Can a poem be a form of resistance?

[image error]I don’t know the answer to the title of this post. Writing a poem in the face of injustice feels both pointless and like the strongest thing I can do. The story of Chikesia Clemons, who was assaulted at a Waffle House, by police, after requesting plasticware with a takeout order and having the audacity to protest an upcharge, enraged me. I know I’ve gone all kinds of sassy, snarky, uppity and uncalled for in the bank when things didn’t go my way. I’ve vented my ire at more than one undeserving customer services representative. But I’m white. I can behave badly and suffer the hangover of shame and move on. What of the black women who are my neighbors and coworkers and community? Where is the justice? How do we stand with them and for them?

This poem ripped through my guts, born of fire and fury.

THE DESCENT

For Chikesia Clemons

What goes unsaid

is that you were given a double-serving

of injustice. Twin lashes

for your duplicitous sins of being born

female and black. You,

the Queen of Heaven, sent into a life

of fun house mirrors that distorted

your every truth, reflected your image

back wrenched and marred

and nightmarish. Sorry

isn’t even a drop in the bucket

it would take to quench your burning. But who

would spare their own piss

to put out the fire you walk through? We

are all tethered

to our individual pain and muzzled

by the promise of a little relief in exchange

for our complicity. Sad animals plowing

an endless row to escape the whip

while calling the rut

a moat, calling the prison a palace. So

as you were assaulted in a restaurant,

knocked to the ground, breasts

exposed, the other diners went on

eating waffles and fryer grease

and shame, like your humiliation

was just dessert. Like your body

is every girl we can’t protect

from eyes and hands and entitlement

and toxic masculinity and violence

and oppression

and oppression

and the bad dream of oppression

that plays out over and over

in daylight, like reality TV. Like

your skin is the flag of our collective

land grab, your bones a litany of our

trespasses, your pleas

and anguish that must be unlistened

so that we may unhear

all of the cries. To help you up

would be to admit to all those subjugated

before you. To admit you’re not a carpet,

not a corner stone, not a headstone,

but blood and breath and dream.

Your body is not a woman

broken but our ancestral homeland,

which we also could not save

from greed and appetite

and eyes and hands and entitlement

and oppression, and oppression, and

the rising tide of apathy. To see

your humanity would be to see

our own inhumanity and then what?

Would we get up from our waffles

to tear down the cities built upon

your sweat, your ache, your grief, your

blackness, your womanness, the space

you take up by being here despite every effort

to erase you?

Karma is a revolving door, bitches,

says the one who birthed the stars, the one

who stirs the cyclones to retrace, season

after season, the path of the slave ships:

Remember, remember, remember, and still no one

puts down their fork. You take your

double-serving of injustice, your

twin lashes, like a to-go order. Like

a take out meal you paid for

even though it tastes of bitterness. Like

you’ve been rocked

in the hold of a nameless ship

for eons, your story a retelling

gone on so long the words

have lost all meaning. Like

what goes around can’t

boomerang back soon enough. But

isn’t it prescribed to offer cakes

to the Queen of Heaven at her altar

rather than her grave?