Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

by Danez Smith

but here, not earth not heaven, we can’t recall our white shirts turned ruby gowns.

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.

dear sprinkler dancer, i can’t tell if I’m crying or i’m the sky, but praise your sweet rot unstitching under soil, praise dandelions draining water from your greening, precious flesh. i’ll plant a garden on top where your hurt stopped.

i leave revenge hopelessly to God.

when i want to kiss you i kiss the ground. i shout down sirens. they bring no safety.

what good is a name if no one answers back?

we citizens of an unpopular heaven & low-attended crucifixions. listen i’ve accepted what i was given

i’ve left in search of a new God. i do not trust the God you have given us. my grandmother’s hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir. take your God back. though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent. i want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha, want Chucky, Bo, Meech, Trayvon, Sean & Jonylah risen three days after their entombing,

i tried, white people. i tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones. you took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after girl after sweet boi & ask why does it always have to be about race?

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

i am a house swollen with the dead, but still a home. the bed where it happened is where i sleep.

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.

on the bad nights, i wake to my mother shoveling dirt down my throat i scream mom! i’m alive! i’m alive! but it just sounds like dirt if i try to get up, she brings the shovel down saying i miss you so much, my sweetest boy

today, Tamir Rice tomorrow, my liver today, Rekia Boyd tomorrow, the kidneys today, John Crawford tomorrow, my lungs 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

think: once, a white girl was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan War. later, up the block, Troy got shot & that was Tuesday. are we not worthy of a city of ash?

do you expect me to dance when every day someone who looks like everyone i love is in a gun fight armed with skin? look closely & you’ll find a funeral frothing in the corners of my mouth,

how does joy taste when it’s not followed by will come in the morning?

i tell him the thing i must tell him, of the boy & the blood & the magic trick me too his strange dowry vein brother-wife partner in death juke what a strange gift to need, the good news that the boy you like is dying too

but i will say look i made it a whole day, still, no rain still, i am without exit wound & he will say tonight, i want to take you how the police do, unarmed & sudden.

dream where every black person is standing by the ocean & we say to her what have you done with our kin you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk them by now & we don’t understand & then one woman, skin dark as all of us walks to the water’s lip, shouts Emmett, spits &, surely, a boy begins crawling his way to shore