Citizen: An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine

He says, no, it’s not him. He’s met your friend and this isn’t that nice young man.

He looks at you a long minute before saying he can speak on the phone wherever he wants.

“I feel most

colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”

After her three-second celebratory dance on center court at the All England Club, the American media reported, “And there was Serena … Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world…. You couldn’t help but shake your head…. What Serena did was akin to cracking a tasteless, X-rated joke inside a church…. What she did was immature and classless.”

American press that it is a Crip Walk, a gangster dance.

Wozniacki, it becomes clear, has finally enacted what was desired by many of Serena’s detractors, consciously or unconsciously, the moment the Compton girl first stepped on court.

smiling blond goodness

you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about.

You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh.

You wouldn’t call it an illness;

unreasonable child, a small animal.