The students are always puzzled by these questions as it’s nothing they
are used to.
Somehow, in all of my readings and discussions of this work,
I missed something obvious about a Black girl building her own religion
amidst war, isolation, and gun violence.
Although, I did understand that Octavia Butler was forewarning us about
issues that would plague us in a not so far away future.
Also, in the novel she warns of a water crisis and in one of her
books she warns of a character/a politician who would come to power
with the rhetoric of “Make America Great Again”
she wrote this over twenty years ago.
She not only warned us but in the same seed/breath
gave an answer
Told us in the midst of chaos and destruction, to create something new.
“God,” she said through Lauren Olmeeda, “is change.”
Since the election and this new year I’ve been mulling over this epiphany
as I contemplate change in my own life asking myself
what am I willing to do differently
I’m tired of the schizophrenia of activism, two lives
living separate and opposite
people who say Black Lives Matter but secretly or openly attack Black women
and Black women and Women of Color are the biggest perpetrators of this
Then there are those who say they love queers, but are ashamed/
value straights/anyone over other queers.
Trans peoples lives are not the only lives at stake here.
I have never been safe.
I got a text recently after the New Year from a former student
of mine.
She is a Black lesbian. She invited me to a show.
I had worked with and helped her.
In an act of what I can only guess was self-hatred, as I once watched her
adore white men regardless of what they gave,
she and another Black woman led students in an elite school
to attack me.
It was brutal and I won’t recall the gory details.
For the most part, until now, I’ve stayed publicly silent,
but the results and repercussions in my life were long-lasting.
I was so stressed after the event occurred, a few years ago,
I fell down in my apartment and needed six stitches over my eye.
I never had stitches before.
I fell on a sharp plastic object that just missed my eyeball.
For her fear, hatred, and slander, I could have lost my eyesight.
Even the doctor who stitched me up said
“You’ll never get rid of the scar, it will last a lifetime,”
and it has.
I saw another woman/an ex-lover this past New Year’s day.
She’s a poet.
I saw her at an event and she was smiling at me.
Twenty years later, you could see she’d forgiven herself.
She looked so happy and at peace.
Everybody I believe should be happy and let go,
but I couldn’t go and say to her
like the scar over my eye, the wounds from our relationship
were long-lasting/that for years she and all of her friends
all white women who I don’t even know/harassed me
and spread wild rumors and gossip
because I am a tall Black dark lesbian from the working class
they all assumed like Susan Smith, a white woman who accused a
random Black man of killing her kids when she herself was culpable
They all said I did it.
For years I grieved, lost weight, and more.
One of the games some former friends played is they’d
invite me to parties
then pretend they couldn’t see me,
though I was the tallest, darkest there.
I will never forget one of my ex-lover’s exes who used to try to sleep
with me, helped my ex in a vicious campaign,
sat a dinner table with me just recently and pretended we’d never met.
She stuck her hand out and said, “Hi, I’m …”
I said, “I know who you are,” and laughed.
Actually, I was in shock.
I was in a museum the other day seeing the work of Kerry James Marshall
and I passed by Ralph Ellison’s classic, The Invisible Man
There was an article going around the internet about high schools
and they said the most discriminated against,
the persons falling through the cracks, the most unseen,
most unlikely to have needs met,
most likely sent to detention were Black girls.
I know I’m not a girl/I’m a woman
A friend of mine recently
told me to grow up/stand up/fight for myself/she’s right
but there are repercussions for me as a Black woman making myself
visible that she could never know
that my entire upbringing and society silences me
I’ll put my friend’s comments in the category of
another white woman with a trust fund/has never been to therapy
rarely has had a job/takes recreational pictures all day and told
me once flippantly, “You should work harder.”
I won’t say how old I am but at this age
I feel like Benazir Bhutto emerging from exile
I’ve been thinking about taking art classes and driving lessons
Things I’ve never done
And I feel like Dorothy Allison said about when she chose to write
I am just beginning to live.
BEY
I have to say I envy Beyoncé
That she gets to show up after the fact in New Orleans
With her hair and make-up did
Going down on a police car
That she epitomizes Black cool
With a voice-over from Messy Mya and Big Freedia
The Queen of sissy bounce
I envy her Lemonade when she got to have Serena twerking
A few frames before the mothers of sons lost to police violence
And no one called her out on that
I envy her Black Panther and feminist garb in Formation
That she is a declared feminist
It’s like being the first wife or something
The one who bore the kids
Whose body got stretched out
Didn’t care for herself
Got tired and too caught up
Disillusioned
Had needs
The one who got left for a glamorous other
Because real life activism isn’t that glam
There’s lots of loss and invisibility
And it’s just incredulous you hear people saying things like
She’s so beautiful
Admiring her hair and make-up
And will pay anything to hear her sing
And relish in the Bey and Jay soap opera
Talk about how abused she is
While there are still so many real-life Black women
Standing right next to you
Who are also beautiful
Whose lives got used up paving the way
And you wouldn’t pay ten dollars or a dime to hear
The people of New Orleans are still struggling
Lost their homes
Their city
I always teach the work of Safiya Bukhari, a Black Panther
Who died in prison at fifty-three years old
Advocating for the
