«I HAVE come to believe over and over again that what is most
important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even
at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the
speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here
as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon
the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been.»
CONFESSION: i seek solace
BLACK CONFESSIONAL: i seek solace from white men
CORRECTION, ALSO BLACK: there is a man, white, of whom i seek solace in.
BLACK JUDGEMENT: my body and the being contained inside of it are the Native Informant — selling pieces of precious gold to the enemy; working in cohorts with the demon that first confined me to this color and enslaved me by way of pigment.
WHITE CONTENTION: “. . . but i’m white–”
BLACK CONVICTION: “–and so you aren’t biased toward nor blinded by blackness.”
My densities may at times be tragic, yes, but I am not tragically endowed. The isolation does not create some internal craving for approval, for validation, for my color to be settled in court. My contents are what they are — they just happen to be in a black body. Racism is just a coin with too many sides and a million more ridges. The ridge I occupy has a great view — I see all other corners and crevices, but mine is somehow invisible to the others. I like it best this way. In this cyphered sense, I have no quarrel at all — I belong to no groove or contour that denies the validity of other. I refuse to subscribe to the belief that I am the shadows these opposite ridges cast onto me. I am not the shadow nor the light; simply the material receiving and emitting both. I have no time to argue perspective. No, I’m too busy widening my own.
Some of these ‘woke’ folk are always at my neck reminding me of some harsh reality — an institutional violence, a historical disservice, a grand mishap. It fails to register humility or a deferral of efforts within me. I’m grateful for all existences: both the tools in my tool kit and the project upon which I utilize them. The martyr and the messiah, the fascist and his regime, the liberal and the radical. After all, each has its respective ridge on the coin. If each groove in the nickel is a reality, how does the coin not collapse onto itself? Somehow everything holds everything together in respective truth — even with respective dissonance. Of this I am curious, not threatened.
Excerpted from zany like zora, zany like me
subatomic thoughts 