After Morgan Parker
After Glenn Ligon
After Zora Neale Hurston
I always feel Black, y’ know? | I close my eyes at night & the tar behind
them lids | ain’t nearly as dark as me | I wake to a thousand white daggers
darting ocular | It’s Only Sunlight Baby my lover laughs | I wanna feel
most colored when my lover calls me baby | her eyes quelled
into half-moons | Instead my color join us in the aisle @ Target | a
white man barreling toward us | & spits | Nigger Dykes he says
& I’m all Yea? Ok But You Ain’t Gon Beat My Ass! | I tryna avoid
incarceration & it ain’t working | Or it is | I refuse to elegy & I’m grow-
ing weary of fighting | I am knuckled into concrete, white schools | Is
mine a body kept alive by white repute? | some of the poets call these
jails | and others pipelines, or warzones | I’m inclined to agree | I been
told I got promise when I write | about fucking | instead of bullets | Promise
meaning a poem so beautiful, I must not be tragically Black |
however drowned I am | by white noise | when calling for help | an officer arrives,
his gun drawn at me while my weapon melts | I mean, my mouth leaks
blood | Am I armed, then | or, breathing? | Am I a threat to the nation
or a small nation of risk | or a threat to a nation of risks | or any way,
an inconvenience | Colored | Loud | Or colored? | I am sharpened
against | a flint of white rage | Or how dare you say women& exclude the white ones | I’m fighting the idea of police & fathers | Or else I am dreadful &
mad | I’m salacious & ever stuck on old shit, or a shitty writer | Perhaps
it’s true | Perhaps I feel my nigga & | color it but what I mean is
I’m cocky | I think I know betta | the Target security guard walks us to
our car | says women like us have to be discreet | I’d like to think he meant
safe | I feel most colored when I realize it’s dangerous | to explain
myself | casually | I feel most colored | when someone make it clear
ain’t nothing bout me relaxed | It ain’t simple: I’m colored & proudly line
my bed with women | which is perhaps the saddest | Blackest praise
I’m colored bitch or baby | in the streets | I critique colored | I color
formally | I form the poem | poem the critic | I flint or fleck color
I set it aflame | I perform white | into a bed and fuck it | I’m dirty after | I
don’t shower | I call the police | pigs | & build my politic
in jazz | I dance wild | don’t touch the floor issa jungle | I have no race &
this ain’t my country | ain’t got skin in it | I’m so dark | I’m the cosmos
& | you can’t catch the Blues or pronounce my name without biting
your tongue | don’t touch | can’t feel me | less you colored
like me | can’t pin me to a wall | or chain my hands to my feet | or make
me translate | you can’t even see me | I’m so colored, I’m
invisible | I widen my legs & disappear | you think you shutting |
my mouth | you just endorsed my shit | feel me? | against a wall
I am colored & | This A Stick Up | against her chest I am colored | Oh Please, Oh Yes | When I beg I’m colored | When I’m broke
too | when I have children | when my womb is barren | I’m so nigga, I
ain’t got no name | I answer to the titles of books
Call me heavy | Or magic | Or achilles
Call me bestiary | Or homie
| Or hull.
Added: Tuesday, December 6, 2022 / Poem used with permission. This poem appeared first in the December 2021 issue of Poetry Magazine.
Photo by: Keyonna Calloway
Aurielle Marie is a Black and Queer poet, essayist, and cultural strategist. They are the author of Gumbo Ya Ya which won the 2020 Cave Canem poetry prize. She is a child of the deep south and the Black griot tradition. Aurielle was awarded the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in bisexual poetry and is the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year. A genderqueer storyteller, Aurielle writes about sex, bodies, state violence, and The South from a Black Feminist lens.
Image Description: Aurielle, a genderqueer poet, appears in a black-and-white photo mid-performance at a mic, wearing Ankara fabric and a "No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA" t-shirt.
