could fit between your legs.
i see you.
i be seein’ you.
i’m watching.
i’ve been watching.
I’d fuck you, with the lights off.
Pussy is pussy.
issa a compliment, bitch.
thassa nigguh.
you a nigguh.
you wanna be a nigguh, so bad.
what? you wanna be a nigguh, ima call you one.
ima treat you like one!
you don’t like dick?
you got a dick?
you want some dick?
you need some dick.
fuck with me, you know i got it.
Oh.
You scared?
Yeah.
You scared.
in broad dayliGht black women look grouchy
For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. —AUDRE LORDE
I tell myself to shut up before i ever utter a word. Before a man inevitably does. Before a lover tells me i’m ruining a moment. I say, shut up, woman. Just write it down. In a text. In a tweet. In a poem. Something easily digestible. To be liked. Shared. Make ’em think you didn’t think but just wrote the thing you don’t have no business thinking or saying in the first place. I have been invited to perform more than I’ve been invited to speak. They want the art not the woman behind it. Want the metaphor not the matriarch. I feel like the world feels like I feel like the angry black woman. My senses tell me to fight. They always have. My senses tell me that physical violence is the only mode of protection that has served me. The world tells me this is wrong. I tell my students this is wrong. I want them to believe it. I want me to believe it. In response to this: I study. I write. I share. With the audacity to exist. To speak. To progress. And the men applaud. And the lovers swoon.
in broad dayliGht black bipolar girls look grimy
Things I have been called by professionals:
Bipolar
Compulsive
Catholic
Depressed
Dyslexic
Efficient
Gifted
Impulsive
Obese
Obsessive
I’ve been baptized twice/washed over/still gay/no choice/no christian/no cure/girl/no daddy/daughter/no dresses/jamaican/no accent /girlfriend/no boyfriend/won’t tell a lie/but I’m always swallowing truth/want to run for congress/but ain’t made a move/stand for something even when I’m sitting/I want to go out/while staying in bed/cuddle without touching/fuck without loving/love without fighting/I’m hungry with no appetite/wide awake/with my eyes shut/so tired/won’t sleep/bathed/still dirty/like my sloppy neat/I like my neat never/smile when I’m angry/cry when I’m happy/spend what I don’t have/living when I want to die/trying to die when I’m supposed to live/I’m the strongest woman you know/in her weakest moment/I’m allergic to peanuts and have been stabbed with an EpiPen/swallowed 30 times the prescribed amount of antidepressants stood smiling over my weeping almost dead body/my mother calls me fearless/my father doesn’t call/built by a broken home/the only thing I’ve ever been afraid of is my lack of fear/my emotions are an 18-wheeler in rush hour/if home is where the heart is I owe back rent to my own chest/I never knew how or forgot along the way to wash the dishes put the pain in the dryer/I’m only breathing because the enemy wants me dead/turned my back on the devil to advocate for someone who actually needs it/I walked away from the cross to have a Godson named Lucifer and he’s a fucking angel/our hugs are crowbars and a part of me is broken into/choosing to learn/to love another good boy who will grow into whatever he chooses/I had to choose me/choose to live/there’s a chance he’ll need my kind of monster to scare away the bad & I’ll be ready & never alone/every best friend I’ve ever had is writing these poems with my hands/so I’ll never have to work again/for now death is behind the back of my mind LIVE scrolls LED bright across the marquee of my eyelids/I’m the rolling credits after a sunset/my memories are deleted scenes/I’ve held a pistol to my head but never brought one home/the only shotgun in my possession is a passenger seat aimed at anyone down to ride for me the clip is endless/& the door is unlocked
in broad dayliGht black victims looked gagged
q. What are the consequences of silence?
a.
