Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

by Danez Smith

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

i leave revenge hopelessly to God.

i can make any black boy a savior

all last month was spent in bed with your long gone name. what good is a name if no one answers back?

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

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’ve never been so alive.

O the boys. they still come in droves. the old world keeps choking them. our new one can’t stop spitting them out.

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

what was i before? a boy? a son? a warning? a myth?

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, their ghost re-gifted flesh & blood, their flesh & blood re-gifted their children.

we did not build your boats (though we did leave a trail of kin to guide us home). we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). we did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not America? her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). i can’t stand your ground. i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law.

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? because you made it that way! because you put an asterisk on my sister’s gorgeous face! call her pretty (for a black girl)! because black girls go missing without so much as a whisper of where?!

i’ve left Earth & i am touching everything you beg your telescopes to show you. i’m giving the stars their right names.

if love is a hole wide enough to be God’s mouth, let me plunge into that holy dark & forget the color of light. 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 & his & his

many stories about queerness are about shame

my blood a river named medusa. every man i touch turns into a monument.

On February 23rd, 2016, the CDC released a study estimating 1 in 2 black men who have sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime.

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

they sent a boy when the bullet missed.

America might kill me before i get the chance. my blood is in cahoots with the law.