Member-only story
When you say…
(a bunch of words about race & my place)
I was raised in the south the younger sister of a Black brother who was the first boy to ever touch me so when you say, “racial history in America is complicated,” I say “I know.”
I was raised in the split state of Kentucky where half the brothers of my historic town’s stately plantation mansion fought for the North and the other brothers laid claims on land and lives on the back of Black brothers in the Confederacy so when you say “do not let this divide us,” I can say “it has.”
I was eleven when I started write-spitting rhymes into a spiral notebook I tucked under the mattress of the bunk bed I slept on beneath my sister, always just under my sister, with floral wallpaper beside I’d pick at with my fingernails when I hadn’t chewed off the nail and the skin around too. When you say “it gets under your skin,” I say, “only until you dig it out.”
I discovered my voice too late to tell my truth and too early to have anything to say. Recorded songs B-side off the radio by holding that Walkman up to the beat. I didn’t know anything about music or that, just north of me, poetry was slamming down on the streets of my origin the streets of my nation, that poetry ran south in my veins — Detroit to Alabama to Kentucky and Go West Young Woman — in the ways I’d count the pauses between…
