
Featured writer: Nikki Patin
Remain Silent
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
-Audre Lorde
When it is the police,
We remain silent
When it is rape,
We remain silent
When it is someone famous
someone popular
someone powerful
We remain silent
Of all rape victims,
We have the right to require silence
Because we think no one is innocent
Not even the innocent
Not ever the victims
We make them complicit
We are told when we are young
Who we can go to
To feel safe
Tell the police
Tell your teacher
Tell your preacher
Who do you tell when those charged with your protection
Those tasked to give you service
Slide their badges over your body
Shove their chalk down your throat
Get you drunk on the blood of Jesus
Then tell you that your silence will protect you
The numbers tell me that nothing will protect me or you
Like how
since 1976, 1,394 people have been executed on Death Row but over 14,000 have been murdered by police
Like how sexual misconduct is the second highest form of police brutality
Like how you’re more likely to get raped by a cop than someone on the street
Like how Oklahoma City cop, Daniel Holtzlcaw, can face over 32 charges of first-degree rape, forcible sodomy and sexual battery and still get freed on bail and still get thousands in donations because him getting punished for raping Black women is seen as the real injustice
Like how 51% of all sexual violence committed by police is against minors
Like how 60% of Black women get raped before they turn 18
Like how every woman I know has either been raped or her sister or her mama or her daughter or her friend or her cousin or her coworker has been raped
Like how men get raped but no one ever wants to talk about that because we don’t even like to talk about women getting raped
Like how children get raped but no one ever wants talk about that because we don’t ever want to talk about anyone getting raped
Like how sex is the weapon when it comes to rape
not the actual point because rapists hardly ever come
And hardly ever close to justice
With thousands of untested rape kits languishing
in basements of police stations nationwide
Why am I talking about rape when I am supposed to be talking about how we can’t breathe?
This PTSD takes my breath away
Takes my days
turns them into tears
Takes my joys
turns them into terrors
Takes and takes and takes and takes my light
Until I swallow darkness of silence
To keep the kind of sanity that makes everyone else more comfortable than I will ever be
I have never been able to breathe
I hold my stomach in unintentionally
Have held it in for decades trying to hold myself together
Held it in so long that it hurts to pee
To sing to sleep to speak
Everyone tells me that my silence will protect me
Just like the police are supposed to protect me
Just like the church should be my sanctuary
Just like schools and workshops and poetry were supposed to liberate me
But I still can’t breathe
Because the movement ain’t trying to get me free
When rape is so pervasive
That those trying to uplift the masses
Do their best to try to uplift some asses
Then press fingers into screams
saying “just move with me
Not against me”
Saying “keep this our secret
No one will believe you anyway”
Gluttons for power
Will always gorge themselves
On those they perceive as weak
What is most terrifying to the powerful
Is the weak realizing their strength
There is no keeping of secrets
When the dead are resurrected
Through the anger of the living
There is no keeping of secrets
When the raped find their justice
In the telling of what happened
There is no keeping of the secret
That the system of America
Was built between the thighs of captured dark women
Built inside the grooves of bloodied Black backs
Built on top of bones red and feathered with colonizing cruelty
When the desecrated begin to assess the damage
Demand what was stolen be returned
Demand what was broken be repaired
Demand what was destroyed be restored
Demand what was betrayed be reconciled by the awful searing truth
Then the breath will demand its rightful place
The breath will command its rightful space
To matter
To shatter this silence
That will never protect us
We matter. Black lives matter.
And so
We must breathe.
Hunted
Who hunts become hunted
No one can stay hidden
What weight is there in having to wait
Night dirt and fear underfoot
Terror gnawing from drawn out hunger
We all become monsters in the dark
Wish to run away from the dark
Wish to dig out a path not hunted
To keen and purr in desirous hunger
To burst into light and expose the hidden
Roll and roil in lushness underfoot
All wishes lose their grip in wait
Petrified, I wait
Suffocating in panicked dark
Sweat trickling underfoot
All my muscles hunted
Every breath remains hidden
Resisting the violence of their hunger
All driven by hunger
When starving, who can wait?
When desperate, nothing stays hidden
Violence rends the dark
What is closest becomes hunted
Blood, bone, sinew crunching slick underfoot
I remember sunlight underfoot
I remember never knowing hunger
I did not know what it was to be hunted
I did not know what it was to wait
Why is evil lurking dark?
Why is malevolence hidden?
Who can respect what is hidden?
Do we ever love what is underfoot?
Are we invited by the silkiness of the dark?
Are we soothed by the chew of hunger?
Can we save ourselves by choosing to wait?
Or do we cast ourselves as the hunted?
