Passing

by TOI DERRICOTTE

A professor invites me to his “Black Lit” class; they’re
reading Larson’s Passing. One of the black
students says, “Sometimes light-skinned blacks
think they can fool other blacks,
but I can always tell,” looking
right through me.
After I tell them I am black,
I ask the class, “Was I passing
when I was just sitting here,
before I told you?” A white woman
shakes her head desperately, as if
I had deliberately deceived her.
She keeps examining my face,
then turning away
as if she hopes I’ll disappear. Why presume
“passing” is based on what I leave out
and not what she fills in?
In one scene in the book, in a restaurant,
she’s “passing,”
though no one checked her at the door—
“Hey, you black?”
My father, who looked white,
told me this story: every year
when he’d go to get his driver’s license,
the man at the window filling
out the form would ask,
“White or black?” pencil poised, without looking up.
My father wouldn’t pass, but he might
use silence to trap a devil.
When he didn’t speak, the man
would look up at my father’s face.
“What did he write?”
my father quizzed me.

“Passing” is from Tender, by Toi Derricotte, © 1997. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.

MoSt will post a poem by a Black poet each day through the month of June.

Ode to Dalya’s Bald Spot

by ANGEL NAFIS

my sister wraps the throw
around herself on the small
cream loveseat & i know
for sure that she is not
a speck of dirt on a pill.
she coughs & sniffs up all
the lucky air in the room
into her excellent nostrils,
which are endless
holy wells replenishing
the soft architecture of her guts.
not even the lupus can interrupt
this ritual of beholding.
you ever look at a thing
you ain’t make, but become
a mother in the looking?
our blood is a thread tied
around my finger, tied
around her finger, that helps
me love. when her knees
swell, when her joints rust,
when her hair thins & flees
making a small continent
of skin on the side of her head,
i am witnessing her in whatever
state her body will allow.
Bismillah to the brain that
put my name next to her name
and said look at this girl your
whole life and know some kind
of peace. littlest bald spot, that no one
expected or knew how to love
you remind me of us.
i know Dalya’s thinking, how ugly
what a shame, but i wanna
build a mosque right then
& there. make an annual
hajj to that brown meadow.
slick as a coin. little planet
uncolonized. flagless.
her awful, but her own.

Originally published in Poetry, April 2019.

Please consider donating to the GoFundMe organized by Breonna Taylor’s family member, Bianca Austin, titled “Justice for Breonna Taylor.”

MoSt Poetry will continue to post a poem by a Black poet each day through the month of June.

Poem about Police Violence

by JUNE JORDAN

Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?
sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
comes back to my mouth and I am quiet
like Olympian pools from the running
mountainous snows under the sun

sometimes thinking about the 12th House of the Cosmos
or the way your ear ensnares the tip
of my tongue or signs that I have never seen
like DANGER WOMEN WORKING

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuring scuffle
(don’t you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue
and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a “justifiable accident” again
(Again)

People been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun
I’m saying war is not to understand or rerun
war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
blots it out/the bestial but
not too often tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?

Originally published in Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980 (Beacon Press, 1980)

MoSt Poetry will post a poem by a black poet each day during the month of June.

MoSt will be posting a poem by an African American poet on Facebook, and here on our blog, each day during the month of June. Here is our first poem. 

alternate names for black boys

BY DANEZ SMITH

1.   smoke above the burning bush

2.   archnemesis of summer night

3.   first son of soil

4.   coal awaiting spark & wind

5.   guilty until proven dead

6.   oil heavy starlight

7.   monster until proven ghost

8.   gone

9.   phoenix who forgets to un-ash

10. going, going, gone

11. gods of shovels & black veils

12. what once passed for kindling

13. fireworks at dawn

14. brilliant, shadow hued coral

15. (I thought to leave this blank

    but who am I to name us nothing?)

16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint

17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath

Originally published in Poetry Magazine, March 2014

Consider donating to the poet’s Venmo @Danez-Smith, collecting for food, first aid, and other materials for Minneapolis protesters.

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