This is How We Make Trade
“I see my people, but I don’t hear my people.”
-A Comment on My Instagram Reel
There are many somewheres
across this free country
where there sits a little Black
boy in his inner-city classroom,
a child who speaks in a way
unlike the others. His voice soft
like satin, high as the storm clouds
drifting in on the wind. Why
do you talk like that? He’ll grow
up wondering why he finds some
men so pretty while Googling
Playboy images of WWE Divas
with the boy sat next to him in 6th
grade Tech Ed. The eccentric
English teachers will adore him,
& maybe someday he’ll write
a book stuffed with feelings,
which he believes are only just
printed words on dead trees. Perhaps
in 9th grade, the boy & a friend
will have a close encounter, pretend
it never happened even after one
moves to the Sunshine State, & then never
speak again. Perhaps in 9th grade,
he will finally understand the tingle
in the P.E. locker room, will comprehend
why peers sneer and jeer
& stab with that Groundhog-Day question.
Are you…?
The boy shrinks into himself, creates
another who sounds and acts the same
as all the rest. A Him who isn’t other.
Any trace of distinction extinct, fire
feelings extinguished to damp embers,
solar flares biding time, havoc in the wings.
Some nights you may find the boy
digging in the field by his childhood
home – no tools hands bare –
planting peonies for the Brown boys
bullied out of erudition, trampled
into conformity, shoved into the knotty
violence of hiding in plain sight.