I refuse to be hunted
As I break the wait
Survival, my only hunger
Bedroom Empire
after Marvin Tate’s “My Life to Present”
I am a sometimes singer
an assumed diva
but in a trashy sort of way
who smokes and tokes
and laughs and acts
surprised a lot
when nothing ever shocks me
bullshit defining dark moments
between the truth
according to me
I only bullshit fools
long for the brilliant ones
to wrestle me to the carpet
prove how easily they can see through
I am an all-the-time grinder
on schemes that make short money
a role model to myself
scrunched into too-small clothes
cheap shoes
and fake hair
faking fantasy
burning out between my thighs
I am a nasty gal
betty davis
listening-to wild child
a heathen in a world
of struggling angels
a nomad on a sinking ship
I am a dick lover
clit sucker
an I can't believe
she said/wore/did that
motherfucker
I learned want and need
at the age of greed
insistent at three
about what no one else
even tried to tell me
I'm on that greenery
better not bring no
hateration or holleration
to my dancery
I am a butch girl's wet dream
and a lonely femme's obsession
eyes crafted with possession
I am the lesson
in who not to fall in love with
I am deadly
a self-centered
sex-obsessed
pop medley
I take dirty pictures
and give them to my Mom
I take clear shots
and party til dawn
I'm a hustler, baby
on the take and the make
Cree Summer's pirate plaything
on Prince's purple ship
I am not hip
cool or down
I am awkward
big and brown
phat grrrl superhero
with no cape
and the power
to attract losers, psychos and killers
in a single bound
I am the warrior
mistaken for the fool
the arrowhead
swapped for jewel
I am a multiverse
of glitter and heartache
a parallel life of longing
waiting for the Hottentot
to split me down the middle
and snatch back her heart
I am a self-deluded
misfit who sucks at life
can't keep apartments, relationships
or attention
who fails to mention
any of this
to crowds loud and lewd
and ready to be unplugged
I am no lady
slightly shady
and gone off
like bad television
or cream
I am an abusive asshole
known to toss cords and cartridges
at heads and hearts
cruelty falling from my
golden tongue
I don't believe in anything
except my own eyesight
and the sky
space and time
I am a poorly read philosopher
a cartoon flunkie
posing as a fangirl
I am atomic
in how epically I fuck up
foreign at home and away
black stamp denied
always told
someday
someday
She
To say youth, beauty and innocence were stolen from her would be to assume that she ever possessed any of them.
She be Black girl and not that kind who is the exception to the rule of Black girl. She be Black girl who looked 30 at age 13, Black girl with too big tummy and rusty knees. Black girl with hair that never behaves. She be Black girl too smart, too quick, who no one would ever work hard to save.
She was born beyond salvation; heart broken by Daddy long gone before she ever drew her first breath. She solitary. Intrepid. Nuisance. Burden. She Black girl heaped on the back of another Black girl, except that Black girl was actually beautiful, eternally young and doggedly innocent. What could she do with a Mother determined to not know? To Mother is to know, to want to know, to get all up in all that business, even the nasty kind, even the kind that keeps you up at night.
Her Mother only wanted to know certain things: are you getting good grades? Are you being good and not having sex, drinking, smoking or doing drugs? Is your womb empty? A filled womb is an indictment in a world full of too many, too-grown Black girls who were too eager to be women.
Her Mother only wanted to know if she were winning, doing the right things, behaving well, being nice, staying polite. Her Mother wanted her to be not woman, not girl, but some neutered robot that brought home first place certificates and excellents on the report card. Some automaton who knows how to work and not jerk, who knows how to do the right thing every time, all the time, and not feel any type of way about it. A lockstep, forward-moving worker bee with no feelings, no desires, no dreams. To dream is to open the door to disaster. To want more than is your station.
She was the first girl in her class to wear a bra, starting at the end of the third grade. The secret was that those were not breasts filling out the polyester training bra, but baby fat spilling over into fat fat. Little girl chub jiggling a little too much. She got teased like they were those other things, but now that she's grown, the breasts still look like the same hanging blobs of flesh that were never firm or perky or fresh.
She pretend she tough, a real badass. Behind the wheel of the cars she owns (never anyone else's or a rental), she'll gun right behind anyone she feels disrespected her on the road. She brake-check, stopping fast right in front of anyone stupid enough to fuck with someone they don't even know. Like how she stupid, sometimes. She acts tough and stupid sometimes even though she doesn't know how to fight, throws punches with nothing behind them. She uses this big, stupid body to intimidate people into silence, to threaten them with the possibility that they tangled with the wrong one.
She angry. Uncle say she got this deep well of anger inside her, like someone dug a hole inside her soul, lined it with stones and filled it with every cliché of rage. She lava, she a pot bubbling, she the lid banging against that metal, she lightning across an ominous sky, a mighty ocean come to wipe out anything resembling earth, dirt, foundation. Monster. She be Mothra and Godzilla's hate child, come to finish the job.
Why she so angry? Who the fuck knows? Maybe 'cause she born ugly in a family of gorgeous women. Maybe 'cause she born gorgeous in a family of gorgeous women who didn't want another so they fattened her up, turned her into a deformed nerd the shape and weight of a book no one wants to read. Maybe 'cause she figured out that don't nobody want a smart woman, a Black woman, a fat woman, a queer woman, an all-of-the-above-and-then-some woman who don't even want to be a woman sometimes because it's too much goddamned work. Maybe 'cause people were fucked up to her from jump, never gave her a chance, talked shit about shit she couldn't control, like being the bastard daughter of a drug addict, like being the only child of a heartbroken woman, like being a fat kid in cheap clothes who acted like fucking royalty and looked down on the hooligans in $100 Jordan's who couldn't even spell.
She got something, though. She got something the tiny chicks ain't got. She got something the white boys ain't got. She got something that Jordan's and a good father and a happy mother and a back yard can't get you. She can get up on that stage and melt every face with her voice, her words, her passion. She can bellow like a beast and make them love it. She can take off all her clothes, cuss like a sailor, cover herself in tattoos and bruises from a lover who does it rough the way she likes it and still get called a role model. There's no name for some shit like that, but when she's feeling low and powerless and weird, she can call on that thing and know that she has lived what most people will never touch.
Then again, her own mother ain't got nothing to say about it, even less she wants to do. So maybe she got nothing. Maybe she is nothing at all.