the blueshift journal

I am altering the subtext of Michael Brown’s body for therapeutic effect.

I am translating into plain English many obscure black norms

that always seem to create a mess that nobody wants to

clean up; I am narritivizing the murder in ways that

will make even the found poets want to bend their rules.

 

Something like: When each one of Mike Brown’s

skin cells developed a coat of impenetrable steel, when the

bullets came to tame him, they gave their velocity back to the

gun, Darren Wilson couldn’t stop the solidification of evolution,

two long slits opened his back, black wings

unfurled a new universe, he saw stars when he

flew, the sky never held a body that big, God never loved

an asymmetrical thing so much, He swallowed him whole. 

 

I never stated ‘I am going to write a poem about the death of Michael Brown’

even though I am a black poet who appears to always wax poetic

about the next one slain.  I now speak of a future where

the crime scene is excised from the processing of the dead.

Where my tongue is a blank landscape where the hunted come

to build new lives.

 

I know this is foreign. You are used to my massaging bloody bones

my asking why the body stayed in the sun for so long

to my staying by the body until I cry a sea and the salt burns the wound

And I write about the hurt until it rots.  That said, it is ok to

mourn a former way of rendering black death while birthing

a mouth full of odes, petals falling from my lips,

one for each Mike Brown blooming out of a chalk outline.