If a Black person is alive but no one /
is around to profit off of them, /
do they make a sound?

you’re not even catholic, and i’m not even catholic,
and we’ve just played the biggest prank on the church since
the time that those kids teepeed the courtyard at st. joseph’s.

Sanctuary.
You are with me wherever I go.

who excused the executioner
who watched, and said nothing

Our bodies, my mother answers, //
when I ask her what the world reined. The world / tightening / its fist.

Call me by my name. Say it / with the familiarity and reverence / of a spoken prayer.