Every Day Can Be Resistance (and other poems)

Every Day Can Be Resistance

When I examine the portraits of the enslaved
the whole of freedom pauses for respiration
hands sifting soil                               abject frustration.
Every day can’t be rebellion but will be resistance,
a man convinced that he is not a cow or horse
the way someone wants him 		to mistake himself.
The hands of enslaved women like mitts, or
an old man’s work hands years past labor,
still refusing balm
until fingers                                         bowls of palms 
crack, bleeding red lines like paper cuts in winter.
And so many women praying 
unlike children with hands flat and fingers steepled 			
beneath raised chins, 			but palms clasped
fingers hugging, too swollen from work, chilblains, and arthritis
to ever lay flat                                       unless broken.

An Extant Slave Receipt 
Signed Peter Hairston

Negro wench and child declares the receipt,
Black woman I mentally retaliate.

In Europe, a royal wench was dubbed a lady,
not a metonym for social promiscuity. 

Consider the barmaid— much like cook, 
except a few beers and coin most certainly could 

turn a hardworking one to lusty wench, 
only daylight morphing her to maid again. 

The price of Two-hundred and one pounds on American
soil turned this Black woman to wench in no time at all,

and what happened between her thighs, resulting in a child, 
made it a two for one; some planter’s coy prize.

I want to divine her name and that of her babe,
much more than this receipt entails.

It is not enough to know the sweat of the planter seller
is mixing with the DNA of my fingertips 

as his genetic code resides within me.
Still, I wonder at the oft-turned phrase

this family had a habit of not selling off their slaves
A lie contrived once this receipt was neatly tucked away?

Encroachment

Rage                                       from a white woman toward a Black 
screams                                 This body just won’t do 
the words                               But I once owned you 	
history                                    articulating a time
when Africans                       were a hostile mistress’s wealth 
a guaranteed                          come up
from being                              property herself
of a husband                           who had a choice 
of whose legs                           he split in stealth. 
There is nothing                      more despised	
than a sister at ease                 in her own skin
the hard-won swagger            before a predator’s desire
to drape it over pale arms      gaudy and feral.
I know this to be true              because I heard a Karen once exude
You move so comfortable       within your skin
as if she wanted to peel me     to see what lay within	
that comfort                              that movement,
that                                              othered self.

Of Bison and Bullets
A Preservation Project
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA 2022

                                                     for Jayland Walker


Behemoths cleave to the landscape 
like they have always been here
amid the care the preservationists exhibit 
as they muck, monitor, and water.
Shaggy brown cloaks appear
more mange than majestic,
unlike the embossed portraits
on my father’s horde of buffalo nickels, 
tossed carelessly into a dresser dish
alongside mismatched popped buttons
and dulled copper pennies he called rare.
Did he know then that the species itself
was endangered, not so rare victims 
of overhunting by European settlers
committed to wanton western migration.
O the irony as I read 
of conservation to replenish 
the genus bison, common name buffalo
on Indigenous reservations 
to restore glory to the family bovine;
the descendants of majestic herds
lured from the precipice of extinction.
I always confuse preserve and reserve
to keep safe, to hide away
for now and tomorrow
on purpose for posterity.

Still, there is a parallel history 
as our very communities become
preservation projects 
harboring assault rifles
and teens programmed for defeat, 
steered by parents who haven’t
learned to parent yet. 
I will not reserve judgement
as doctors help viewers digest
what a body looks like 
after taking rapid rounds: 
the severed heads 
and eviscerated torsos abound.
Extinction. Has anyone had enough 
of being enslaved by a trigger 
aficionados can’t let rest
ah, but I digress, they don’t
want to preserve life 
just reserve the right to shatter lives 
and apologize in hindsight.
Let’s try to preserve 48 bullets
pumped into the back 
of a running Black man,
use the same handcuffs 
that worked well to arrest 
a 21-year-old white man, 
so they both can stand trial,
one for killing seven in Chicago
on the 4th of July
the other for killing absolutely no one.
Bison and bodies coalesce in my mind, 
but this is muck work
for which no one seems to have the time.