She is a noose still soiled with rotting chips of bloody skin

She is the floor freshly mopped for the wrong man to stand on

She is a maze a lion’s lair and a labyrinth

She is the prize in the center of the maze

She is an expensive shirt that matches nothing in your closet

We do not call it black love

Our love has no need of labels

I am the night sky earth’s blanket everywhere but nowhere

I am convinced that my blackness has always been a preexisting condition

I am a thrift store sofa

I am stained

I am used

I am someone’s trash 

Black girl magic is a misnomer

There is too much Sandra Bland-ness in her brilliant blue-blackness for it to be magic

Her kisses do not turn me into a prince

Or

A citizen

Her love does not add the other 2/5s needed to make me a man

All the men in this land are old white and do not appreciate Kendrick 

I do not want to be these men

Black girl magic is the honey that makes black excellence easier to swallow

Black boy joy is a misnomer

To be boy is a luxury we cannot afford

It is a Greek myth like Heracles or the American Dream

No

Black boys are born running like gazelles

We are hunted for our bodies

I wonder who has made room for me on their mantle?

In which trophy case will you find Trayvon?

We still use Emmett Till as a ghost story to train our sons

We tell them

“She will never love you like on of us”

“She will never be one of us”

“She need only whisper the word rape with the strength it takes to blow the candles off of a birthday cake

And they

Will throw you a lynch party

The only magic is making love out of black fear

Carrying your black like stubborn belly fat and no matter how much you diet

Ain’t no coming back from that

Promise me you will never call it magic again

You are a spirit you have a body

You’re not inferior to anybody

Don’t let them tell you that double-dutch is not a tradition

Those swinging ropes like lines of descent cutting through air and airborne oppressions

Those sneakers on wires symbolize the heights to which we’re called to climb before we get caught by crime

Tradition

My woman girls never chanted over cauldrons

They made us a life from scratch

Adding elements periodically to a pot

Mixed sweat with flour

Withstood summer and oven heat

Not one body starved

There was no magic or metaphors

I do not not belittle my queens by calling them girls

I’ve seen black women battle

Breathless as they bathe and dress babies in the sink

I never understood how they made money out of mindfulness

How fish dinners turn into fish sandwiches

Turn into feeding 5,000

Grandma inherited Jesus’ hands

How she heal faces with spit and thumb?

How you multiply gum and peppermint in purse?

How you believe me?

Tradition

We beat our women

Tradition

We beat them with fists and words and indifference

We beat them because they will never be ours

Their bodies belong to European standards of beauty

Their minds belong to Neo-American ideals of feminism

We don’t say we love them

Because when a man says he loves you

It means he will support you

Provide for you

And feel responsible for you

So those 3 words are shackled captives in the gilded cage of our fragile masculinity

We are pawns of reality 

Ignorant of truth

Us 

The other

The black 

The muslim

We 

The different

The latino

The poor

We all of us have more in common with bears than american citizens

We know how it feels to be hunted for our bodies

For our bodies to be gutted of everything that fills our bodies with pride

To be stuffed

We have become rugs 

We lie still

Quiet 

Only noticed when stepped on

Mouths open because of the trauma

Or hunger

But we have our voice

A gift from God

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