A Conversation with My Mother About the Bloodstains on My Shirt

do you remember in fifth grade

when i was all of eighty pounds

soaking wet and fully clothed

i told you there was a boy on the bus

twice my size and three grades ahead

he liked to throw his weight every which way

and i had little to no weight to throw back

with all the reasons to get out of his path

you sent me back to that narrow aisle

with slim chances of victory you told me

there’s a Palestinian student

who waited all night for me when pigs snatched me

from an action and she taught me about genocide

about the PLO and Black Panther Party

said our struggles share goals and enemies

i met a Congolese dancer who said slavery didn’t separate       us completely

he told me of  Nkrumah and Lumumba and Garvey and Cabral

and how brutal belgium and all of europe is to Africans

did you know we been fighting back

since before the slave ships docked

did you know the shore tried to wash our footprints

away but some of us walked here on air

did you know there are traces of us

in every speck of dust in this dirty world

Ma we are thousands of miles apart but there are Black women

who look just like Granny braving floods in makeshift tents up the street

there’s an east side where the sun shines all night

and there’s no shade in the daytime and no grocery stores year round

if a bully must be stopped then what are we to do about biden or obama

or congress or Chevron or Firestone or Apple or Nike

these cowards push buttons and traffic in drone strikes and slave labor

and pandemics and extinctions and mass slaughter and apartheid

ain’t they just some wooden giants

don’t they got toothpick ankles

won’t they fall like all weak effigies

must eventually with enough gasoline

believe me your baby is still your baby but (un)fortunately

now he sees himself in handcuff scars and collapsed mines

i stay up late all week studying

every other night a new corpse who looks

like me falls off the pages and onto my floor 

a whole human gone before i knew them

who loved me enough to offer their life

what am i to do with all this sand in my chest

i read about another political prisoner last night

and nearly drowned in salt water

i can’t keep crying for dead and dying people

without doing something about the death

i’m trying to say it’s fifth grade again

and the aisle is getting more narrow

the bus is headed off a cliff

if we don’t knock

this stubborn giant off its course

i hope you can understand

why i haven’t called

why i still think of you daily