Kate Lahey
Tangled toes and lips
Slip beneath the covers
And the colour of our skin
Doesn’t seem to hover where we are
Because we are veins and muscles,
The pulses in our chests.
Words like black and white
Are made up pests, put to rest
As we tie ourselves in multicoloured knots.
History rots and falls into the ocean of our memories:
The seas between our ancestors.
Colonizers are colonized—we have all been raped and pillaged,
Land claimed and revised.
So colonize my heart.
We aren’t worlds apart
We’re the same.
No shame or blame
For the meaning of melanin.
Do you remember the ocean?
Do you have memories of hot suns?
And sweet sand between your hands?
The way I have memories of freezing stones, moors and seas cold as bone?
I understand what I see,
But what I can’t see
I can’t understand.
Just as you will never know what it means to be me,
I’ll never know how it feels to want to be free
From that rusting cage of history
The mystery of racism that seems
To allude our hearts
When we start binding our minds and find that it’s illusory.
Cursory fables of time long gone.
But I could be wrong.
While so many praise abolition and Martin Luther King,
The notes of plantations,
White incantations
Still ring in the stifling air of political correctness
That looms like a black veil over tangled tresses.
Pretending like we are equal,
Hating differences that could be beautiful:
This is just a sequel
In which racial profiling isn’t seen as real
Just disregarded as another rap lyric.
Where miscegenation is no longer a crime
But will cost you a moral dime in the eyes of the others.
Mothers, sisters, brothers
But we aren’t.
Because when I hold his hand
You call me a bitch,
A snitch to your cause.
Essence magazine writing about how white women steal black men,
As if you are animals to be passed and traded in pens, and
How, I can’t understand the historical bond
Between black men and women,
That, I can never belong,
Be fond of him the way
You can.
But six black men in the middle of the night,
Trying to start a fight, saying that it isn’t right because
You’re a ‘chichi’ girl.
Hits me like a bolt of lightning, so frightening
My veins are screaming thoughts teeming “bloody murder”
But my tongue won’t move,
Can’t prove that they are wrong,
That I don’t need their approval to belong.
Because we are stronger.
Not as some “interracial relationship” that statistically won’t last as long,
But as two giddy teenagers walking in a realm
Where there is no colour or structure to puncture our identities,
To make us feel like we need to defend some sort of legitimacy.
Because love will set you free
From bitches babbling behind your back
And the clattering clang of the words “chichi.”
He and me and me and him
Are purple and pink and red and green.
We are the blue sky, the golden sun
We are dew drops on the grass,
