When you call me by my name you will know what it is like to swallow the
sun. Do not avoid the art of stomaching me in all of my
fullness, learn it. Learn like curls climbing in and up, skybound sunrays.
To be black is to forever defy
gravity in small doses.
So when my name stum
bles
across your tongue, you are shedding stars. Know what you relinquish.
To deny my name is to deny hella deny dope.
Familiar words in foreign settings and the rest found in the split second
before the correction comes.
A day of ducking and dodging between the sounds of home made
still in understanding. To deny the laughter
pressed behind pursed lips when she calls the silk bonnet a shower cap,
ignorant
to the fact only royal silk is fit to contain our crown.
To deny the three suns in a sea of stars. I know no gravity
stronger than that of unwaning eye contact. A recognition, a silent
knowing and nodding that today, we make mirrors of our melanin
and refuse
to go another day without seeing ourselves. All this power you invoke
not. Let us warn you, powerless souls
sag and so we celebrate these silent intimacies
until we float.
Weightless is a skill best learned young
for morning solar eclipses
for morning sun’s eclipses
for morning suns black
for mourning black sons
is something only possible when you have learned how to fly.
To
fallen sons,
our spines seep fire like love liquidates and so
we melt and melt and melt until we harden. Unearthly pressure.
But the bends benign our buckled backs and I know us to be
superhuman. Our transcending of
gravity can be traced to too much time on our toes.
For we fight, float like butterflies by day when
we receive no justice.
Flight is survival of the fittest, but instead I name this
a timeless beauty. He who questions the beauty of blackness, look
to the night sky. Black don’t crack cuz our collagen is created from cosmic clouds.
O, to age like constellations.
Call me by my name. Say it
with the familiarity and reverence
of a spoken prayer.
For its stary syllables are the closest you will get to the heavens
without dying.
Do not let it fly away. Instead force your tongue
to find a home for its phonetics.
There will be no other name.
No clever contortion
for your comfortability.
Let this be the one time I sink.
