More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
please, don’t call us dead, call us alive someplace better.
do you know what it’s like to live on land who loves you back? no need for geography now, we safe everywhere.
if you were here, we could play Eden all day, but fruit here grows strange,
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 can’t stand your ground. i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law. each night, i count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave. i reach for black folks & touch only air. your master magic trick, America.
because there are no amber alerts for amber-skinned girls!
because black boys can always be too loud to live.
besides, the only reason i want to make this is for the first scene anyway: little black boy on the bus with his toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.
lord, give me a sign, red & octagonal. god bless the child that’s got his own.
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
they sent a boy when the bullet missed.
prediction: the cop will walk free prediction: the boy will still be dead
have i spent too much time worrying about boys killing each other & being killed that i forgot the ones who do it with their own hands? is that not black on black violence?
what a strange gift to need, the good news that the boy you like is dying too
lately, i open my mouth & out comes marigolds, yellow plums. i came to make the sky a garden.
