Poetry

Moonlight / Sunrise

I.

I dream about black boys.

I dream about black bodies in the middle of winter;

black bodies in the middle of the road,

surrounded by broken twigs, melting in the snow

until

someone's mother asks

where is my son and what the fuck have you done to him?

I see her quiet rage in the tremble of fingertips.

I sense her sorrow in the way she hangs her head,

face towards ground

as if she could see

his last steps before death.

I dream while mother moon glows softly in the sky.

Beneath bruises,

between broken bones,

black boys bleed blue.

II.

I hear black boy joy in the screams of a distant summer.

Black boy screams in the middle of summer.

Sun smiling golden over cracked pavement and deep skin;

they are still learning how to love themselves.

It's okay to be soft,

I whisper.

Black boys flutter, scattering ashes in the wind.

Waves are just gallons of ocean water dragged by the moon.

I see a black body in the middle of blue.

I remember nineteen ninety-six, when I had chubby fingers and chubby toes,

and a heart so whole I had no idea my family was breaking.

I remember the suffocation of humidity; sharp claws around my neck, fucking me slowly.

I tasted the salt in my sweat as it dripped.

I remember the mango flesh you fed me, incisors grinding down on your fingers,

as though you were a tropical fruit too.

I remember paper peeling from the walls, fragile and crackling, attempting to hold on.

Our house was different.

I remember the television so loud that static soon turned into silence, white noise into blackness,

I can still smell the stale cigarettes now.

My family constantly collided in the kitchen. Smashing dishes in the sink, we bruised like peaches.

We bruised like soft women.

I remember how stubborn the kinks in my hair were, knotted like the roots of a palm tree.

I remember how you tried to carry me.

I still remember the white skulls of black slaves in silver chains on crowded graves.