Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

by Danez Smith

history is what it is. it knows what it did.

here, there’s no language for officer or law, no color to call white. if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call us dead, call us alive someplace better. we say our own names when we pray. we go out for sweets & come back.

O, the imagination of a new reborn boy but most of us settle on alive.

can’t tell if I’m crying or i’m the sky,

i’ll plant a garden on top where your hurt stopped.

paradise is a world where everything is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.

he needed me so much he had to end me.

what good is a name if no one answers back? i know when the wind feels as if it’s made of hands & i feel like i’m made of water it’s you trying to save me from drowning in myself, but i can’t wed wind. i’m not water.

how old am i? today, i’m today. i’m as old as whatever light touches me. some nights i’m new as the fire at my feet some nights i’m a star, glamorous, ancient

dead is the safest i’ve ever been.

the old world keeps choking them. our new one can’t stop spitting them out.

we earned this paradise by a death we didn’t deserve.

someone prayed we’d rest in peace & here we are in peace whole all summer

i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more.

that summer when nobody died except for boys from other schools

if love is a room of broken glass, leave me to dance until my feet are memory.

love, stay in me until our bodies forget what divides us, until your hands are my hands & your blood is my blood & your name is my name

they said i was a princess, that I’d come to see you, but you assumed flowers when i prefer a bouquet of swords.

can you keep a secret? a history of blood: from sacrament to sentence the red the white the blue of my veins //

was everything/required of me & i was anything/but tame/& so, so long from then/ i stand in the deepest part of night/singing recklessly, calling/what must feast/ to feast. //

as the skin breaks as the skin do as salt overwhelms your simple palate as you sing salt devotion as salt gives way to salt

bet they had a pastor who didn’t know you do your eulogy, kid. they turn our funerals into lessons, kid. they say blood & everyone flinches, kid. they say blood & watch us turn to dust, kid. they want us quiet, redeemed, or dead already, kid.

i am telling you something i got blood on the brain the prettiest fish are poisonous & same is true for men

the test results say i am the father of my own end

again i have too many words for sadness i touched the stove & the house burned down i touched the boy & now i have his name our bloodwedding—our bloodfuneral i’m his new wife at dusk & by morning i’m his widow

i was the sun, not light from some dead star. i was before. i was negative. but i’m not. i am a house swollen with the dead, but still a home.

i want to go back to the question, sweet if of yesterday bridge back to maybe, lord bring me my old blood’s name,

i would sing if not for blood in my throat if my blood was not a moat.

my blood a river named medusa. every man i touch turns into a monument. i put flowers at their feet, their terrible stone feet. they grow wings, stone wings, & crumble.

family portrait full of grinning ghosts, they look just like me

this is prayer right? i fall & i drown & i trash & i burn & i dunk my head in the water & i call the children drowned in my blood to come home—

you went in for a routine test & they told you what you were made of:

you knew it would come to this, but then it actually came.

if you trace the word diagnosis back enough you’ll find destiny trace it forward, find diaspora is there a word for the feeling prey feel when the teeth finally sink after years of waiting?

some of us are killed in pieces, some of us all at once

i got this problem: i was born

today i’m alive, which is to say i survived yesterday,

how long does it take a story to become a legend? how long before a legend becomes a god or forgotten? ask the rain what it was like to be the river then ask the river who it drowned.

what was their last dream? who sang to them while the world closed into dust?

i have no more room for grief. it’s everywhere now. listen to my laugh & if you pay attention you’ll hear a wake.

a note on the body your body still your body your arms still wing your mouth still a gun you tragic, misfiring bird you have all you need to be a hero don’t save the world, save yourself you worship too much & you worship too much when prayer doesn’t work: dance, fly, fire this is your hardest scene when you think the whole sad thing might end but you live oh, you live everyday you wake you raise the dead everything you do is a miracle

you’re dead, america & where you died grew something worse—

came to make the sky a garden. give me rain or give me honey, dear lord.