The words became librarians, custodians of people
I looked for on the bridge.
I forgot my own face.
I read the book backwards, and
I painted your name in lace
(I drink only the milk of script as beer).
I dislocate all gallery aesthetics,
I carry keys for Baltimore and
Go where no one is my name.
I wish I could sculpt a healing street
from a blanket of guns. The way the sun drops
behind a one-armed cop & we default
to believing in voices. This is the trough of sleep
we draw from. Even gravity works at night.
If I pull your speech on the carpet of impossibility,
will you speak this immediate need for movement?
The immediate need of not drowning in public?
I will walk with the sharks of our pigments
if that's what inconclusive data requires,
until we leave rooms that hold us apart.
What you see as a small minority, I see
as closer to liberatory. Nothing comes from the center
that doesn't break most everything in parts.
I break bread with the handwriting of words.
Nothing of appearance is always an illusion.
Lend me your book when you finish
writing it. I'll be the first to fill in its spaces.


About this poem
"In a culture where the historical construct of race has been used to harm people in the effort to maintain power and claim privilege, this poem seeks to complicate and reveal how we are the makers and perpetrators of that culture, even when we are supposedly only consuming it. Our choices, including passivity, affect others."
-Amy King

About Amy King
Amy King is the author of "I Want to Make You Safe" (Litmus Press, 2011). She teaches at Nassau Community College of State University of New York and splits her time between Baltimore; Long Island, N.Y.; and Phoenicia, N.Y.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Amy King. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate