"Afro"
I’m hiding secrets & weapons in there: buttermilk pancake cardboard, boxes of purple juice, a magic word our Auntie Angela spoke into her fist & released into hot black evening like gunpowder or a Kool, 40 yards of cheap wax prints, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a Zulu folktale warning against hunters drunk on Polo shirts & Jägermeister, blueprints for building ergonomically perfect dancers & athletes, the chords to what would have been Michael’s next song, a mule stuffed with diamonds & gold, Miss Holiday’s vocal cords, the jokes Dave Chapelle’s been crafting off the grid, sex & brown liquor intended for distribution at Sunday schools in white suburbs, or in other words exactly what a white glove might expect to find taped to my leg & swallowed down my gullet & locked in my trunk & fogging my dirty mind & glowing like treasure in my autopsy
Reprinted with Permission from Tin House © 2017
