Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

by Danez Smith

if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call us dead, call us alive someplace better.

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.

what good is a name if no one answers back?

dead is the safest i’ve ever been. i’ve never been so alive.

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

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

in the catalogue of ways to kill a black boy, find me buried between the pages stuck together with red stick. ironic, predictable. look at me.

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

i don’t doubt that anything is possible in a place where you can burn a body with less outrage than a flag