silence is a lynching
of things the world already knows about you
but still
needs to choke from your throat
silence is a cloak
draped over a body
of lies
has the world thinking you are safe//whole
something worth listening to
because everything is
the truth
once you believe it
silence is not just deadly
but the weapon itself
left at the scene of the crime
used to extinguish
generations
of black mental health issues
because black people don’t have
time for exhaustion//depression
we will do our work//massa’s work//
& still have time
to be slaves to our own
trauma
silence is blinding
the reason i look for children
the way no one looked for me
is deafening
how no one heard my cries for help
or cries to sleep
impenetrable
how we cannot break
through
my depression
The consequences of silence will leave me lying in traffic on 42nd Street
Believing the only imprint i’ll have on the world is what’s left after the cars stampede over my body
is a drug
i was so strung out
no one knew i wished to die
until I had a stomach full of pills
& when i woke up
still trapped on this bridge
between heaven & hell
silence rendered me speechless
i had no song to sing
silence is no apology
no thank you
my mother,
didn’t know
how to
welcome me to the
world a second time
pessimism is trying to kill myself
optimism is living afterward
i have silence beaten into my body
i exist in this constant state of rage
when my hands don’t know
when my mouth can handle it
and so sometimes my tongue
swings before my fist do
& vice versa
& sometimes they wild out
at the same ga’damn time
no one wants to be a victim out of love
they do it out of threat
of whip
fist
gun
&n
bsp; shame
silence does not make a victim out of me
predators do
silence means i never tell my mother
i was molested
because he is family
because he is bigger than me
because i should have known better
silence means i don’t tell my friends i was abused
because she was a woman
because she wasn’t bigger than me
because i should have known better
i say nothing
because defending myself is
seen as an attack to my attacker
i say nothing because doing nothing is
seen as an attack on myself
i use silence for safety
they think me strong
think I can take it
because I’ve been witness
to my own murder
& still ain’t said shit
i am teaching myself
how to peel back the layers of silence
when the only undressing
i’ve known has been
in front of those who never deserved
to see
silence is not always a choice
it can be
a protest
the thin line
between danger
& safety
saying nothing
doesn’t mean everything’s all right
saying nothing can mean everything
is all wrong
but it doesn’t make it any less real
saying nothing means look at me
close
& hard
my whole body
is a language—
& i’m begging you
learn it
homage to dyke girls with gap-tooth smiles
You still gay no matter how much you smile
straighten your hair
curve your spine
Your butch more visible than your black sometime.
You know,
your smile a gateway to safety
The beginning of your happiness
An interstice for grief and greed to slip in
Holy to be spit out
You know,
if there is a god
he got some ’splainin to do
I know,
if there is a god she
black—tired of yo shit
& ain’t ’splainin a ga’damn thing
That’s why you got this crevice
behind your lips
So even when you breathe
the truth come seeping through like a whistle.
in broad dayliGht black mfa candidates look glamorous
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.
in broad dayliGht black dykes look go
the bible be a fascinatin’ book of fiction.
got all kinds of tricks & schemes & wonder
how folk still buy it. live by it. die by it.
i read them tales in there.
tall’a than that tree as smart as all get out
& that god fella, him think dyin’ a metaphor.
say you git what you git & don’t throw no fit.
like the ground ca’ just swallow a gurl.
his world gon’ wish away.
& i git it, that gumption get ya cursed.
but eve. eve aint ne’er wanna be no s*n.
not on this earth, dirt & damned, or any.
every gurl in there got some flaw. mostly
make it look like she chasin’ some man to the end
of the world. when she always only eva been chasin’ daylight.
& he still convinced the s*n come up just to hear him crow. them stories as crooked as a barrel of snakes.
most’a it seem like just pickin’.
i reckon the only time a man come first is …
awww, don’ pay me no nevamind. i’m always fussin’ on sum’n. startin’ arguments in a empty house.
just wonder, in all them stories, if a period make a page dirty like it do a woman?
well, i’m fixin’ to have my own genesis & there shall be no more curse & no more night & we be first & last.
call it blasphemy, but dammit this time the black girl come home!!
this time the black girl come home.
yeh, that’s it. this time the black girl go home.
in broad dayliGht black sisters look glass
the word faggot
shoots off
my brother’s
tongue
more often
than good morning
he doesn’t think it
offends me
he doesn’t believe
the barrel of his
voice could hold
the bullet that
would call me
cadaver
i say,
when a stranger
calls
me a black
dyke
nigga
bitch
i don’t know
where to insert
comma
or
know which name
does the least
damage
because
that’s the one i’ll
turn
into compliment
or think it a
blessing
they left me alive
enough
to hear it
i must be l
ucky
men offer to let
me suck their
dicks more often
than straight
women
an honor
some think their
wives
too clean for
they offer to save
me
make me walk
crooked
fuck me straight
be the daddy
i ain’t have
ain’t want
gon’ show me
what I been
missing
what I’m supposed
to do
when a stranger
wish me dead?
his heart
beats in his throat
and he says
i’ll rip out the
tongue
of any
motherfucker that
would
i swallow and say,
start with yours
in broad dayliGht black dykes look gomorrah
megaphone Jesus says I am the abomination
when I pass his tribe on 149
With his Israelite robe and sparkly headdress
said my denim jeans were ungodly.
One minute I come from Kings
The next I’m the devil’s plaything
both royalty and meant to bow
to those that won’t rise for me
at least not in my time of need
at least not if I don’t bend knee
and that’s just it
I was Nubian a moment ago, y’all
Right up until i ain’t wanna guzzle his kids
even tho I’m so good at doing what i don’t want
like making men erect
but can’t make a man erect a statue
in my honor
fuckable until proven dick free
He ain’t even tryna know my name
Let alone say it
His god and mine suffer a language barrier
How you create your own sect
and still manage to worship a god that’s more involved in my sex than my safety
How you preaching the word of your lord
and cussing me in the name of your crotch
Oh yeah,
you believe the seed comes from the father?
in Hebrew seed is Zephra
which translates to semen.
is that what you spittin?
or you been swallowing so long you don’t know whose shit you eating?
