belong
It’s not as simple as belonging or not. To be honest, I don’t give a shit about belonging, particularly not the kind that’s on offer—conditional, illusory, a clothespin on the nose, at arms-length in a sour whole that plies its broken hand to crush its broken foot
You belong if you fold yourself into this
small
quiet pretty
shape
stay that way don’t make trouble
don’t make me come over there—
to belong
break
bring down the
smash, crack, cleave it in two. by the way if you balk
at this violence and think all verbs matter let me ask you
where was your outrage when
a 65-year-old woman on her way to church was slammed to the ground and kicked kicked kicked
a 19-year-old girl sitting in a car with her friends was shot in the eye
a 37-year-old mother waiting for the train with her child was punched in the face
a 61-year-old man riding the L to work was slashed from ear to ear
a 75-year-old grandmother leaning on a lamppost was hit in the face
a 75-year-old man on his morning walk was shoved to the ground and killed
an 84-year-old man on his morning walk was shoved to the ground and killed
and six women, mothers, grandmothers, daughters went to work and were shot and killed
to be to long
I long at least for calm at least for my mom to walk along the street free to speak the soft rounded sounds of my mother tongue and not be wild with fear that she’ll be shoved to the ground and
I long at least to go at least to utterly mundane locations the store the park the train and not be always braced for danger a pipe in the face or a knife or a fist or a foot or simply being shoved to the ground and
I long at least for them at least for friends to comprehend this abject terror we are wracked with and act with caring say I see you I love you I hate this or anything, anything at all
that’s the least of it.
of course there’s more I long for
you to slough off the crust of willful blindness from your eyes. you to look square at the broken bodies that are the base, the beams, the load-bearing walls of where you stand. you to take up and make new tools that don’t just break but build. you to see we all rise or all fall: the trial of George Floyd’s killer will raise or raze us all. you to take a long, hard look at how your silence buttresses the lie of who belongs and doesn’t. you to see we long only to be.
if you stare at the verb for long enough and let it echo in your ear and
let it slosh around your mouth it stops tasting like English at all
it sounds foreign, like some other tongue
like some far-flung, godforsaken
nowhere civilized, nowhere we’d be caught dead
it should go back to where it came from
smash, crack, cleave it in two
leave it shattered on the ground
close the door.
It’s not ours. It’s not from around here.