Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

by Danez Smith

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

do you know what it’s like to live on land who loves you back?

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

say the word i can make any black boy a savior make him a flock of ravens his body burst into ebon seraphs. this, our handcrafted religion. we are small gods of redemption.

we dance until guilt turns to sweat. we sweat until we flood & drown.

what good is a name if no one answers back?

some nights i’m new as the fire at my feet some nights i’m a star, glamorous, ancient & already extinguished.

we citizens of an unpopular heaven & low-attended crucifixions.

when i was born, i was born a bull’s-eye.

i spent my life arguing how i mattered until it didn’t matter.

who knew my haven would be my coffin? dead is the safest i’ve ever been. i’...

dear ghost i made i was raised with a healthy fear of the dark. i turned the light bright, but you just kept being born, kept coming for me, kept being so dark,

dear badge number what did i do wrong? be born? be black? meet you?

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

a somewhere for every kind of somebody,

i’ve left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system revolving too near a black hole. i’ve left in search of a new God. i do not trust the God you have given us.

take your God back. though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent.

i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law.

your master magic trick, America. now he’s breathing, now he don’t. abra-cadaver.

many stories about queerness are about shame

All i Desire Surrenders Have i no Venom?

i’m learning to become all the space i need.

i laughed today. for a second I was unhaunted. i was the sun, not light from some dead star.

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

do i think someone created AIDS? maybe. i don’t doubt that anything is possible in a place where you can burn a body with less outrage than a flag

if i must call this their fate i know the color of God’s face.

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

tomorrow, i’ll have hope tomorrow, i can shift the wreckage & find a seed i don’t know what will grow i’ve lost my faith in this garden