Don't Call Us Dead

by Danez Smith

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

they’ve made you a boy i don’t know replaced my friend with a hashtag.

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

who knew my haven would be my coffin?

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.

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

i’ve left Earth, i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don’t see race. neither did the poplar tree.

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?

i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law.

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 it’s taken my papa’s & my grandma’s time, my father’s time, my mother’s time, my aunt’s time, my uncle’s time, my brother’s & my sister’s time … how much time do you want for your progress?

the princess brings the prince before her, he looks at her with eyes that ask how could you? & she looks back with eyes that say they said i was a princess, that I’d come to see you, but you assumed flowers when i prefer a bouquet of swords.

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? of 1,000 ships launched because we are missed?

prediction: the cop will walk free prediction: the boy will still be dead