uptown/vague
featured in issue two: taste!
city girl
city lights
uptown
in her posh
percussion!
perfection!
perforating!
city girl...
vaguer than before.
city girl is uptown now,
no’where, no’wise,
no’way!
oh city girl!
morphine diamondback
morphine diary,
a purse for a sack or the other way around.
oh city girl!
your diagnostic dementia left you blinded.
you’re uptown now, sweetheart,
where all eyes, ears, and one or two brain cells are
still equipped to know,
city girl,
YOU ain’t welcome here.
you are so stunned by the beauty of my brothas melanated
“It’s payday!”
pouted lips
And burrowed eyebrows screamin’
“i ain’t the one
i ain’t the one…
mister, please not today.”
oh city girl, the deflation of your first-of-the-month happy-day dance
turns into a staggering fast-paced walk
faster and faster does that mood change, like a PMS slap in yo face.
oh city girl, your whole aurora vomits colonizer, gentrifier,
white-women-splaining, closing the mouths of every Black Women you see.
YOU think you can speak for me?!
oh city girl, this story has shifted
got you stutterin’
trippin’
fallin’ in your loss of words.
this ain’t ever happen to you before…
wake up baby, this world has lost the red and white stripes on your flag…
it’s all blue baby blue!
in the way beautifully dark caribbean boys and girls dance free in the moonlight,
blue hearts of sorrow and tears that scream!
“i can’t breathe!”
blue stars that wave and wave in this white wind.
oh city girl
Your buildings are caving
chafing in.
this is a wake-up call, televised revolutionary call or cry.
go home baby!
till you pay your dues
eviction notices
haven’t you seen the news?
this the life you dreamed of?
we didn’t get to choose.
your privilege oozes with every spitting sentence.
keep it movin’! ...we do.
oh city girl, this shit ain’t about YOU. it’s bigger than your pump high heel shoes.
your daddy’s daddy's daddy made me question YOU.
made me clutch my purse when left in four walls with
YOU.
narrative switched on YOU, i’m gettin’ tired of finding reasons to hate YOU.
this world ain’t porcelain lysol clean, boo, flea free just for YOU.
i’ve got bigger fish to fry, rage to unleash… these dawgs be chasing me, biting my ankles
got me on my knees.
i’m watchin’ my back with every step
blue sticks breakin’ blue bones of my brothas’ backs.
to much bull to worry my brain about.
i only have so many days left in this vessel of mine, i can’t waste nothing on hating…
but i could…
ball up my rage in a wad thrown in the wastebasket with the rest of y’all
but oh city girl,
please
just
sit
down!
so that I can stand up and scream at the top of my lungs…
“At the end of the day would you listen to what I have to say?
Would you hear my cry, wipe the tears from my eyes like my ancestors wiped your ancestors’ babies’ behinds? While their mothers sipped Sweet Tea in the Southern heat… Made by my great-great-great grandmother’s withered hands on her tired feet.
Would you even let me scream?
….
“City girl.”
