God’s Land PT II (Maiya’s Interlude)

[Spoken: Maiya Pittman]
And I laid down in the street last night
Counting how many men’s deaths I mourned
Before I got to my own
The skin feels like deliberate martyrdom
The way it wars with itself
Both black and woman, knowing it can’t have both
My hands hold generations of compliance
All dishwashing in the kitchen, and bent over scripture
Reminds me of my grandma
And women who were too quiet storm
And not enough floodgate refusing to break
I spit on death's face
Ask him, “Why you so patriarchal?
Why do you engrave black boy’s names into my chest
But forget black women, trans women, sex workers
Death has become another male privilege?”
Death wants foot soldiers for their movement
But asks me to sit on the back of the bus on the way to basic training
Death tells me to wear my resilience like a [?]
Be seen, and not heard
So I won’t wait for death to come
I want my departure to be like a hurricane with a ghetto name
So people know to get the fuck out of town
I want it to have a fat ass and a bad attitude
Tearing up the town like it was a dance floor
I want the storm to roll
Like an angry black woman’s neck
Leaving a sea of picket signs that say
“Black women’s lives matter”
I want black men to take to the streets
Without they mama telling them
Or because I was someone’s sister
Or because I was someone’s daughter
But because I am someone
I want a flood of guilt
A river of crumpled stigma
A whimpering lamppost laid down in the streets
And let me ask, why, do all the beauty salons look like graveyards?
Why, did the cities become so raspy?
How, will the earth remember to turn without using a black woman’s neck as it’s axis?
I’ll say it because you made me do this
Winds pushing through your misogynoir
While contorting a landscape that never left a place for me
I’ll make a night so black you’ll forget the sun existed
Snatch the landscape just to lay my edges
Shake this earth, try to knock some sense into it
And when the last wave crashes over your hatred of black women
‘Cause you didn’t hear me the first time
I will leave you with what I owe you
Nothing
*Gunshots*